UNITED LEFT ALLIANCE:THE FINE Gael-Labour coalition will be "as despised" in time as the outgoing Government, according to Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins.
He said yesterday the incoming government would implement “the programme essentially of the bondholders and bankers as represented by the EU-IMF”.
Mr Higgins told a Dublin press conference that the United Left Alliance (ULA) would vehemently oppose the new government, and offer a socialist and left alternative.
He accused the Labour Party and Fine Gael of rapidly splitting the minute differences in their respective manifestos.
“Tied in the straitjacket of cuts and austerity, the policies of this government will mean more unemployment, more emigration, more stealth taxes and more transferring of wealth from taxpayers to failed banks and greedy bondholders,” he added.
“Scarcely any demands are being asked of the wealthy to pay for the crisis they created.”
Mr Higgins was joined by fellow alliance TDs Joan Collins (Dublin South Central), Clare Daly (Dublin North) and Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire).
Séamus Healy, who was elected in Tipperary South, was represented at the meeting by his brother Paddy Healy.
Ms Collins said Labour’s promise to oppose water charges had been ditched.
She added that Labour would carry on with the Fianna Fáil-Green Party policy of wasting hundreds of millions of euro on meter installation instead of investing directly in repairs and in the infrastructure of the water system.
Ms Collins said the alliance would be a key organising force, with others, in a “no water tax campaign”.
A campaign of non-payment, comparable to the one that took place in in the 1990s, would be set up throughout the State, she added.
Ms Daly said the alliance would hold the new government to its promise to reverse the minimum wage reduction, which affected 80,000 workers.
“The ULA TDs will be equally uncompromising defenders of public sector workers, 25,000 of whom face the sack under this agreement, further decimating our public services in the process,” she added.
Mr Boyd Barrett said the alliance would be active on the ground in communities, workplaces, schools and colleges, building resistance in the form of strikes and people-power demonstrations in the months and years ahead.
“Having made our breakthrough in this election, we will go on to build the ULA nationally as a left alternative to the political establishment,” he added.
Mr Healy said Labour was more interested in securing office for itself than in the interests of working people.
