Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

The response in the future involves us all. It also involves a cute evasion - those who say it is not a matter of left or right any more. This is a cop-out. This is to say, "You are afraid to say that a party of the left, the Labour Party, gave its vote in September 2008 against an indiscriminate guarantee, unbounded, from which flows most of these difficulties." There is a strange hesitation in those would-be opportunists also of the left, who would like to say, "Maybe now in the anger that is there, we could defuse it somewhat; maybe what is required are celebrities, people untouched by the fact that they ever stood for election, people that we might recognise by some kind of competence and so forth".

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