BLOOD ALL OVER SF scum will vote for them not @ChocolateMice @Nembo_Kid @Mac @Bandage
Sickening.
Jesus talk about simpletons over there.
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cat got your tongue mac?
We know the class of people that will vote Sinn Fein.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6SHWl2dJcc
Hon Mattie. Iâd say every candidate in the county nearly has some kind of Tipp hurler associated with them
Babs and Lowry are grand.
Eoin Kelly looks quite dodgy in this photo.
For someone who has never voted and isnât voting on Friday, @Little_Lord_Fauntleroy has contributed a lot of posts to this thread
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The Mail on Sunday have a âsecret FGâ poll today with some constituency analysis.
Hereâs what theyâre saying by constituency and in total:
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FG are being very optimistic in thinking theyâll get two in Cavan-Monaghan.
FF SF LAB SD government
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This Week on RTE Radio 1 just played a clip of Enda Kenny ranting like a madman last night.
Shouted out that people who disagree with him are âwhingersâ. âWe have some All-Ireland champions in this constituency, and I donât mean Castlebar Mitchels, we have All-Ireland champions in whinging.â
He stopped just short of telling them to go and commit suicide, but it was a serious meltdown.
Hopefully that will be the last weâll hear of Joan Burton
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Gene Kerrigan: Last-ditch pitch for the politics of fear
Slowly, as the parties seek to frighten us, the voters move beyond the old politics
It was the night of the general election, 2011, the polls had closed and there was a poet on RTE.
Perhaps the usual pundits were busy that night - you know the ones, the same old faces. The experts who reel off yards of useless information. Like, how many second preferences so-and-so needs if heâs to be elected on the second count.
Instead of that kind of petty babble, we had poet Theo Dorgan giving a truly political assessment of what was happening. We quoted him in this column.
âIt seems to me,â he said, âthis is an interim moment in a long, unfolding process of change.â
And he went on to assess the reality behind the election.
In a moment, weâll explore how well Dorganâs theory stands up. And weâll also note just how much shit has been frightened out of us over the past week. My apologies for the language, but thatâs the way Fine Gael talks these days.
Usually, pundits speak of the election campaign as if it was a television drama, stretching over four weeks. The drama has highs and lows, comic moments and cliff-hangers, winners and losers, and the pundits speak of how the politicians âperformedâ.
And, like teenage trainspotters, my colleagues steep themselves in the minutia of constituency statistics in the hope that they can âcallâ various seats sooner and more accurately than some other pundit.
But who, my friends, gives a damn?
Donât get me wrong. All that speculation about what percentage of a quota the candidate will get if the third preferences come from the boxes in the eastern part of the constituency - well, thatâs all very interesting.
When I say very interesting, I mean mildly interesting.
When I say mildly interesting, I mean almost as interesting as listening to the Cattle Market Report.
The reason this column quoted Theo Dorgan five years ago was that it was so unusual to hear an attempt to place the collapse of Fianna Fail within a larger context - to understand politically what was happening. And in the five years since I havenât heard a more plausible analysis.
The media is bad at analysis. It loves the game.
I donât know if Dorganâs analysis was correct, time will tell. Thatâs not the point. Trying to see the larger picture, to understand whatâs happening to us, always seemed to me to be what journalism should primarily be about.
Dorgan, 2011: âNothing in this election has persuaded me that Fianna Fail, Fine Gael or a great chunk of Labour understands ⌠how desperate the situation is ⌠how powerless the old politics is to deal with it.â
Five years later, nothingâs changed on that front.
For decades, the civil war parties sneered at one another, and everyone else was pushed to the side. By and by, civil war enmities faded, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael settled into competing tribes with little meaningful political difference between them. Fighting mock battles, they happily took turns running the country, sometimes with the help of smaller parties.
After the right wing parties destroyed the economy they seemed to believe that nothing had fundamentally changed. Fine Gael would take over for a term, while Fianna Fail did penance. Then, after a few years, things would settle back into the old pattern we know and love.
To gauge the scale of the political disaster, try this: imagine that in 2007 Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit was Minister for Finance. Imagine Ruth Coppinger of the Socialist Party was Taoiseach.
And imagine that their left wing policies wrecked the economy. Imagine they plunged us into tens of billions of debts, caused mass unemployment, large-scale emigration, service cuts, emergency taxes, hospitals asset stripped, queues at soup kitchens, thousands homeless.
Let me write the editorials for you: âUtter calamity ⌠ghastly left wing experiment ⌠never, ever again must the voters be so foolish as to ⌠madness ⌠loony left âŚâ
Imagine Clare Daly was Minister for Finance and tried to force bankers and bondholders to pay their own debts, to get them off our backs. And imagine the EUâs chief banker, Jean Claude Trichet, told her to bugger off and she immediately kowtowed to him.
The editorials would condemn this weak woman and hint that this disaster wouldnât have happened had a tough man like Michael Noonan had the job.
But Noonan did have the job, he kowtowed and cost us billions.
These things happened. They happened to Fianna Fail, with Fine Gael and Labour jeering them for not being right wing enough - and promising even more right wing measures if they got the Mercs under their own arses.
After that, Fine Gael and Labour protected those who wrecked the country. And passed the bill to us.
Now, they boast of recovery, unaware of the damage theyâve wreaked.
The polls suggest thereâs a surge away from the right wing parties. Itâs unfocused, tentative. Hereâs Dorgan in 2011: âI think Fianna Fail is a dead piece of roadkill at the moment,â he said. âThereâs going to be, I think, a decimation of Fine Gael the next time out. People are going through a strange, slow-motion crash of the State. Theyâve dealt with one of the great monoliths. Theyâre now scrupulously giving the other monolith, in the old politics, its shot.â
Now, a substantial part of the electorate has detached itself from the old politics.
You can smell the fear within the parties, within the media. Ibec has pretty much gone hysterical.
The old politics depends on fear to retain its hold on us. Vote for the old politics, weâre told, or the economy will be damaged, thereâll be huge unemployment, massive emigration and âŚ
Eh, folks - itâs already happened, and it was you that did it. Your parties, your bankers, your developers, your right wing politics.
Ah, now, thatâs all changed, they tell us, weâre different now. And their frightened cheerleaders badmouth every potential for change that dares show its face.
But we know Fianna Fail is umbilically connected to the developers; we know Fine Gael has adopted ever more right wing policies - for instance, voting at the United Nations to allow vulture capital continue to prey without hindrance on Peru, Bolivia, India.
So, the electorate is considering the smaller parties, and the Independents. Richard Bruton responds with a rant against a âmotley crewâ. Fine Gael doesnât mind if you vote for Fianna Fail, and vice versa. What they fear is that voters have looked beyond the grand old game the parties love to play.
Last week, a âkey party strategistâ for Enda Kenny whispered to the Sunday Business Post that for the last 10 days of the campaign they would âfrighten the shitâ out of voters.
Since then, weâve seen their frighteners at work, on our screens, in our newspapers.
The crime here - an attempt to subvert debate - is not the smearing of Independents and smaller parties. They can look after themselves. Itâs the bullying of voters.
But people like Richard Boyd Barrett for once got access to a TV debate, and it turned out that he didnât have horns - he had reasonable policies and a contempt for the crooked and the craven. Likewise, Stephen Donnelly of the Social Democrats. It will take more than two elections to bring change, but weâre at least moving towards it.
Some of us, wary of Sinn Fein, fear not that Mary Lou will suddenly flash an AK47. We fear Sinn Fein will find its niche in the old politics.
Dorgan, 2011: âA new way of thinking is struggling to be born. And itâs not ready yet to be cut off at the neck and co-opted by the spinmeisters and by the image makers.â
Weâll see next Friday if the politics of fear has succeeded in killing off that new way of thinking.
FF wonât be getting a preference from me. Those pricks will jump straight in with the Sinners if given the chance, the polls abode are worrying but I still think thereâll be a late jump to Fine Gael.
Kerrigan wanking himself into a frenzy here. God it will be so sweet if FG are returned on Friday.
FF cannot be trusted, they will do this
There are a few shy FGers out there. Will be the same as in England last May, a late swing.
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Kerrigan has been writing the same article for over a decade.
My favourite thing about Kerrgan and the other cranks is the victim position they take. Despite the fact that every other part of the Irish media barring his own newspaper group (who are laughably ott with their bias) are left of centre.
Would Vincent Browne ever go into a middle class area for an election special?
???
