The two candidates for the Labour leadership made their most partisan speeches asserting the party’s autonomy in the last formal debate of the campaign. In the final leadership hustings in the Mansion House in Dublin last night, Joan Burton and Alex White separately sharpened their rhetoric, with indirect and direct warnings to the party’s rivals, including Coalition partner Fine Gael.
Ms Burton focused on the comments of Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and indicated strongly that she too would be pushing hard for more concessions. This was taken as a strategy for shifting perceptions of the party as a supporters of austerity measures.
In the course of her speech to delegates, Ms Burton dwelt on this point, outlining an argument that the party should strive hard to have some independence from the straitjacket imposed by strict EU rules. Ms Burton said the new centre-left Renzi government could be one of a new key allies in an EU where the political landscape has changed somewhat.
“One of the sensible Italian demands is for an EU-wide investment programme along with an imaginative accounting rule to subtract investment spending from the deficit calculation.”
For his part, Mr White made the harder-hitting speech of the campaign warning the party that it will fail to get any hearing in the next general election if the impression stands “we told a string of lies before the last election and that since then we have broken every promise we ever made”.
This last meeting of course was seen as ‘home turf’ for the Dublin South TD. He needed to perform strongly to close the gap with the favourite Ms Burton – he did but so did his rival.
No clear winner emerged from the debate. Mr White told delegates it needed to meet its detractors and opponents head-on. He made withering criticism of the “Sinn Féiners and Mé Féiners on the extreme left”.
Unique in western world
He told delegates those left parties in Ireland were unique in all the western world in being opposed to property taxes and accused them of forcing waste collection services into the hands of private operators by advocating a refusal to pay charges.
He also argued that the party needed to stand up to Fine Gael and promised, if elected leader, that he would make Labour more visible in government.
Ms Burton made reform another major theme of her speech, contending the Government’s record was actually quite good but there had been failures in communicating its successes, or joining up the different reforms into a coherent message.
“Reform has become a dirty word in recent years, often because fiscal hawks use it as code for slashing public services,” she said. “We on the left need to reclaim the word ‘reform’, and restore its proper meaning and purpose.
“I understand how frustrated you feel that the promise of new politics in 2011 has come to look hollow,” she said, promising to regain the initiative.
The four deputy leader candidates spoke ahead of the leadership contenders. Alan Kelly perhaps came across the strongest ahead of Michael McCarthy.
