If last nights performance on Vincent Browne wasn’t enough….. January 21, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Fianna Fáil.Tags: fianna fail, Irish Politics
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If Last nights performance on Vincent Browne wasn’t enough, looks like Conor Lenihan went and read a prediction here yesterday from EWI
I expect that the next step is for the entire Fianna Fáil party to resign the whip to run as ‘rebels’.
So what pops up today courtesy of Conor Lenihan only the headline in Todays Herald
We’re in meltdown. Moment may be ripe for a new party
I gather poor Conor was later on Joe Duffy in a terrible state altogether.
A consumate politician.
Nice bit of simulated anger on VB’s Tonight coupled with a steadfast defence of everything he’s ever done and then he’s away shedding the baggage of the past, one of the strongest contenders to retain a seat in a new party. Brilliant.
Meanwhile we get a taste of the effectiveness of what the ULA (I like the TLA, reminds me of N.Irish terrorist groups and dodgy trot formations) will be like in terms of their effectiveness in disseminating ideas that challenge the status quo.
Roll on FG/Lab austerity with FF rebuilding in some form and all the left political energy gone into a bearded-lady act in the political circus.
“Roll on FG/Lab austerity with FF rebuilding in some form..”
Really? And how are they going to pay for it?
The next leader of Fianna Fail is almost certainly never going to be Taoiseach.
There are 66 constituencies in the Republic, and Fianna Fail are not going to win 66 seats. THat means that there are going to be between one and two dozen electoral areas with no sitting FF TD.
Fianna Fail have lost their support, and after the election they are going to lose both the money men and electoral machinery at a time when Sinn Fein are on the rise and the ULA are looking like forming at least a technical group in the Dáil.
Fianna Fail is dead. I say that because the voters have left them, and once it is clear that Fianna Fail will not be in power for a long long time, the moneymen will leave them as well. Who the fuck is going to fork out for FF dinners for a party bereft of power?
Labour have already made inroads to business donation market in Ireland. The moneymen will leave FF for Fine Gael and Labour, with Sinn Fein and ULA soaking up the electoral votes.
They are dead. Dead. Dead.
43 Actually.
Hmm I’d be very cautious about declaring FF dead at this stage. They’ll take a hammering at this election (it’s a possibility that SF could eclipse them in terms of seats and votes) and it’s unlikely they’ll get a single seat in the greater Dublin area.
However they’re still the second largest party on local government. There hasn’t been any mass defections on local government level, which is very strange. Also their local organisation is going strong in a lot of rural areas whiles it’s effectively collapsed in Dublin and other parts.
I’d wait till after the election before preforming the autopsy.
ok. I better not ask you your thoughts on the french revolution then, you’ll probably say “hmmm, too soon to say.’
The Fianna Fail support of June 2009 is not the Fianna Fail support of January 2011.
Maybe you’re right, though. Maybe what has happened since June 2009 – when Fianna Fail secured 24 per cent of the seats nationally -the IMF, for ecample, and two more draconian budgets – is just a blip, though.
Yreah, ‘too soon to say.’
Listen there’s a lot of die-hard FFer in the country. FF still have a fairly good structure to fight elections in a good few constituencies and they can rely on a good degree of support. You still havnt answered my point about why there hasnt been mass resignations from the party especially on local government level.
And thats the main worry I have and the main danger. If the next leader manages to somehow electrify the party.
“once it is clear that Fianna Fail will not be in power for a long long time, the moneymen will leave them as well.”
I have every confidence that FG/Lab will be as awful, if not worse, than FF have been and the resulting backlash from being the fools that held the reins during this upcoming period of horror will see them kicked out come the next+1 election.
Similarly the ULA will gain a reputation for being ineffective, but will have performed sterling service in siphoning off discontent into acceptable channels. Probably at least one of their new faces will find a way to parlay their chance into a life in politics.
It’s really like watching cars pile up on motorway in a fog.
ZZZzzzz….. resist the ULA, comrades!! The revolution is just around the corner, promise, if you can just wait ’til after March 11!! Down with the ULA crypto-fascist FF running dogs!! The capitalists want you to waste your energy and time in their pathetic ULA front group!! Don’t be fooled!! The time is nigh!! Resist, comrades, resist!!
There’s no need to resist the ULA. It’s pretty clear that you’ve staked out your little piece of ineffective ignominy and you’re going to stick with it no matter what.
I’m sure you’ll have proved me wrong once you’ve “raised the consciousness” of us lumpenproletarians.
Presumably, if the ULA is so manifestly hopeless, there must be a more-radical, further-to-the-left movement waiting in the wings?
Or is this another example of somebody who’s able to be verbally radical without actually doing anything but blame other people for not being verbally radical as well?
‘…into acceptable channels’…
It’s what ejh says, what precisely are the alternative channels which you suggest?
ULA is far from faultless but it’s an honest effort to leverage the admittedly small power of a part of the further left into something that will provide a pole of attraction for a broader pool of working people.
There simply isn’t anything else out there in terms of an organisation or structure of that size that will do that.
It’s fine to have a realistic view of ULA’s prospects, of course it’s not going to set the Irish political scene on fire, but it hasn’t said that it will and its goals are modest but achievable and given a clear headed appraisal of the actual relationship of forces on the ground the centre and right in this state is overwhelmingly powerful.
And even the ULA is off the scale for most working people in this state. It’s going to take years to influence anything like sufficient numbers even to mild left of centre solutions – after all if SF is only on 14 % and the LP with its utterly mild reformism is dipping down to 20% it’s not exactly socialist millennium time here, now is it?
Given that your complaints seem somewhat unreasonable.
“I have every confidence that FG/Lab will be as awful, if not worse…”
Well bully for you. However, you also had every confidence that FF would crawl back until it was pointed out that a) the voters are leaving them and b) the moneymen will leave them.
‘Having every confidence’ seems to be be your bag, baby.
FF are going to crawl back with the money once FG/Lab (with tacit assistance from the ULA who will be as discredited as the Greens) have presided over the coming fiasco.
Same old, same old. All thanks to the dinosaurs insisting on a “voice in the dail”.
Exactly what “assistance” do you think the ULA will “tacitly” give Fine Gael and Labour, outside of your fantasies?
Actually that’s a very good question.
The notion that the ULA would ‘assist’ FG/Labour is very strange. It’s such an inversion of their stated (and entirely principled) positions that I’m a bit at a loss to understand the point being made.
My suspicion is that it’s standard anarcho-gibberish. Something along the lines of, by encouraging people to vote for a radical left alternative you are in fact just helping the credibility of the electoral shell game and diverting people away from real forms of (anarchist approved) struggle.
Which is, of course a point of view dependent on the near-religious dogmas that:
(a) People cannot combine voting with anything else,
(b) Elected representatives cannot, despite the evidence of things like the GAMA dispute, use their positions to encourage extra-parliamentary struggle, and
(c) If you stand in an election, you must see elections as the main mechanism for changing things.
Spot on. I’m particularly fond of:
(a) People cannot combine voting with anything else
I think they can.
And you know logically given the state of the left here there’s more than enough so far none-left citizens to go around to try multiple courses. It’s not as if the ULA is somehow poaching all the available citizens.
Anyhow, I’m all for multiple, overlapping and even, in certain cases, competitive tactics towards increasing the left vote (including anarchist socialist approaches). But sniping at the ULA doesn’t seem to me to be such a tactic.
My suspicion is that it’s standard anarcho-gibberish. Something along the lines of, by encouraging people to vote for a radical left alternative you are in fact just helping the credibility of the electoral shell game and diverting people away from real forms of (anarchist approved) struggle.
This is true. it’s also true though, that the
complaint that less-radical goals are diversions, or cause illusions, is quite a common one on the further left in general, not just its anarchist branch.
L’Aughable
You manage to do an amalgam between FF and ULA./ This is disgraceful.Where is the campaigns which ULA is siphoning off.Cheap innuendo, you should be ashamed.FF and FG are the target and those who collaborate with them. Stop the sneers.Leve that to FF and FG
Indeed Jim, a few cheap shots with little substance behind them.
Jim don’t get to het up about Mr L. Look on his ‘Kevin the teenager’ interjections as providing some light entertainment. As Sly Stone used to say ‘different strokes for different folks’.
Wow, the contempt that you have for the concerns of working class people is astounding.
But surely, you will speak for them? You clearly know what their concerns are. You obviously know what they want.
And your contempt for people who’ve dedicated, in some cases, decades of their lives to advancing socialism in this state, is astounding. You’re disgracing yourself by maintaining that contempt for many of those people, deeply embedded in working class communities as they are, who sincerely believe that the best way forward for the Left at this point in time is the ULA. You’re then compounding your disgrace by arguing, on the basis of zero evidence, for the utterly inconceivable and implausible premise that the ULA will somehow lend support to a FG/Lab government. Shameful.
ULA is a compromise forced by circumstance. I’m sure RBB and Joe Higgins would rather be leading a revolutionary movement. The Alliance may well fall apart over the coming years, or sooner, but it may not and it might provide impetus for a much larger and more revolutionary movement. We’ll have to wait and see.
What has absolutely no chance, whatsoever, making radical change here is the kind of apolitical sneering that you’ve indulged in repeatedly here.
I hope the coming revolution works out for you.
Once the ULA have been crushed and its members dispatched to the camps Brother Number One Comrade L.aughable might, just might, ask a lackey to search through the records for posters to the CLR in early 2011. Hopefully, he’ll let bygones be bygones. But I think it would be wise to have a contingency in place, just in case.
The supreme leader, Brother Number One Comrade L.Aughable might not have the same caché as Comrade Stalin, Comrade Mao or Comrade Pol Pot. But, it’s the 21st century and people, thankfully, have moved one and an unfortunate name is no longer an impediment to revolutionary greatness. So, there can be absolutely no doubt that the capitalists of the mid-21st century will tremble at the very mention of Brother Number One Comrade L.aughable, Supreme Leader of the Irish proletariat!!!!
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