Too toxic, ever since that misappropriation of funds for the Limerick City walking tour app and he had to flee the county his name is dirt.
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You’re a gimp?
Himself and Mary Coughlan fucked up the chance to save the Dell jobs back in 2009. Granted it was more Mary Coughlan but they fucked it up.
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Don’t be worrying about Dell, shur the likes of @mikehunt here cant wait to drive the apple and Intel jobs out.
Sinn Fein had no candidate in Cork North West. In any future election, I think Dr. Mouse could be that candidate. With bases in Cork and Limerick, he straddles the constituency very nicely. I could see him being SF’s Rocky Balboa - knocking out Creed (FG).
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There’ll be no need for jobs when we’re getting a free house.
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TBF they did not. It was a complete joke and PR stunt going to Austin in the first place.
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They were at best very very naive .
There’s a very populist anti-journalism narrative out there and sadly it is often heard surprisingly often on the populist left as well as on the populist right, where you’d expect it. It’s a disastrous thing for this narrative to become widespread because it has no nuance to it, it does not distinguish between good and bad journalism, and it enables the Trump/Brexit vacuum etc. Good journalism is an essential part of a functioning democracy and we had better start understanding that. The problem with the pervasive narrative of “fuck journalism” is that it feeds completely into people believing whatever they want.
There’s a cohort of SF supporters who just brush away questions about what happened in the past. That’s what Trump and Johnson do. You can’t look at the UK and US and groan as the right wing nutcases create a parallel world of fake reality in the face of scrutiny, and then just dismiss the questions about SF here and say “fuck journalism”.
Technological changes have hit journalism very hard and fed into the opinion/clickbait bubble, and that’s a problem. People’s concentration spans have collapsed, and that’s a big problem. In the UK and US, much of the press/media, mainly the Tory and Republican-biased press/media, has discredited itself and has become a poisonous, frothing mess, yet perversely the frothing mess outlets are the most believed by their readers or viewers – because their modus operandi is one of creating a tribal culture war. That’s a huge problem.
In Ireland, there is plenty of poor quality journalism too. But overall, the standard is a lot better, we don’t have a Fox News or a Breitbart or a Daily Mail or a Sun poisoning the discourse and what’s there, even the Indo group, which is probably our worst offender for clickbait style opinion pieces by charlatans, is still a long way ahead of the rags in the UK and US. That Irish Times podcast you referred to is an excellent podcast, very thoughtful and in my experience of listening to it, pretty even handed. We do see the embryonic beginnings of an attempt to create Breitbart style propaganda sites with Gript and TheLiberal.ie. Everybody should hope they fail miserably.
Local journalism is essential. In the UK, in areas where local newspapers have folded, political engagement has gone through the floor compared to areas where local newspapers have survived. In Ireland, local journalism is still doing reasonably well – I think Donegal alone has four newspapers - and that’s crucial to political engagement.
In a strange way, I think Sinn Fein’s rise shows that the Irish press and media etc. is actually reasonably even handed. You definitely cannot compare it to the UK or US. If our press/media were like the UK and US, Sinn Fein would not have been able to break through. FG’s campaign this time is what would have happened to the Tories if there was no industrial bullshit machine there.
Flawed though the press is and will always be, we need people to report. Because if there’s no press, where is there going to be scrutiny? The parent company of the Miami Herald filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday. If there was no Miami Herald, then Julie K. Brown would not have been able to doggedly pursue the Jeffrey Epstein story and he’d still be roaming around free as birdie. That shows the value of good journalism.
In the UK you have Boris Johnson de-funding the BBC and threatening to destroy it altogether by removing the licence fee. And you have a surprising amount of Labour supporters online almost agreeing with this and saying things like “no tears from me”. But that misses the point entirely. Yes, a lot of the BBC’s coverage of the UK election was terrible and hilariously biased towards the Tories. But that’s because of the way the authoritarian Tory government has gradually co-opted the BBC for its own ends. If you take the licence fee away, the BBC is gone, and there is no such thing as public service broadcasting anymore, and the UK media would slide ever more towards the absolute hellhole of a press and media environment that the US has become. And that would be a tragedy.
There’s a sort of narrative among a cohort of SF supporters that the way Trump and Johnson operate as regards the press/media should be the way SF should approach things. That would be a disaster. Politicians can’t or shouldn’t be allowed just suppress or ignore or twist on their head, things they or their supporters don’t want to hear. If they do, nobody should vote for them. SF and their supporters really need to stay away from this stuff.
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Not from what I heard. There was a huge amount of prep work done and the two of them jumped in cos they thought it was a done deal and they wanted the kudos. Coughlan fucked it up.
Hutchinson would be considered an intellectual in loyalist circles not that it would be difficult. Dunphy is so much of a plámáser that he never challenges him on any of his crackpot theories. Then again he’s the same with Bertie.
That may be story from one side but is not the fact on the other side
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That’s progressive taxing from SF. 
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Yes
Whatever about the Dell business, Mary Coughlan is a smashing waltzer. Fact.
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Looking at the big picture is the issue with the likes of Hutchison and it’s not just a unionist problem. They’re more interested in flegs and marching than making it a better place for everyone to live in.
Anne Rabbitte pulling up Carty on SOR earlier over their 22bn- you know damn well we don’t have the physical space!
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If SF did go into gov with FF - watch their manifesto get diluted down significantly. It would suit FF because they could argue they negotiated a “prudent and achievable” program for gov and it would suit SF because they never thought they’d actually have to put their manifesto to the testo and would be happy enough to have it brought closer to reality “in order to agree a program for gov in the interests of the country”
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Correct
SF don’t want a real left wing government as they know it will fail.
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