Ex-Irish minister to form new party ahead of wide open election
By Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland's former Europe minister Lucinda Creighton said she will form a new political party ahead of scheduled parliamentary elections next year that polls predict will signal a major shift away from dominant parties.
Despite an upturn in the economy, government support slumped throughout last year at the expense primarily of independents, raising the prospect that any new party could have a considerable say in the forming a fresh coalition in 2016.
Creighton, the highest profile member of Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Fine Gael party to be expelled in 2013 for opposing an easing of Ireland's restrictive abortion laws, said the as yet unnamed party would include a number of elected representatives and seek to run at least one candidate in every constituency.
She laid out a pro-small business platform that will likely see her compete for votes with her former party and fellow centre-right opposition party Fianna Fail rather than the left-wing Sinn Fein, more aligned with anti-austerity parties gaining popularity around Europe.
"My concern is that what we are seeing now in terms of the economic agenda is an exact replica of what was there in the boom period," Creighton, 34, told a news conference on Friday in a long anticipated announcement.
"Pumping up the property market to recreate the artificial boom of the early 2000s is not a solution... We have a huge over-reliance on FDI (foreign direct investment) and we have absolutely nothing happening to stimulate the domestic economy."
She also focussed on the uneven spread of recovery between urban and rural Ireland and on small business owners who she said were discriminated by high taxes in a pitch aimed at voters who had "turned away in despair" from the political system.
Two other independent members of parliament have said they may also form new parties or a catch-all group of non-party MPs to capitalise on a frustration that spilled over last year into the largest series of anti-austerity protests since Ireland's financial crisis began in 2008.
This opposition saw Kenny's party drop to third place behind Sinn Fein in an opinion poll last month, hitting an 11-year low of 19 percent compared to the 32 percent who said they would vote for "independents and others".
"All polls are showing an anti-party vote so it will be difficult for this new party to put clear water between itself and Fine Gael and Fianna Fail," said Gary Murphy, a politics professor at Dublin City University (DCU), referring to Ireland's two dominant parties.
(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Toby Chopra)
