Sir, - The continued opposition by Joan Burton (January 4th) and her party to the Electoral (Amendment) Bill offers further confirmation that Labour has exchanged constructive opposition for unreasoned political antagonism.
Facts, not spin, should inform our political opinions. The fact remains that electoral spending limits as set out in the 1997 Electoral Act are too low. The Labour Party's record of continual electoral overspending since its enactment provides evidence enough of this. In the 1998 Dublin North by-election Labour overspent. In the Dublin South Central by-election Labour overspent. Plainly, the Labour Party cannot keep to the spending limits it continues to defend.
The Labour leadership, in objecting to the more realistic spending limits set out in the Electoral (Amendment) Bill, has rejected reform and forsaken common-sense for the groundless spin of Labour as sentinels of political morality.
Indeed, in the wider context of political funding, the Labour Party stance is equally misleading. The party which proposes a full ban on corporate donations is also the party which engages in corporate golf classics. The party which lambasts low standards in high office had a Minister of State issue an invitation on official notepaper offering "a rare opportunity to gain access" to the then Minister for Finance, Ruairi Quinn, for £100. Plainly, the Labour Party stance on political funding, based on its past record, owes little to political morality.
Perhaps the fact that, under Labour's proposed guidelines, the establishment of effective new left-wing Parties to threaten Labour's flank as she moves ever rightward, as Democratic Left and the Worker's Party once did, would be nigh impossible, offers an insight into Labour's real motivations.
Perhaps Labour's leadership has been heeding the words of that other old socialist, Aldous Huxley, that idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. - Yours, etc.,
Michael Ahern, TD, Dail Eireann, Dublin 2.