Labour leader Pat Rabbitte has called on disaffected Fianna Fáil voters to support his party in the next general election, saying Labour is their "natural home".
In a speech last night on the eve of his party conference in Dublin today, Mr Rabbitte said he had no doubt that his party and Fine Gael will form a government after the next general election. He pledged Labour would drive "a progressive centre-left agenda within that coalition".
Describing his party as "the natural home for disaffected Fianna Fáil voters", Mr Rabbitte said "the McCreevy years" had done great damage to Fianna Fáil's traditional support base. "In other European member states these people would be natural Labour voters. The Labour programme is closest to meeting their aspirations for themselves and their families.
"I hope those people feel that they can switch to Labour at this coming election and I pledge to them that Labour in government will not desert them."
Speaking to a joint meeting of Labour's parliamentary party and national executive, he said Fianna Fáil had now lost almost a quarter of its 2002 support, and that on its most recent opinion poll showing, would win just 55 seats compared to the 81 it won in 2002.
He claimed the Government had failed on health, crime, public transport, road safety, social housing, house prices, inflation and its failure to confront vested interests. He said the Tánaiste's recent announcement that there was "a national emergency" in A&E units in hospitals after nine years of this Government was "a shocking indictment of three successive Ministers". There was now a real opportunity for Labour and the alternative government to offer the people the possibility of positive change.
He rejected analyses that concluded that Fine Gael and Labour cannot gain the 30 extra seats needed in the next election to allow them to form a government. Nobody had predicted Fianna Fáil's 1977 landslide, the PDs 14 seats in 1987, Labour's 32 seats in 1992 or Fine Gael's 23-seat loss in 2002, he said.
"I have no doubt at all that the Labour/Fine Gael alliance will be able to have their candidate for taoiseach elected in the next Dáil," he said. This was because "when that time comes, I believe that people will demonstrate a clear preference that will reflect the disenchantment building about this Government and the mood for change".
Noting that the conference theme was "Preparing for Government", he said Labour must now set out for voters that it wanted to do in government. "We must present a policy platform which demonstrates how Labour's progressive social democratic values are applied to the needs of today's Ireland.
"At the same time, we have begun work on a broad common policy agenda with Fine Gael," he said. "The public will be left in no doubt that the alternative government will not just be a different government, it will be a better government." He said that after his recent "remarks about displacement and exploitation in the workplace, former EU commissioners, archbishops and academics were recruited to argue that there is no displacement and that Gama and Irish Ferries were once-off untypical developments". It was now known that these cases were not at all unique, and there had been three high profile disputes on the same issue since.
"We have no coherent immigration policy, and illegal working and exploitative practices are being allowed to continue unmonitored and unpunished, threatening to reduce wages and conditions for the indigenous workers," according to a recent NESC report.