Labour support slumps

A chara, – We have become used to disastrous opinion poll figures for the Labour Party, but Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin's response (Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll, Front page and Breaking News, October 1st) is so blinkered as to be delusional. He argues Labour's figures won't improve until voters get money in their pockets, oblivious to the sense of betrayal that working class voters feel towards Labour and to the fact that indeed they have been betrayed.

Everyone knows that the bank crisis and subsequent economic collapse impose severe restraints on our society. But it isn’t a question that the bills left by the collapse must be paid, but who will pay them. And Labour has pushed the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil policy of toeing the EU line and making the poorer sections of society pay, so that the bankers – at home and abroad – can maintain or regain their wealthy status.

It will take working people generations to undo the damage being inflicted on them at the moment, but people’s anger is there because they know it is unnecessary: that it is the rich and the people who made the big profits out of the boom who can and should pay.

No amount of recovery is going to assuage that anger.

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I have always thought the Labour Party was an essential component of any united Left alternative to the Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil alliance, but unless honest voices who have learned the real lessons of the betrayal come to the fore in Labour, it is becoming increasingly hard to see any role in the future for a party that has proved such a woeful disappointment to those who voted for it. – Is mise,

EOIN Ó MURCHÚ,

Ascaill Ghleanntán

na hAbhann

Cluain Dolcáin

Baile Átha Cliath 22.

Sir, – Your Front page report (October 1st) shows Labour support at just 6 per cent in your latest opinion poll. Meanwhile, the Letters page features an appeal for a No vote in the Seanad referendum, signed by 29 politicians of various hues. The signatories include two Labour TDs, despite Seanad abolition being the agreed policy of the coalition Government of which their party is a member.

The lack of cohesion and coherence in Labour’s ranks is a godsend to the party’s opponents, who continue to peddle snakeoil remedies that purport to provide an alternative and pain-free escape route from the crisis in our national finances.

Labour TDs, MEPs and councillors need to hold their nerve and hang together. Otherwise, they will surely hang separately! – Yours, etc,

PETER MOLLOY,

Haddington Park,

Glenageary,

Co Dublin.