There was something rotten in the public life of the Republic, the outgoing president of the Workers' Party, Mr Tom French, claimed on Saturday.
"The politics of `cute hoorism' is rife. We have had scandal after scandal in land-rezoning deals, the beef industry, offshore bank accounts, tax evasion and fraud, the blood transfusion services, bribery and corruption in virtually every sphere of public life."
Addressing delegates at the party's ardfheis in Dublin, Mr French said that in a cynical Irish manner the euphemism "brown envelope" had been used to describe criminal monetary activity.
"We should call a spade a spade. When a TD, civil servant, city or county official is engaged in accepting bribes, or in other forms of corruption, we should call it just that."
On the North, Mr French said the Workers' Party had vigorously supported the Belfast Agreement. The party's new president, Mr Sean Garland, said that whatever about the mistakes, problems and disasters which the bureaucrats in the Soviet Union had inflicted on their people, they paled by comparison with the "evil and inherent destructiveness" that was capitalism.
"No country today is immune from the damaging effects of capitalism. Control and manipulation of the mass media worldwide have played a major role in enabling capitalism to portray communist and workers' governments and parties as anti-working class and hostile to the interests of all the people."
Socialism, he said, represented the best hope, indeed the only hope, for the vast majority of people in the world.
