Ireland General Discussion

[ObserverIE]

Now is a time when we really could do with a strong and credible Irish Labour party. Which just makes what has actually happened there all the more tragic.

That ship arguably already sailed in 2011, but Dublin Bay South was a disaster disguised as a triumph. Bacik, who has spent her entire adult life ensconced in the bubble that is Trinity, has absolutely no idea how to connect with voters beyond Portobello and Ranelagh or even with her own councillor base.



I've no doubt there were working-class voters at those parties; somebody had to serve the canapés, after all.

[ObserverIE]

Now is a time when we really could do with a strong and credible Irish Labour party. Which just makes what has actually happened there all the more tragic.

That ship arguably already sailed in 2011, but Dublin Bay South was a disaster disguised as a triumph. Bacik, who has spent her entire adult life ensconced in the bubble that is Trinity, has absolutely no idea how to connect with voters beyond Portobello and Ranelagh or even with her own councillor base.

Are there any working class/kitchen table issue focused politicians left in the party? From the outside they seem to basically be a scattering of de facto independents and the woke middle class who are too establishment/power hungry to vote Social Democrat (and at a guess presumably arrived in politics at the wrong time to join the Greens).

Alan Kelly is/was relatively kitchen-table focussed but the problem was that his personal abrasiveness made his relations with the rest of the party hierarchy terminally dire. Ivana, on the other hand, as a product of Alexandra College (Ireland's Roedean) has impeccable manners even if she has no idea how to relate to the Common People.

Of the remaining TDs, Ged Nash (Louth), Duncan Smith (Fingal), and Seán Sherlock (Cork East) represent the medium-to-small-town traditional Labour base, but the boundary changes have already doomed Sherlock who's standing down as a result, and make it very difficult to see Smith (the only senior figure young enough not to have the stench of 2011-16 attached to him and sensible enough not to be normie-repellent) get back in, as well as not helping Nash. Aodhán Ó Ríordáin is on the same wing as Ivana only more so and is running for the European Parliament and may get in as a result of the transfer Battle Royale on the bourgeois left, in which case that would be another Dáil seat irretrievably lost. Howlin retiring in Wexford leaves the seat there in peril, although the boundary change and reduction in seats doesn't actually damage Labour very much there as the area removed is a wasteland for the party. The only likely gain I could see at the moment is Kildare South and I don't see it as being even 50:50. The Seanad team are either based in gentrified inner Dublin (Kilmainham or Stoneybatter) or are terminally Yank-brained (yes, walking packet of fruit pastilles Annie Hoey, I'm looking at you).

The really hilarious thing is that the current leadership of the SDLP (Eastwood, Hanna, O'Toole) seem to be looking at this spectacle and viewing it as a model to be emulated.

[ObserverIE]

Yes, ballot papers have already been printed

SF would have been Western-skeptical over Russia but did pivot and pivot hard to a strongly anti-Putin position on the day of the Russian invasion and I'm not sure how old the tweets are (McAdoo aka Paul Duggan is a hyper-partisan FG shill who spends as much time attacking his coalition partners in FF and the Greens as he does on attacking the opposition parties).

[ObserverIE]

RedC for the Business Post:

SF 23 (-4)
FG 22 (+2)
Ind/Oth 21 (+2)
FF 15 (+1)
SD 5 (-1)
GP 4 (+1)
Lab 4 (+1)
SWP/SP 3 (+1)
Aontú 3 (-1)

[ObserverIE]

Daly's problem, tragedy, whatever you want to call it, is that despite being essentially intelligent and capable and despite having managed to disentangle herself from the more bovine of the two Trot cults (the CWI/SP), she then leapt into both personal and political entanglements with Wallace who:

a) is as thick as pigs**t,
b) is also as lazy as sin, and
c) has been a sucker for every anti-western conspiracy theory for the last three decades going back to the fall of the Wall.

[ObserverIE]

IrelandThinks, for the Sunday Independent:

Ind/Oth 23 (+4)
SF 22 (-7)
FG 22 (+3)
FF 17 (+1)
SD 5 (-1)
GP 4 (-)
Lab 3 (-)
Aontú 3 (-)
SWP/SP 2 (-)