PDs will not have voting pact with FF in June elections

The Progressive Democrats will have no voting pact with Fianna Fail in the forthcoming elections, despite not fielding any European candidates of their own.

Announcing the party's local election manifesto in Dublin yesterday, the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, said that the PDs would be fighting the local and all future elections as an independent party. They would not be advising supporters how to vote in the European elections, she added.

The Tanaiste said that she was "very pleased with recent polls, which suggest we've turned the corner". The local elections were being used to rebuild the party from the bottom up, she added, and with a total of 70 candidates - including candidates in Donegal, Roscommon and Tipperary South for the first time - the PDs were determined to remain a force in Irish politics.

Identifying planning as one of the main areas of concern with local authority voters, Ms Harney said that "perceived improprieties" in the system had done much to damage confidence in politics in recent times.

Planning was "very much owner-focused" at the moment, she said, and the PDs wanted to change this. Ordinary people should be involved in the process at an earlier stage, while the track record of applicant-developers should be examined, particularly on the question of whether they had completed previous schemes to the satisfaction of the authorities.

Other policies favoured by the party included a move towards treating key infrastructural developments as single projects. For instance, the Dublin-Cork or Dublin-Galway roads should be dealt with in their totality, rather than in the stop-and-start way they were currently being developed, Ms Harney said.

Local authorities publishing prompt annual accounts and, within a given period, meeting the ISO 9000 standard were among the party's other aims.

The Tanaiste rejected comments by a former PD councillor, Mr Larry Lohan, who has joined Fianna Fail and who said on RTE last week that he saw no difference between the Government parties. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were both conservative parties, Ms Harney said, and there were "more similarities between them than between either and the PDs". The PDs had a more liberal attitude on many issues, she added, of which refugees were one obvious example.