Labour needs to ask for forgiveness for the pain it pushed on to its voters
READING your reports on the Labour Party conference, it was breathtaking to see that a major plank of its new manifesto is to create an Economic Equality Agency, which would try to “understand the causes of poverty and disadvantage”.
The notion that those in the Labour Party do not know what it is that creates poverty, distributive injustice, is just not plausible.
It is clear Labour is still trying to create a narrative that muddies the waters regarding its own behaviour when in power.
The party did not, as it would have you believe, just stand idly by as Fine Gael went about axing many of the social supports that had been painstakingly put in place over decades.
Labour ministers implemented policies that pushed those already struggling into “poverty and disadvantage”.
Two obvious examples were the gouging of supports for lone parents and the overseeing of the hatchet job on the basic State pension in 2012 – two of the most vulnerable groups in our society were targeted by a Labour minister.
The party should come clean about what it did in power and seek the forgiveness of those it abandoned because those who suffered under Labour-facilitated austerity policies know the reality.
Their anger is exacerbated when they hear the mealy mouthed attempts to justify what they were forced to endure at the hands of a party that claims it is left-of-centre.
That is Labour’s only chance of redemption and the possibility of regaining the trust of sufficient numbers of voters to become relevant again in Irish politics. Jim O’Sullivan Rathedmond, Co Sligo