Fine Gael would honour a pre-election deal to share power with the Green Party even if the smaller party's seats were not needed for a Dáil majority, the party's leader, Mr Enda Kenny, has said.
"If we can arrive at a situation where we have a pre-election pact with FG, Labour and the Greens, that election pact would apply post any election also. I would honour it," Mr Kenny said.
However, the Green Party later issued a statement saying it would not "be drawn into any pre-election pact as the party's main focus right now is to be effective in opposition and to set out in its own right what it has to offer the Irish people".
The party leader, Mr Trevor Sargent, said he believed that any talk of a pre-election pact was "letting the current Government off the hook".
The statement reflects Green concern that the agreement of a pact two years out from an election could limit his party's room for manoeuvre.
Mr Sargent said: "Parties in opposition need first to co-operate to expose how this Fianna Fáil and PD administration is treating the people with contempt and storing up problems for the future," he said.
Before there was any talk of pacts, the people deserved to know exactly what each party in any prospective coalition stood for, he added.
On Thursday Mr Kenny had raised the prospect that the Greens would not be part of a rainbow coalition if Fine Gael and Labour managed to win 84 Dáil seats.
Moving to clarify his remarks yesterday, Mr Kenny said the central point of a pre-election pact, if successful, would be that all three parties would subsequently serve in government.
Mr Kenny said he hoped that all three parties could agree a transfers pact before the coming by-elections in Meath and Kildare North, on foot of the good figures which were achieved in the local elections.
At the Fine Gael press conference, strategist Mr Frank Flannery discounted fears that FG gains would come at Labour's expense. He said Fine Gael and Labour had won 48 per cent of seats in urban areas because of good transfer rates between them.
Mr Kenny emphasised that he had yet to have discussions on a transfers deal or a coalition pact with Mr Sargent.
"I respect him, and I respect the Green Party," he said.
Asked if he believed Fianna Fáil would portray the Greens as "bogeymen" in an election campaign, Mr Kenny said FF had tried to do the same to Democratic Left in 1997.
"I don't see the Green Party as any kind of bogeymen. They are a registered political party. They have their own policies and their own view," he said. "Their starting point is that they don't want to have anything to do with FF in government. From that perspective I am going to talk to Trevor Sargent and see what lies ahead." Playing down the difficulties that could lie in such talks, he said: "Obviously there are wide differences of opinion in various areas, but there is a convergence in others."
Describing the two-day parliamentary party meeting as "successful and constructive", Mr Kenny said Fine Gael had achieved "a certain credibility" with voters by its performance in June. He acknowledged that improving economic figures would make it more difficult for his party to persuade the electorate to remove Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats.
However, he believed that voters would put more emphasis on the Government's performance before the last election. "This Government reneged and abused the trust given to them 2½ years ago," he said.
He did not believe that FF and the PDs would be able to rebuild that trust.
"The June result has cast a deep sense of fear into this Government. That is why you are having their reaction now."
