Poll: Irish general election edition

[DCI Harry Batt]

The logic being that it would lead to a majority government when SF run enough candidates to translate vote strength into seats? I'm not sure the SF would be as popular when it is a vote for Mary Lou to be Taoiseach rather than as a protest against FF and FG. The affluent voter voting Green may not be as keen if it means SF wins out.

Yeah, that's the chance you take, obviously. But I don't think it's riskier than going into government with FF. Letting FF / FG fuck things up some more might be a safer option.

[Ek weet nie]

FF are the largest party by seats despite crippling the country a decade ago and being mired in corruption scandals for all of my life. I'm not sure if they can go any lower.

I'm not convinced this is a vote for the left rather than a vote for change from the government which whilst it was a confidence and supply arrangement was construed like a FG/FF coalition as FF had veto powers which they didn't enforce.

One area of the landscape that will change as a result is the tone of the two civil war parties. It was all well and good lambasting SF when SF were transfer poison. Now, SF surplus transfers are getting smaller left wing parties elected in 4th and 5th place ahead of FF/FG candidates. FF in particular will adjust their message on the ground to get more transfers from the SF vote.

Mostly I'm just really disappointed that Labour threw away the chance that they had from 2011 to be the voice of the left and be in a position to have a second spring tide rather than the unpleasantness of SF.

[Ek weet nie]

Also, I am genuinely worried that throwing out the FDI strategy that the country has pursued for 50 years is a real possibility. I'm open to it if there is a coherent plan to replace it. I'm also fine with redistributing wealth across a wider tax base and investing in public spending and infrastructure. I'm not sure SF have a vision for what that looks like though.

[anton pulisov]

Let's not forget that Sinn Fein are a civil war party as well.

[Nefertiti2]

would be curious to hear Irish readers's thoughts on this analysis

[anton pulisov]

I'm not convinced this is a vote for the left rather than a vote for change from the government

You're on the money.

[Duncan Gardner]

would be curious to hear Irish readers's thoughts on this analysis

Briefly,

- housing and health confirmed as the main issues, despite a late media campaign to link current SF leaders to past criminality

- as others mention above, national and local politics in Ireland are largely the same thing. Many TDs are effectively councillors with a personal vote

- Varadkar will prob resign and Martin take over. Then expect lots more dirt about McDonald and another election within months

- neither Irish team will make the Euros unless Bosnia's injury crisis significantly worsens

[DCI Harry Batt]

I've always liked Conor Kostick

What can we learn from election 2020 and the Dublin Bay North results?

[Ek weet nie]

Thanks for sharing. The lesson that I got from that article is that the left will be forever held back by infighting and inability to work together.

[DCI Harry Batt]

That's certainly a theme. I take a more positive view of the future, but then that's socialism.

[Ek weet nie]

Yes, I didn't mean it as a dig at your work, more as a frustration with Irish politics.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Oh no worries, I didn't take it as that. Not that I do anything much in the way of "work" these days anyroad up.

It's extraordinarily frustrating. I think initiatives like the Independent Left are a good thing and could be part of an improved picture on the left in Ireland. It's bloody long hard work, and no guarantees, mind.

I do think the escape of the SP from the English mothership, and the SWP in Ireland hiding their banner more and more are both positive signs, though not necessarily for those organisations or the people in them.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

The Sinn Fein people in galway were told to fuck off with their tricolour by the returning officer, as it wasn't the place for symbols. I didn't realise that this little insipid drone, with her endless ads on youtube about how she is just an ordinary mervue girl from mervue, was the niece of Mairead Farrell, who got what was coming to her in gibraltar back in the day.

extra-judicial murder is justified now?

[Ek weet nie]

The Irish electorate has decided it is.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Slightly off topic, but is regional government particularly weak in the Republic? All these independents and indications upthread that they get heavily involved in local matters suggests so.

How is local government organised, in fact?

See the thing is that Ireland is about the size of a small uk region. It would be a big region, geographically but it would have a very low population. To a degree the parliament is a regional parliament, with 158 tds each representing certain areas. So the lines between local govt and national govt are extremely blurred. There are also other problems with local govt in ireland, and just how much of it we have. It's important to remember that when local govt, and the Congested Districts board were introduced to Ireland in the nineteenth century, we immediately descended on it like hungry wolves, shaping our approach to politics forever. I think you can see the problem when you consider that during the celtic tiger, Monaghan country council zoned enough land to build 300,000 houses. monaghan is the bit of the republic that sticks right into the middle of northern Ireland. It is not near dublin. It isn't easy to get to belfast from there either. The county has a population of 60,000. Why did they zone enough land for 300,000 houses? Because they could. Because that's what every one wanted. Every farmer wanted to build a housing estate.

But even if you take the opportunity to do dirt out of the hands of county councillors, county councils basically lost most of their capacity to raise money, when in 1977 we got rid of rates as part of one of our periodic periods of cutting huge chunks off our tax base, while increasing spending, which is fucking amazing up until the moment that the global economy takes a downturn, and we go bankrupt. Without rates, the money has to come from general taxation, and central govt retains control of a lot of it. Something like rates started to make a comeback with the introduction of a very small residential property tax, but all that has happened since its introduction is that nominally hard left county councillors have joined with everyone else to set it at the lowest possible rate, and demanding it be scrapped, while screaming for more central funding .

County councillors kind of operate at a level of clientelism one level below a td, and they can't really get you very much, but if they show themselves to be effective, they stand a good chance of going up to the level of Dail candidate. At the last local elections, a load of sinn fein councillors lost their seat because basically SF are kind of shit. A load of these councillors then topped the poll in the general election. This Sinn fein surge is a mile wide, and an inch deep.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Thanks for sharing. The lesson that I got from that article is that the left will be forever held back by infighting and inability to work together.

I learned that conor kostick is working class apparently. I've got to say he looks like the conor Kostick I used to know, but he clearly must be an entirely different person. If the Conor Kostick I remembered was working class, then I must be a hindu untouchable. Similarly he talks about losing Ruth Coppinger and Seamus Healy as though they are comparable. Now I actually know Seamus Healy since I was a boy, and quite like him. But he's basically Mattie McGrath for people who live in council houses, which is what a politician of the left has to be in Tipperary, It's what Michael Ferris was. It's what Sean Treacy was before him, until he got notions and went weird. It's what Alan Kelly is in North Tipperary I wouldn't like to try and construct a model of his political positions or beliefs. He's not like Ruth Coppinger though. He couldn't possibly be. It's hard to find two more different parts of Ireland than West Dublin and South Tipperary. He'd get about 10 votes if he stood in Dublin west, and she'd struggle to get that in tipperary.

[Diable Rouge]

Thanks for sharing. The lesson that I got from that article is that the left will be forever held back by infighting and inability to work together.

Even if the left parties there had coalesced, it would have been an uphill battle for Lyons to take a seat - O'Riordáin is widely viewed as Labour's heir apparent, O'Callaghan a seasoned campaigner before the Soc Dems ever formed, and the Greens arguably threw away a guaranteed seat there through fielding a pro-life candidate in a constituency that voted heavily for Repeal.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

extra-judicial murder is justified now?

no, I didn't say that. I'm saying that if you get murdered on your way to murder a load of people, you probably can't complain too much about the cosmic unfairness of the whole situation. She tried to blow up a hotel before, and kill a a lot of people, but it went badly wrong and her boyfriend was killled when they broke into the house of an armed policeman. and she wound up in jail. She got out of jail, and immediately set about trying to blow up more people. She wasn't going to stop until she blew up some people. Society is not a poorer place for her absence.

On the plus side, she got to die a martyr for Ireland, her name will live forever, and she got to expose the brutal murderous nature of the British state, and no innocent civilians got killed.

[Duncan Gardner]

...and her niece got elected to DE 30 years later. I'm guessing the voters in seaside Galway aren't that interested in Auntie Mairead's antics

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

She didn't mention it once. Her entire campaign was about how she was from mervue, had only ever left it to go across the town to college, and then to get caught up in the traffic jams that everyone complains about, to show that she's just a really ordinary person just like you. She certainly didn't campaign over this side of town. i'd probably have brought it up with her. I had been to see the thing her aunt was going to blow up a couple of months before the shooting. She would have happily killed me under slightly different circumstances. Fuck her.

[Diable Rouge]

How the various parties fared in the election of female candidates:

https://twitter.com/Claire_McGing/status/1227190434885181440.

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/ccferrie/status/1227161024530460673

[Lang Spoon]

But SD and PBP prob wouldn't have done so well had SF run more candidates- eg a running mate for Mary Lou in Dublin Central would likely have taken out Garry Gannon, might even have fucked the Greens Nessa Hourigan.

[Lang Spoon]

Imagine being Mary Fitzpatrick today.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Imagine being David Cullinane any day?

Here's the transcript.

The Video

[URL]https://twitter.com/ThatBurke/status/1226920156649185282?[/URL]

and the least sassy, least camp Sorry-not sorry you are ever going to hear.

[URL="https://twitter.com/Conor_McCrave/status/1226957207134199808"]https://twitter.com/Conor_McCrave/st...57207134199808[/URL]

These fuckers are scum. I'm a couple of years younger than this cunt. I'm from forty miles up the road from him. I too am from the Deise. There is no fucking excuse for him to think the things he thinks. For instance When we were growing up, the IRA were kidnapping entire families, and forcing the father to suicide bomb military installations. I thought that was disgusting. He fell in love. This cunt only ever delivers his criticisms perched precariously on his high saddle, on his high horse, on the high moral ground. And he does all this without knowing the difference between right and wrong. May his piles hang like a bunch of grapes.