Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton has failed to deny she would like to become leader of the Labour Party.
In a radio interview broadcast yesterday, Ms Burton repeatedly dodged questions about whether she would like to become party leader. The party’s deputy leader and her husband were interviewed on the RTÉ Radio 1 show Miriam Meets.
When first asked if she would like to become leader, Ms Burton failed to give a direct answer saying, “I’m very happy doing what I’m doing, and for as long as I can contribute in politics, that’s what I’d like to do”.
Asked a second time, she said “I hope that I can contribute for a long time to come”.
When interviewer Miriam O’Callaghan said she would interpret her answers to mean “yes”, Ms Burton said she felt at the moment people “expect politicians to focus on sorting the country rather than on internal political disputes”.
Her husband Pat Carroll, a former Labour councillor for Dublin City who has been actively involved in Ms Burton’s election campaigns, said the Labour Party electorate “doesn’t want to know” about “strife” in the party.
“They want the party to govern and to be focused on solving the problems . . . internal disputes leave people very, very cold altogether”.
Referring to the well-known conflict between former British Labour leader Tony Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, Mr Carroll said such conflict can have “incredibly destructive effects”.
“Judging from conversations anyway, Joan is very conscious of that,” he said.
Asked about Róisín Shortall, who resigned as junior minister for health last year, Ms Burton said “I’d certainly like to see some of the people currently in dispute with the party coming back again”.
Ms Burton, who was born in Carlow but formally adopted to a Dublin family aged four, also spoke of her search for her birth mother whom she did not meet before her death.
She described herself as “very lucky in getting a chance” at a time when some children in orphanages had been sent to Magdalene laundries.
