Is it Labour’s fate to be Enda’s mudguard?

This post is entirely a rip-off of a post from the under-rated Your Friend in the North blog in which Johnny Guitar acknowledges a … er… ‘third way’ strategic opportunity that leading the Irish opposition could offer to Labour.

Aside from the obvious point that the next few years are going to be pretty horrendous for whoever is in government (and that makes it a particularly bad time to perform the mudguard role that damaged Labour so badly in the 1990s), he quotes UNITE’s Regional Secretary Jimmy Kelly and this bit stands out for me:

We can now see the end of the old and outdated political divisions that dominated Irish politics since the 1930s. The political dividing line is no longer determined by Fianna Fáil. They have been totally rejected and must not be given the oxygen of being an unwanted official opposition. The dividing line is now between the Left and the Right.

Do read the rest.


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