Senior Labour deputy Mr Michael D Higgins has differed strongly with his party leader over the taxi crisis, describing as "disastrous" the deregulation of the taxi industry which has been strongly supported by Mr Quinn.
Mr Quinn declared on Saturday that Labour supported the Government's decision to deregulate the industry, as it was currently anti-competitive and anti-consumer. "We have argued for change for many years and we have taken it on the chin from the taxi lobby for doing so", he said.
"Let me be quite clear about where the Labour Party stands on the taxi proposals", he went on in a speech in Dublin. "We are in favour of the Government's proposal to meet the public demand for taxis."
Mr Quinn condemned Fianna Fail for attempting to distance itself from the deregulation decision and for blaming Mr Bobby Molloy for it. "Other parties have taken to shooting themselves in the foot", he said. "Labour is the united and coherent opposition to the Government. We are carefully setting out our stall."
But Mr Higgins, the party's foreign affairs spokesman, took a different view yesterday. The deregulation of the taxi industry is an ideologically driven and "disastrous" policy that will not solve the taxi shortage he said.
A party spokesman said yesterday that while the party was in favour of deregulation, it was opposed to the way the Government had gone about it. "This should have been more orderly - this approach has caused mayhem both for the public and the taxi drivers," the spokesman said.
Mr Higgins, who spoke at a meeting of taxi drivers in Galway on Friday night, said he agreed there was a severe gap between the supply of and demand for taxis. However he warned that everywhere deregulation had been tried, the authorities had returned to regulation of the industry.
Deregulation amounted to "a Third World option in transport", he maintained. He predicted that people in low paid jobs would now begin to operate taxis part-time in order to boost their incomes. "They will take out their cars when the demand is the greatest, leaving the quieter hours in the middle of the day with a continuing shortage".
There should be regulation with some form of rostering, he said, in order to avoid this problem. Regulation should also cover issues such as the reduction of emissions and the standardising of safety requirements, he said.
He maintained that in Montreal, where total deregulation was tried, the authorities ended up buying back at huge cost 25 per cent of licences issued.