SOUTH TIPPERARY:THE LEFT-WING Workers Unemployed Action Group (WUAG) has staged a spectacular comeback in South Tipperary by winning a total of eight council seats and attracting more than 43 per cent of first-preference votes cast in the election for Clonmel's Borough Council.
It now makes up the largest political group on the borough council, with five of the 12 seats. The WUAG also won seats on South Tipperary County Council and a “breakthrough seat” on Carrick-on-Suir Town Council.
The group’s leader, Seamus Healy, yesterday called on Labour leader Eamon Gilmore “not to contemplate going into a future coalition with Fine Gael but to instead offer the public a radical alternative government at the next general election”.
He said WUAG had established “informal links” with groups, including People Before Profit and Joe Higgins’s Socialist Party, and was “willing to work with the Labour Party” to offer the people an alternative to both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
The party had run a hard-hitting campaign under the slogan “Tax the Greedy Not the Needy” which “called on the public to use the local elections to fight back against greedy bankers, speculators, regulators and their crony politicians who, by reckless lending, corrupt practices, profiteering, huge salaries and junketing, have brought this country to its knees”.
WUAG councillors would try to prevent their fellow councillors from participating in “junkets”. He said he and the other WUAG councillors “have consistently voted against junkets and never taken part in them”.
He called for the introduction of “wealth and asset taxes on the super rich”, a “halt to obscene salaries and bonuses”, and an increase in Government borrowing to create jobs.
Mr Healy (58) also pledged to win back the Dáil seat he lost – by 59 votes to Fianna Fáil’s Martin Mansergh – in 2007.
A former hospital administrator and trade union activist, Mr Healy originally founded the WUAG along with other “community activists” in 1985. He himself headed the poll for Clonmel Borough Council “with three quotas” and headed the poll for the Clonmel area in the county council election “with almost two quotas”.