Labour's ruling body has voted unanimously to oppose the tax deal for bogus non-resident account holders, despite initial support for the move from Mr Pat Rabbitte TD.
The party's General Council voted yesterday to oppose the measure vigorously and called "on all members of the Labour Party to oppose this measure".
The robustly worded motion contrasts with Mr Rabbitte's support for the move on Wednesday. Mr Rabbitte, a member of the Oireachtas sub-committee that inquired into the issue of bogus non-resident accounts, stated: "To be honest, I couldn't call it an amnesty." Yesterday's council motion states: "This is another tax amnesty."
While Mr Rabbitte's comments at lunchtime on Wednesday were supportive of the move, a meeting of senior party figures later that day decided to adopt a more questioning approach.
The finance spokesman, Mr Derek McDowell, issued a statement reserving judgment and calling for an examination of aspects of the Revenue proposals by a Dail committee.
In the Dail yesterday, the Labour Party leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, made it clear this was the party's position. However, the party's social, community and family affairs spokesman, Mr Tommy Broughan, branded the proposal "disgraceful".
A party spokesman denied yesterday there were differences within the party on the issue but agreed their position had "evolved". Mr Rabbitte declined to comment last night.
The differences on the issue mark the second such divergence within Labour this week. On Monday night, Mr McDowell indicated on RTE's Questions and Answers he believed the national stadium and sports campus project should go ahead in a scaled-back form. This is consistent with the view of the party's spokesman on sport, Mr Brian O'Shea, who in the Dail on Tuesday called on the Government to retain "a sense of proportion", but did not suggest the project be dropped. Mr Quinn has also taken this approach.
However in Tuesday's Dail debate, Dublin South Central Labour TD Ms Mary Upton opposed the project outright. Saying the stadium would be "a white elephant" and "bad for Irish sport" she called for the redevelopment of Lansdowne Road instead.
But Dublin North TD Mr Sean Ryan supported the project in principle. "This country needs a stadium," he declared. "There is a need for a national sports centre." The following morning Mr Rabbitte wrote in The Irish Times that the project should be abandoned altogether. "Until we find that we have too few stadiums to cope with the flood of fixtures, there is simply no point in going ahead. This project should be scrapped," he wrote.
The Green Party yesterday condemned the Revenue proposals, saying they amounted to a new tax amnesty.