Labour Youth Summer School:Labour leader Pat Rabbitte has admitted there is a problem with the "Labour brand" and says he has urged his party members to examine their place in Irish politics and society.
Labour "does not conjure up in people's minds, much less inspire, a definite sense of what the party stands for" and does not reflect the aspirations of "most of the new middle-class", he said.
The Labour leader was delivering the Jim Kemmy lecture to Labour Youth's Tom Johnson Summer School in Galway at the weekend.
He posed the question as to why there had been a a shift back to Fianna Fáil in the last week of the election campaign. "Did the tag of 'slump coalition', particularly when applied to a possible three-party line-up including the Greens, have an impact? Probably. It is ironical that Fianna Fáil's partner in government should be the Green Party, given how liberally Fianna Fáil and the PDs used the possible inclusion of the Greens in a Fine Gael/Labour government to scare off people from voting for the alliance for change," he said.
Mr Rabbitte said that the leaders' debate, "the Late Late Show Benefit for Bertie" and Fianna Fáil's campaign to denigrate the capacity of the Fine Gael leader for the office of Taoiseach also played a role. "I also believe that a lot of the damage was done as long ago as last October. 'Bertiegate' cost us in the polls," said the Labour leader.
Mr Rabbitte said that in referring to a "brand", he did not mean "something superficial, such as the way we package the party". Labour had performed well in the general election among young people, and had secured 16 per cent of first preferences from first-time voters, he noted. However, there was "no escaping our own flatlining", he added.
RTÉ's exit poll had recorded more people in the ABC1 category voting for Labour than in the lower income C2D groupings, but this did not mean that the party was losing its traditional working-class base, Mr Rabbitte continued. The traditional base was being eroded and changed by affluence.
"If we ever did, we do not reflect the aspirations of most of the new middle-class - people in working-class occupations trying to live middle-class lives," he said. These were "people whose parents in some cases voted Labour, but who themselves do not vote Labour".
"As a party, we have plenty of policies," he said, and Labour dominated the left space in Irish politics. However, the party needed more than policies - it required a "project" to build an Ireland founded on the values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Such a project must be "at once global and local, immediate in terms of action and long-term in conviction", the party's president, Michael D Higgins told the summer school. If the party was serious about fighting poverty, it must tackle inequality, he said.
Mr Higgins said that he believed many people voted for Fianna Fáil in the election due to fear of change - "a fear very skilfully exploited by that party and to some degree by the Progressive Democrats".
Labour now needed to articulate an alternative vision to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of a social market economy which had been successfully reformed and revived in Scandinavia and Germany, in spite of the challenges of globalisation.
The argument that absolute poverty had largely been eliminated should be countered by the fact that the level of inequality was the major predictor of social unrest and violence, Mr Higgins continued.
Ireland was moving "in the direction of the USA, where rising inequality has produced an increasingly dysfunctional and violent society", he warned.