Kenny says FG reform is needed if party is to survive

Fine Gael is facing the prospect of electoral extinction if it does not undergo radical and wide-ranging reform, the party leader has tacitly admitted.

Mr Enda Kenny said he was "fully aware" of the challenge facing him in the light of an internal report which warned that the organisation could go the way of the Canadian or British conservatives if trends continued.

In what Mr Kenny called a "warts and all" portrait, the report predicts the party's vote could fall to under 14 per cent by the election after next unless it reinvents itself.

The document was drawn up by a strategy review group chaired by Mr Frank Flannery.

Speaking on RTÉ's This Week programme yesterday, Mr Kenny conceded that it painted a bleak picture. "It says starkly that if the party is not prepared to move and to change radically, then it's going nowhere."

According to yesterday's Sunday Tribune, the report characterises the image of Fine Gael as wholesome but boring, although it argues that if the party can combine "the best facets of Fianna Fáil populism with a rejuvenated expression of the great ideals which Fine Gael stands for", winning 60 seats at the next election is a realistic goal.

Mr Kenny said many of the report's recommendations had already been implemented. While he accepted he had not yet "electrified" the party as promised after his election, it was now at least "plugged in".

The Fine Gael leader continued his attack yesterday on the 2003 Estimates, describing them as "a macho attempt" to make the public pay for the Minister for Finance's incompetence in managing public spending.

He blamed the Government's failure to introduce value-for-money reforms for the "shambles" of the public finances, but he also accused Mr McCreevy of cynically "blaming all the other ministers for failing to stay within the budgets allocated to them".

Addressing the Young Fine Gael conference in Dublin at the weekend, Mr Kenny particularly criticised the abolition of the first-time buyers grant.

He said its abolition "has sold out an entire generation of Irish people, condemning them in a stroke to the kind of future that would normally involve a creek and a paddle".

He added: "It has put paid to the hopes of countless thousands of people of buying a home any time in the next few years. It will send thousands more on to local authority housing lists where 10,000 people are already waiting, many of them in vain, for accommodation.

"It's a far cry from Fianna Fáil's 1997 election manifesto where they promised to increase the grant to €6,350 for couples, a grant they are now calling an 'inefficient use of resources'."