Fianna Fáil will use taxpayers' money "without scruple" to buy the next general election, the Labour Party leader, Mr Pat Rabbitte, has warned.
Speaking to Labour councillors on Saturday, he said: "They may have taken a hit, but there is no party better at using power to cling to power than Fianna Fáil.
"We can see the determination to cling to power in the farce that has become the longest-running Cabinet reshuffle in history. The desirability of running an efficient, effective government does not seem to have intruded on the Taoiseach at all.
"In order to keep his backbenchers quiet over the summer, he has put the work of every Government Department into a holding pattern for at least three months, as Ministers and civil servants contemplate who will be in charge of what come September," he declared.
The Labour gathering, in the Mansion House in Dublin on Saturday, was called to celebrate the party's achievement of over 100 council seats in the June elections.
Today Mr Rabbitte and the Fine Gael leader, Mr Kenny, will attend a function in Mullingar to mark the signing of a pact to share power on Westmeath County Council. Though the significance of the move has been somewhat exaggerated in some quarters, given that a number of such deals have already been agreed on other councils, the event will help to counter the publicity afforded to Fianna Fáil's two-day meeting in Inchydoney in west Cork which begins today.
In his speech on Saturday, Mr Rabbitte warned the electorate: "Do not doubt but that the public purse will be used without scruple in an attempt to buy the next general election with taxpayers' own money. The much promised 'loosening of the purse strings' is not an ideological shift. It will simply be a repetition of what Charlie McCreevy did for 18 months before the last general election, when taxpayers' money was spent for partisan electoral advantage."
However, Mr Rabbitte said he believed a mood for change existed amongst the public, "a mood to get rid of an arrogant, inept Government that inherited such a thriving economy, and did so little with it". But Labour must be able to provide "a credible alternative" along with Fine Gael and the Greens.
Though disagreements will inevitably emerge about policy on individual councils, Mr Rabbitte said "hard work and determination" could resolve them.
"It is our task now to work with Fine Gael and the Green Party to explore whether we can build that alternative. We must show the public that there is nothing inevitable about the visionless drift of Fianna Fáil and the PDs. Prior to the local and European elections, the conventional wisdom was that there was no alternative government on offer. That is no longer the conventional wisdom," said the Labour leader.
The former Labour leader, Mr Dick Spring, will head up a committee to choose "the best possible" general election candidates.
"Squatting on quotas and fending off fraternal rivalries will not meet today's imperative to constantly improve our organisation. Our competitors do not allow sentiment to get in the way of modernising and professionalising the organisations, and if we don't continue [to professionalise] it will leave a price to be paid down the line," he said.
