February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Andrew Bushe
DUBLIN — Labor Party leader Ruairi Quinn is to step down from the post after five years and will not seek a second term office in October, he said on Tuesday.
“The job of leader requires total dedication, which I have given with the help and assistance of my family over the last five years. I believe that it is now time to pass on the baton of leadership,” he said.
Quinn’s term of office ends Oct. 25 and he will remain on until then.
The continuing leadership of the 57-year-old father of three had been in doubt since a disappointing May 17 general election result when the party failed to gain seats.
Labor was squeezed between an increase in support for the Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat coalition and a surge in the vote for the Greens and Sinn Fein on the left.
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It came back with 21 TDs in the 166-seat Dail — the same as it had before the election — and its share of the national vote was down 2.1 percent to 10.8 percent.
Former leader and Tanaiste Dick Spring lost his North Kerry seat to Sinn Fein’s Martin Ferris. Labor also lost its outgoing finance spokesmen, Derek McDowell, and long-serving Louth TD Michael Bell.
“While the last general election may not have brought all the Labor Party would have wished, we did return the second largest Parliamentary Labur Party in our history,” Quinn said. “I am particularly proud that one third of those elected are women. We have made some progress but there is much more to be done.”
The third biggest political party in the Dail, Labor is the longest established of all the political parties, having been founded before Independence in 1912.
For the first time the new leader will be elected by a postal vote of the 3,500 Labor Party members. Those mentioned as possible contenders to succeed him include deputy leader Brendan Howlin and former Democratic Left TDs Eamon Gilmore and Pat Rabbitte.
The party has suffered left-right, urban-rural splits in the past, but the difficulty for any Democratic Left TDs with designs on the leadership is that most of the electorate will be “old” Labor activists with membership dating back to before the merger of the two parties.
In November 1997, Quinn succeeded Spring when he stepped down after 15 years. Spring quit after the June 1997 general election when the party lost 15 seats. In the subsequent presidential election, candidate Adi Roche got less than 7 percent of the national vote when she trailed in behind Mary McAleese.
When he was chosen, Quinn was deputy leader and he beat Howlin, then party whip, by a margin of 37 votes to 27 of the parliamentary party and general council.
When he took over Quinn promised to lead the party beyond the “Spring tide” election of 1992, when it got a record 33 seats. He pledged to see the party get 41 TDs — one for every constituency in the country.
However, in May Quinn struggled to hold his own seat in the mainly middle class Dublin South-East constituency, where he was first elected in 1977.
Quinn, who is strongly pro-European, said he would complete his mandate with a “vigorous campaign” for the forthcoming second referendum on EU enlargement.
In June 2001, Ireland delivered a shock 54 percent rejection of the Nice Treaty on enlargement in a constitutional referendum.
The Dail returns early from its summer break next month to pass laws to allow a second referendum to go ahead.
A former architect and town planner, Quinn has wide experience in senior and junior ministries and was Ireland’s first Labor finance minister.
He joined the party 38 years ago as a UCD student and was nicknamed Ho Chi Quinn when an activist in the 1960s.
He is the younger brother of one of Ireland’s wealthiest men, Lochlan Quinn, who is chairman of the Allied Irish Bank group. He owns 26 percent of Glen Dimplex, the domestic appliance maker.