Politics

The Labour Party's deputy leader has travelled a bewildering trajectory from privilege to architecture, to Marxism/Stalinism, back to (very) moderate social democracy. By Emma Browne

Labour leader Pat Rabbitte now enjoys a blank cheque from his party to agree to whatever deal with Fine Gael he feels is necessary for a successful assault on government at the next election.

This is an edited version of a piece by Marie Mulholland published in Village just after Denis Donaldson was outed as a British agent on 22 December, 2005

An average of all published opinion polls since 2002 shows none of the coalition options offered to the electorate would win an overall majority. By Colin Murphy

Pat Rabbitte has disappointed expectations of him as leader and he has moved his party decisively to the right. By Vincent Browne

Not a single one of the three vital measures promised by Government eight years ago has been implemented. Meanwhile, in that eight years almost as many people have been killed on the roads here as were killed through the 25 years of the Northern conflict. By Donal Kavanagh

The Labour Party assembles in Dublin this coming weekend (31 March – 1 April) to advertise its wares in what is the start of the long 2007 election campaign. There are many signs the party has lost its way and no longer stands for anything even vaguely resembling a socialist alternative. It hardly could do better than to reflect on the Democratic Programme for the first Dáil, which we publish in this issue of Village (see Page 66).

Derry council has voted to take a High Court case against the FOI Commissioner, who said that the council should disclose a deal it did with Ryanair regarding the council-owned Derry airport. Eamonn McCann reports

The Green Party proposed a motion in the Dáil on 21 March to deal with the 'collective amnesia' suffered by politicians before the Planning Tribunal, and calling for all parties to refuse funding from developers. These are extracts from that debate.

Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael held internal party inquiries into corruption in 2000. Now it transpires that numerous councillors neglected, or forgot, to to give the inquiries details of donations they had received from the developer, Christopher Jones, and the lobbyist, Frank Dunlop, donations which the Planning Tribunal has since uncovered