There was a sickening stench of corruption in the Republic, the president of the Workers' Party, Mr Tom French, claimed on Saturday.
He said it was now looking astonishingly like Cuba before the coming to power of Fidel Castro in 1959. "It resembles a client state of the Americans run by the mafia, with political prostitutes of all colours pulling each other's hair in an attempt to steel themselves for the brown paper bags that buy them power.
"And the common natives? Well, they are good for tasks like not voting, waiting tables, ironing shirts and shining shoes. But we now know that the common overtaxed natives already paid for the meal and the shirts."
In his address to delegates at his party's annual ardfheis, Mr French said the WP was now trying to re-establish the ideas of democracy and independence in Ireland. "Our enemies are silly if they think we will one day march with bowed heads, as others have, into the capitalist reservation, there to follow the burnt-out surrenderists and chancers and roll over and die, soulless."
Mr French said it should not be forgotten that if there had not been a row in Mr Ben Dunne's family about who owned the shop, and if someone had not sworn an affidavit, "the traitor and unrelenting leech on the poor on behalf of the rich, Haughey, would be lording it now in Kinsealy with mobs of slobbering media and other sycophants kowtowing to the Lord High King of the Celtic Tiger".
The Dunne family row had knocked the first brick out of the wall, he added. "Behind that wall, alleged politicians and our heroic job-creating entrepreneurs do the business. The people do not get a look-in."
He added that to create what Mr Charles Haughey had called "a climate of confidence" in the 1980s, alleged politicians of the main parties turned the screw on the poverty-stricken and soft-soaped the filthy rich. "But then if Michael Lowry had not been caught in the same row, he would not have won 31/2 quotas in Tipperary. It seems a great thing there to try to cod that tax crowd up in Dublin. What an eye-opener."
Mr French said that the current economic consensus among the major political parties was dangerous for the working class, democracy and Irish politics. "It has no intellectual base," he said. "The market's poverty-stricken victims will be forgotten and hidden, just as the State and media try to hide our party's existence and views from the people. The sort of partnership being peddled here is a scam for capitalism and a sham for the rest. "It is opportunism and cowardice, imported first from Clinton's America by Blair - they even borrow each other's spin-doctors - and from Blair by Irish impostors of like mind."
