Pat Rabbitte rejects Fintan O’Toole criticism

Former Labour minister Pat Rabbitte has defended the Government's use of the parliamentary guillotine to cut short debate and rush legislation through the Oireachtas.

Speaking on The Irish Times Inside Politics podcast, Mr Rabbitte said the use of the procedure had not been extended by the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition, which has faced criticism for using the guillotine in bills such as the one to establish Irish Water.

The Programme for Government contains a commitment to “tackle the huge over-use of guillotines to ram through non-emergency legislation.”

Mr Rabbitte and Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, who exchanged views over the performance of the Government recently, appear on the programme to discuss what the former Labour leader sees as unfair criticism from the journalist.

A decision by the Government to comply with the European Central Bank’s demands to not burn senior bondholders in Irish banks was also defended by Mr Rabbitte, who said the ECB’s “almighty threat” of the removal of emergency funding forced the Government’s hand in the early days of the Coalition.

“I would like to have seen senior bondholders take their share of the punishment, and by that I mean a very large share,” Mr Rabbitte said. “If we did do that, we didn’t know whether there would be money in the ATM machines in the morning”.

He rejected criticism from O’Toole that Labour broke their promise to stand up to the ECB in the last general election campaign, when Labour used the slogan “Frankfurt’s way or Labour’s way”.

“It is easy to be denigratory about the practice of politics. The fact of the matter is, Labour set out its stall with absolute conviction. It isn’t a Labour government, it is a coalition government. That’s a reality we have to take into account. Fintan might choose to discount it,” he said.