Madam, - Pat Rabbitte's vision for the Labour Party as outlined in your edition of Friday, May 9th will be greeted warmly throughout the Fianna Fáil organisation.
Advancing simplistic, mantra-like dichotomies of Berlin versus Boston, left versus right, Fianna Fáil versus the rest made Labour an irrelevance in the last election. While people worried about health, crime, jobs and Northern Ireland, Labour focused on rhetoric, screaming "crisis" at every opportunity but providing no workable policies on the core issues. As a result the Irish Labour Party today is an oddity among other Western European labour parties in being numerically small and bereft of working-class support.
As Rabbitte grappled once again with Cold War concepts which Schroeder, Blair and Clinton saw off almost a decade ago, he indicated clearly that the policy malaise which has defined Labour for a decade continues to grip the party.
In the broad area of social policy I would concur with the statement of the Labour Party's general secretary that Labour in Government made decisions which would "make a social democrat shudder". Any comparison between the social welfare increases under Fianna Fáil and the Labour-Fine Gael coalitions are empirically clear - we give more to the less well-off time and time again.
Last Friday Mr Rabbite ignored this fact and blithely declared that I was right-wing, disregarding the fact that in five years as Minister for Social Welfare I provided more in terms on pensions and social welfare increases than any Labour Minister ever delivered.
On the crucial issue of health the Labour Party today still has no tenable policy to offer. The ludicrous "Curing Our Ills" health policy document proposed to place insurance companies between the patient and the hospital bed and was dropped two days before the general election when the party spokesperson on health, Liz McManus, conceded that it could not be implemented for at least five years. The self-proclaimed champions of the health service have no health policy.
Still defined by an exuberance of concern and an absence of credible policy, Labour will remain a mere party-political refuge for middle-class guilt. - Yours, etc.,
DERMOT AHERN TD, Minister for Communications, Marine & Natural Resources, Frances Street, Dundalk, Co Louth.