LABOUR:THE LABOUR Party has urged supporters of Independents and smaller parties to switch their votes to it as a way of ensuring Fine Gael will not be in a position to form a single-party government.
Party leader Eamon Gilmore said yesterday Labour represented the main bulwark against formation of a single-party Fine Gael government. In his final press conference of the election campaign, he appealed to people to vote for his party to achieve this end.
Mr Gilmore said the election is essentially about how people see the future of the country and how Ireland is going to get out of the mess it is in.
The choice for voters on polling day is between a single-party Fine Gael government or a coalition of Labour and Fine Gael.
The only way for people who do not want single-party government to avoid this outcome is to vote Labour, Mr Gilmore said. He said voters who intend to vote for Independents or other parties should understand that they may end up with a single-party Fine Gael government as a consequence.
The election could produce a result they do not want and for this reason they should consider switching their vote to Labour. “Our message now is that if you don’t want single-party government you should vote Labour,” he said.
Asked how he thought Labour would do in the election, Mr Gilmore said it would perform better than the polls had indicated. However, he declined to predict the number of seats the party would win.
Mr Gilmore said that when he first called for Labour to be included in a three-way debate, he was told it was unrealistic and yet this had come to pass.
He said he was flattered and reassured to be asked why Labour was not leading in the opinion polls, but added its ambition is to come first.
The party is in a different place now than it had ever been historically, he insisted.
On the EU-IMF deal, he said he still believed the choice is, as he said earlier in the campaign, between “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way”.
The deal would have to be renegotiated, and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael now accepted this. The only area where those two parties are not “on the same page” as Labour is on the period allowed to reduce Ireland’s deficit.
Clarifying his party’s policy on home repossession, he said Labour would ensure no family is put out of its home because of mortgage arrears, provided it is making a genuine effort to make repayments.
