THE FORMER MINISTER of State Lucinda Creighton will come face-to-face with Taoiseach Enda Kenny for the first time since she voted against the abortion bill last July.
As vice president of the European People’s Party, Creighton will attend the meeting of Europe’s biggest political grouping at Bouchout Castle in the National Botanic Gardens just outside Brussels this morning.
Enda Kenny will also be in attendance along with German chancellor Angela Merkel and other EU leaders where talks will likely focus on issues that will be raised at the main European Council meeting getting under way later today.
The EPP meetings are not unusual on the fringes of EU summits. Creighton was elected to the vice presidency last November and will remain in the role until 2015. It is unaffected by her expulsion from the Fine Gael parliamentary party.
It will be Creighton’s first encounter with Kenny since the abortion vote last July when her decision to vote against the government position resulted in her losing Fine Gael whip and being forced to resign as Europe Minister.
Asked what she might say to Kenny if she met him in, Creighton told TheJournal.ie last month: “We’d probably have a chat and a natter and that’d be that. No daggers across the table or anything.”
Today’s meeting comes amid mounting pressure on Creighton to resign from Fine Gael altogether at a local level. However one councillor in her Dublin South East constituency threw her support behind Creighton this week.
Meanwhile, in a post on her website yesterday, Creighton strongly criticised “the over dependence on loyalty in Irish politics”.
She wrote: “The Irish people are not stupid, the reason they no longer support either government parties to the same extent they did in 2011 is not because our economy has yet to recover, or because they are feeling the pinch of austerity, it’s because the preponderance of the Irish electorate voted in 2011 based on the policies that both these political parties promised, yet diluted once in office.”
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