Poll: Irish general election edition

[DCI Harry Batt]

Oh I hope Labour dies a final death in Ireland, for sure. Filthy awful bag of scumbags.

[Lang Spoon]

They are fucking terrible. People like Kevin Humphreys, he's a D4 Fine Gaeler if he had any honesty.

[Diable Rouge]

Hazel Chu secures a Seanad nomination, despite Eamon Ryan's opposition:

https://twitter.com/gavreilly/status/1374051807689867272

[Lang Spoon]

What, did he prefer to have someone shit nominated?

[Diable Rouge]

They were supposed to support the FF and FG candidates officially.

[Lang Spoon]

Jesus, useless fuckers. Such a shit shit bastard fuckin Ryan.

[Diable Rouge]

90-minute United Ireland discussion on RTE with Martin, Varadkar, McDonald, John Bruton, Paisley Jr, and Joe Brolly, among others.

[Lang Spoon]

John Unionist? Rte are trolling us.

[Diable Rouge]

A new "Red-Green" political party is reportedly about to launch:

https://twitter.com/VillageMagIRE/status/1374274483570233348

Given that PBP already cover the ecosocialism end of the spectrum, and the Soc Dems are targeting the more centrist environmental element, I can't see there being a political gap in the market.

[DCI Harry Batt]

OFFS.

Who is this?

[elguapo4]

The Village seems to think they're the dogs you know what's, so that should be good enough for the rest of us.

[Diable Rouge]

OFFS.

Who is this?

Presumably Neasa Hourigan, Catherine Martin, and Patrick Costello, among others. Meanwhile:

https://twitter.com/McConnellDaniel/status/1374409852810715142

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Fair dues to Hazel, she manage to announce that she was running for the seanad as an independent Green Candidate, on the day that the Environment bill was published, thereby managing to overshadow any legislative achievements by the Green Party, which was the primary reason for going into government, and turning the media attention onto herself. And the people signing her nominations form are a bit of a who's who of the anti eamo wing of the green party. There's her husband paddy costello, there's Catherine Martin, her husband, her brother, and to break up the incestuous little clique is Neasa hourigan.

It's also worth noting that the reason that the Greens weren't standing a candidate was in the programme for govt which was voted for by most of the tds and three quarters of the members, so on top of overshadowing what was supposed to be the Green's first big day in govt, it's a big fuck you to the members as well. But Hazel has her day in the sun and that's nice for her.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Greens who don't want to be in government with right-wing scum, then?

[Lang Spoon]

The Environment Bill that's more watered down than the semi skimmed one Bruton put before the last Dail? If I were in the Greens I wouldn't exactly be cock a hoop at what Ryan got through.

[Diable Rouge]

Laughably, all of "Greenua's" hit pieces on their rivals have been leaked.

PBP:

https://twitter.com/MadMarx__/status/1374481685983588352

Soc Dems:

https://twitter.com/MadMarx__/status/1374502314413674501

Sinn F?in:

https://twitter.com/s_m_egan/status/1374547855550132226

[DCI Harry Batt]

Also their "Leak Mitigation Plan".

[Lang Spoon]

Always pay (and vet) your interns.

[Diable Rouge]

https://twitter.com/aoifegracemoore/status/1374767465117405198

[Lang Spoon]

Brilliant.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Hahaha

[ursus arctos]

In case anyone was wondering why they needed to "steal [a] reputation for competence"

[Diable Rouge]

And to cap things off, the vote on Chu's position has now been officially "deferred".

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The Environment Bill that's more watered down than the semi skimmed one Bruton put before the last Dail? If I were in the Greens I wouldn't exactly be cock a hoop at what Ryan got through.

Do you honestly believe this? You can't honestly believe that a climate change bill largely written by a green party is more watered down, than the version of a bill produced by a single party Fine Gael govt, with no majority. They're very different. The one last year was a vague aspiration with painfully limited goals and no implementation mechanism. This is a full set of binding targets, and a wide variety of implementation procedures, and is aimed at embedding issues to do with carbon budgets and climate change in everything every department does. Sure the bill can be repealed, but at considerable political cost. The point of the bill is to change the direction that the ship of state is sailing in, and make it difficult to change course, and it's happening at the start of the govt, rather than at the end like the last one, which oops, ran out of time. This is them implementing the lessons they learned from the last time they were in govt and g

This bill was supposed to be the crowning legislative achievement of the Green party, and the rest of their time in govt was to be spent ensuring it was passed, and implemented across the board. it was entirely overshadowed by the attention seeking stunt, which has managed to rob this of all the oxygen, allowing people to focus on the soap opera rather than the actual fucking important thing. It's an appalling act of sabotage against the party, and the thing that it went into government to achieve.

There's two amazing things about this. The first is that it is utterly pointless. She's not going to get elected, she's not even going to get most of the green votes. There are on average five or six by elections to every seanad for various reasons. The three parties agreed that They would all support one agreed candidate for each byelection. So in the first by election, they're all supposed to vote for a Fianna fail candidate. In the second by election they're all supposed to vote for a Fine Gael Candidate. And at the next seanad byelection, they would all agree to support a green candidate. This is one of those situations where you wait six months and get in the senate. Instead we got this attention seeking act of sabotage.

The thing that is going to cause her a lot of trouble within the Green party, is that the green movement is very member driven and the td's are supposed to do what the members want. A lot of them are absolutely fucking furious.The party chairperson is the person in the hierarchy such as it exists that is supposed to act as the selfless voice of the members, and she does this? 76% of the members voted for the programme for govt, and a similar proportion of the parliamentary party, precisely to bring in legislation like this. The response of those who didn't get their way with the members has been to try and burn the whole party down. And don't fall for any of this "yeah but they're really left wing" bullshit. When I knew Hazel Chu 15-20 years ago she was a progressive democrat, and until two years ago she was a senior marketing executive at Diageo. Given the impressions I formed of her and her dim bulb husband then, none of this is a surprise.

The focus on the members means that the parliamentary party vote of no-confidence should only be taken as a strong encouragement that she resign as party chair. She's not going to resign. This will get dirty.

[Lang Spoon]

It's notable the tough targets are after the supposed term of this govt Berba. You have way more faith than me that future Govts won't find a way to sneak out of the supposedly binding bits. Shout say, "Housing Crisis" or "Rural Development" loud enough and Core voters will positively demand relaxing those damned limits.