Poll: Irish general election edition

[Duncan Gardner]

Yes, that's an SDLP MP canvassing for Fine Gael

I thought she backed the Labour Party

[anton pulisov]

Lots of shy FFers coming back home. And FGers will be giving them transfers to keep the Shinners out.

40/1 for FF outright majority. Might be worth putting a fiver on that.

[Diable Rouge]

Srsly though, why does SF have a candidate shortage? That seems an error.

As recently as May, SF lost half their councillors, and even just before Christmas, their poll figures were similar, which was the scenario around which they had based their GE planning - remarkably similar to how Labour were caught on the hop in 1992.

[Diable Rouge]

Mary-Lou McDonald has been invited/promoted to tomorrow's debate, which may, ironically, suit both FF and FG better than her absence. To pacify the smaller parties, they have been given a hastily-arranged five-way on Thursday, which acts as an effective coalition audition.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Thanks DR.

I thought this piece on Sinn Fein was interesting

https://newsocialist.org.uk/irish-election/

[Duncan Gardner]

Aye, good article. Might lack of SF candidates boost the rest of the Broad Left?

[ursus arctos]

Yes, that's very good.

[Diable Rouge]

Aye, good article. Might lack of SF candidates boost the rest of the Broad Left?

There is a theory that the extra votes will trickle down to the left parties, particularly in urban areas (Mary Lou being likely to get the equivalent of two quotas in Dublin Central, which would benefit Christy Burke, the Soc Dems and Greens there).

[Diable Rouge]

Meanwhile, the death of a candidate in Tipp means polling is automatically postponed there until a later date.

[Diable Rouge]

A crude method of prediction, but if each constituency went according to bookies' odds, the next Dáil would deliver the following:

FF 58
FG 37
SF 28
Ind 16
Green 8
Labour 6
Soc Dems 5
Aontú 1
Sol/PBP 1

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1224444090386804737

[Nefertiti2]

Sinn Fein lead

[URL]https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1224444063912321025?s=21[/URL]

[Diable Rouge]

Age demographics:

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1224445551141253121

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Aye, good article. Might lack of SF candidates boost the rest of the Broad Left?

Ah god love him. (the article writer, not DG) He thinks that Sinn fein are a left wing party, rather than just the irish clientelist party going through one of its many phoenix like rebirths, and are currently in a phase where it makes sense to make promises to people who don't have much money. because Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have the other section well nailed down. After the 2007 election they decided to set themselves up as the party of small businessmen and were saying that any rises in taxes would have to be justified in the economic good. Sinn fein will follow whatever policy their Army council, sorry ard chomhairle of seven decide they should believe this week. They voted for the Bank Guarantee, until they saw that Labour had voted against it on the grounds that it was suicidal and a pointless sop to the banks. Labour are the party who suffered the most from the fallout of the bank guarantee, largely thanks to sinn fein continuously hammering them for it. SImilarly Sinn fein were in favour of water charges on the grounds that they were the responsible way to fund our collapsing water system. Then Paul Murphy got elected on an anti-water charges ticket, and suddenly sinn fein had deeply held socialist convictions that Water charges were wrong and that free, treated and unlimited water was an inalienable human right.. They're telling people in the south that you should be able to retire at 65, but voted to pass a rise in the Northern Irish pension age, along with all of George osborne's welfare reforms.

Sinn Fein are great for calling anyone who has to operate with a budget constraint evil filthy scum. I hope Sinn Fein in the south never get to hear about what Sinn Fein got up to in the north, because otherwise they'd hate them so much.

They're doing very well at the moment, because they haven't been in power over the last 13 years, and all of those parties are getting a lot of blame for things not going great. They are also promising people that they will cut their taxes, increase spending on them, and fund it all with business taxes, which given our current high level of reliance on these highly volatile taxes, strikes me as a desperate rush to get back to the hopelessly imbalanced, incredibly risky tax base of the property bubble, so we get to go bankrupt. The sinn fein manifesto also takes literally no account of the fiscal compact treaty, and how that forces us to treat income from volatile cyclical taxes differently to the way you treat income from stable taxation. Essentially, they'll just say any old thing that you want to hear. We love that shit. That's all we want from a political party really. It's why we've been going bankrupt, bankrupt, or recovering from bankruptcy for half my life.

It did lead to this tweet, which while not quite in the Andrew Neil class, does rather show that some on the UK left have failed to grasp the problems with the principle "My enemy's enemy is my friend."

[URL]https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1224455547807625218[/URL]

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Sinn Fein leading on votes. Blimey eh?

[Duncan Gardner]

SPIDERS AND SNAKES

Do you remember when Mary Lou
Said, "Yis coming back to Stormont too?"
I'm like "Red, White, Blue!"
She goes, "Now I don't want no Language Act"
"Nor more abortion, that's a fact"
Thinks: "Is she on the glue?"

And so we took some walks
Ended up in talks on talks
She's asking "Let's go on the View?"
I was tempted, so found a fleg
Off a bonfire near Lambeg
Shook it at her and smiled "This fleg's for you!"

CHORUS

Ouch. "You don't like Spides and Taigs"
"And that ain't what it takes"
"To love me, like I wanna be loved by you"

Well every so often I see Michelle
But we never seem to gel
What is she saying? Just can't tell
So, "Do you condemn the 'Ra?"
"Join Fine Gael, like Clare Hanna?"
She gurns, "That I just can't sell"

I was bricking, to coin a phrase
(Most of my vote's obsessed by gays)
Til she asks, "Fancy a Border Poll?"
I thought, "That hardly sounds like fun"
"Best ask Peter Robinson"
He has us stuck in a bottomless hole

CHORUS X2

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There's something really unhinged about our last four elections. We voted back Bertie in 2007 in spite all of his scandals, because we wanted the govt to carry on exactly as before and keep this whole celtic tiger property boom on the road. They did, Then that turned out to be a complete disaster, so we destroyed fianna fail, and the Greens, who just happened to be wandering by. we wanted people who would take strong action to fix the nightmare that we were in in 2011 and protect us from the consequences of total collapse They did, We didn't like the experience so we destroyed the labour party, and sick of strong corrective govt action we elected a parliament where it was impossible for any govt to take any form of meaningful action on anything. So the govt happily got down to doing nothing. It turns out, we didn't want a govt to sit down and do nothing, there were problems to solve. So now we're turning on FG because they delivered precisely the type of govt we asked for. Now we want people who propose bold solutions. We're likely to have changed our mind again by the next election.

This is the consequence of our culture of extreme clientelism. We're very good at expressing what we want in aggregate, and the electoral system is really good at expressing this. We insist that political parties offer us what we want, and when that doesn't work out we punish the political parties, and find someone else to give us what we want. At some level we need to learn that the problem is us. We need to start wanting the right things. but also focus on wanting them for more than a very short time.

[ursus arctos]

The persistence of clientelism in Ireland, Italy and Poland lead me to believe that traditional Catholicism has a case to answer

[Diable Rouge]

Much as I'd love this to be true, probably too much to ask:

https://twitter.com/TG4TV/status/1224679096782934019

[Diable Rouge]

Electoral spreadsheet nirvana:

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1224678779848708097

[anton pulisov]

Haha Owen Jones thinking that SF will break the stranglehold of gombeenism on Irish politics. What a tool.

They will take it to a whole new level.

The only schadenfreude that I can get from SF winning is thinking about all those Tories who were bashing Varadkar for being mean about Brexit.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The persistence of clientelism in Ireland, Italy and Poland lead me to believe that traditional Catholicism has a case to answer

It's not the same type of thing though, we're always innovating, the Italians have been resting on their laurels since the 1870s, and it doesn't account for countries like greece. I think being colonized by foreign powers, and having a particularly small political unit based around the village or the family, more than a region seems to be more important. There is nothing like getting a bit of a taste of local govt under a colonial power to teach you to steal everything that isn't nailed down, also people who live in colonies have a very clear set of ideas between the relationship between power and wealth, that people don't seem to have in larger countries, that have long histories of independence.

[ursus arctos]

Or is it that Traditional Orthodoxy and Traditional Catholicism are peas of the same pod?

[anton pulisov]

It's not the same type of thing though, we're always innovating, the Italians have been resting on their laurels since the 1870s

Come on now, the Italians invented modern direct-injected diesel engines.

What have the Irish invented? How to run an airline or lease a plane with as low overheads as possible.

[ursus arctos]

Ireland's gift is in developing other's ideas well beyond what the originators thought possible and then selling that to the world.

"Tax efficient structures" are to our times what Catholicism was to the monks of Iona.