Sinn Féin is already in Government with Fine Gael and Labour, the North’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness has told the party’s ardfheis.
“For those who pontificate about whether they will go into government with Sinn Féin let me be clear: we are already in government with the Democratic Unionist Party but we are also in government with Fine Gael and Labour, with Enda and Joan, through the Good Friday institutions of the North South Ministerial council,” he said in Derry.
“North and South we are opposed to austerity. In Government and opposition we oppose austerity. So let me again be very clear - Sinn Féin doesn’t do austerity. Others do austerity. We do equality,” he said.
“Sinn Féin does do Government and we do government in defence of the most vulnerable rather than the elites”. He insisted the North’s protected welfare system has eliminated Tory cuts and which they sought to impose on the most vulnerable on the North”.
He reiterated the party’s ambition to be the biggest party in the Dáil after the 2016 election as well as the biggest party in the North in the Assembly elections next year.
“The symbolism of doing so on the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising will be massive because Sinn Féin is the only party on this island which is serious” about the creation of a nation as declared in the 1916 Proclamation.
The party's finance spokesman Pearse Doherty pledged that in Government "we will abolish the water charges and scrap the family home tax", the property tax.
“And instead we will introduce a third rate of tax on individual incomes above €100,000. We will clamp down on tax avoidance and introduce a wealth tax.”
He said a fair recovery for Sinn Féin meant “no return to cosseted elites, gambling recklessly, knowing that they have friends in high places to protect them and knowing that when it all goes wrong the taxpayer will bail them out”.
Dublin MEP Lynn Boylan said Taoiseach End Kenny described Ireland as the best little country to do business in. Sinn Féin would create an Ireland "that is the best little country in which to live, work and grow old in".
Addressing the ardfheis and viewers on RTÉ, she asked “do you really want to return the Government that lets the banks call the shots on mortgages” while a family a day lost its home.
She described water charges as the ultimate insult from the Government. “Water charges are the same as this Government, an unfair, unjust and unwanted imposition on the people,” she said to applause.
Ms Boylan said that for the first time in the history of the State, the people of Ireland could end “the system of Civil War politics of right-wing governments of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil”.
She described the Government as “nothing but a cowardly bunch of yes men”.
