for lefties too stubborn to quit
Fianna Fáil 25 (~)
Fine Gael 23 (-6)
Sinn Fein 21 (+7)
Green Party 8 (~)
Labour 5 (-1)
Solidarity-People Before Profit 2 per cent (up one)
Social Democrats are at 2 per cent (up one),
Independents4Change are at 1 per cent (down one), the
Independent Alliance are at less than 1 per cent (no change), non-party Independents are on 10 per cent (no change)
others 3 per cent (up one).
| Tomboktu on Speaking of rotating gove… | |
| Tomboktu on What you want to say – 24th Ap… | |
| WorldbyStorm on What you want to say – 17th Ap… | |
| yourcousin on What you want to say – 17th Ap… | |
| Colm B on What you want to say – 17th Ap… | |
| banjoagbeanjoe on Sunday and other stupid statem… | |
| tomasoflatharta on What you want to say – 17th Ap… | |
| WorldbyStorm on Green Party blues? Not a bit o… | |
| irishelectionliterat… on Green Party blues? Not a bit o… | |
| Wes Ferry on Sunday and other stupid statem… | |
| banjoagbeanjoe on Green Party blues? Not a bit o… | |
| Fergal on Green Party blues? Not a bit o… | |
| Tomboktu on What you want to say – 17th Ap… | |
| sonofstan on Green Party blues? Not a bit o… | |
| Wes Ferry on Sunday and other stupid statem… |
worldbystorm2014ATgmailDOTcom
The Cedar Lounge Revolution
The forward march of the Greens halted somewhat, SF on the rise. FF up, FG down. In a way the broad brush strokes of the weekend poll are replicated here. IND/OTHERS kind of there or thereabouts. Interesting stuff.
LikeLike
core numbers
Undecided 20%
FF 20% (nc)
FG 18% (-4)
SF 17% (+5)
GP 6% (nc)
Lab 4% (-1)
Ind/Otes 15% (nc)
Also Mary Lou has to be on the TV debates now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I will bet they will do everything in their power to not let her participate.
LikeLike
This poll reinforces all the points Mary Lou made about any Varadkar-Martin debate. The core numbers for FF and FG come in at only 38%. And as she said, it’s absurd to stage a debate between the leaders of two parties which until last week were party to a supply-and-confidence arrangement with each other and which to all intents and purposes share the same politics, to the exclusion of any even marginally centre-left voice. Fair enough for British elections with FPTP and two big beast parties with clear blue water between them, but unsustainable and not credible here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
After weekend B&A Poll, Another Good Poll for Sinn Féin
Another Bad Outcome for Fine Gael https://wp.me/pKzXa-jh
MRBI Irish Times Jan 20 (Change in comparison to MRBI Poll October 2019) Sample 1200 MoE 3%
25 FF (NC) FG 23(-6) SF 21(+7) Gr 8(NC) Lab 5(-1) Others 18(NC)
Excluding undecided voters and those unlikely to vote, 25 per cent of respondents said they would vote for Fianna Fáil (no change), 23 per cent for Fine Gael (down six), 21 per cent for Sinn Féin (up seven), 5 per cent for Labour (down one), 8 per cent for the Green Party (no change) and 18 per cent for Independents and small parties (no change). The comparison is with the most recent Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI poll last October.
LikeLiked by 1 person
FF only up 0.7% on their previous GE on this!
LikeLike
Panic stations for FG! At this rate Leo will be lucky to still be leader in April.
FF will be worried about a plateau. Donnelly on Claire Byrne now promising short term, long term, any term fixes to the health service, just whatever they think people want to hear.
Great result for Sinn Fein. Decision to leave them, and others, out of debates looks increasingly ridiculous. Not that it ever looked logical.
Greens will be concerned, but I presume they are banking on being very transfer friendly?
Labour must be bricking it. Imagine if they ended up losing seats!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hope SF can keep it up through D-Day. Someone on the other site pointed out that SF started GE 2016 at a similar peak, but hopefully this time is different… if they could break the 30 seat mark (and anywhere near these numbers surely they would), THEN do what Labour idiots never did and STAY IN OPPOSITION! On 14.5% in 2016 they were infuriatingly close in about 4 or 5 other seats, and should have taken two in Donegal but for their 3 candidate strategy, so 25 on 14.5 was more than doable. This time FG likely to be losing their +30% seat bonus, so who knows how that lost bonus will splatter and slosh when the transfers start flying for the last seats.
I’d love to see Labour stuffed / purged at the very least. They haven’t learned a thing. AESCHYLUS would say that they haven’t suffered enough.
“Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.”
Would be comical if they only came back with Kelly and Howlin. Tee hee.
Ideally both FF and FG to be sub-50 seats would be gravy, better still if the supply/con partners were tied on 48/48 or somesuch, would make new gov. formation a doozie, haha, fingers crossed. “I’m the Taoiseach, no I’M the Taoiseach”, cat meet pigeons.
Really comes down to who I hate more now: FF (who fucked the country so badly) or FG (who are fucking it so badly now). Would love a scenario where both lose somehow. FG are used to being out of power, so maybe seeing FF out for another 4 or 5 years would have an appeal, but jesus, having to sit through 4 or 5 more years of Leo & Co., christ.
Biggest obstacle to me moving home is the cost of property / rent, so I have skin in the game. Not that FF would do anything on that front either, another ship of fools who haven’t suffered enough to learn.
LikeLike
Can SF actually be considered a party of the left, however? After all, bar some superficial centre-left veneers, they essentially fill the ethno-nationalist gap filled by the far-right elsewhere in Europe, minus immigration?
LikeLike
Yeah but that’s a pretty massive distinction in itself – filling an ethnic nationalist gap with a party that has to its credit been overwhelmingly pro immigrant etc. In any case I think they’re a bit more complex than that having aspects of a functionally traditional social democrat party with populist and nationalist aspects drawn from their origin in Irish republicanism – which of course has similarities (good and bad) with FF and even FG. In other polities they’re akin perhaps to Republican Left parties or those in the EFA in Europe often regionalist – broadly, but not universally, progressive centre left or left nationalist but civic nationalist etc (unsurprisingly FF was in the EFA at one stage).
LikeLike
Of course the other gloomy thought is that in this polity on this island this is likely as far left as many of us will see in our lifetimes if SF does wind up in govt. any time soon and that’s no insult to SF, just a reflection on the limits of the achievable at this point.
LikeLike
The jingoistic, pro-imperial nationalism of the Tories and the Brexit party has little in common with the historical anti-imperialism of Irish republican nationalism.
LikeLike
Wikipedia tells me that it was the Neil Blaney “Independent Fianna Fail” vehicle which was part of the EFA. FF itself was part of the UEN group (originating with the EPD group in 1973 of which the driving force was the Gaullists) before moving to ALDE after 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Progressive_Democrats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_for_Europe_of_the_Nations
LikeLike
“Can SF actually be considered a party of the left, however? After all, bar some superficial centre-left veneers, they essentially fill the ethno-nationalist gap filled by the far-right elsewhere in Europe, minus immigration?”
Janey PC. I think that’s a bit simplistic and unfair. SF are to the left of FF and FG. It’s unfair to elide them somehow with the ethno-nationalist far right.
In fairness to SF they have never, certainly in their current incarnation, gone down any of the common paths of the far-right.
No more than many on here, I’d suspect that SF as a junior coalition partner would go the way the Labour Party always did when it played that role – getting the odd sop to its agenda here and there but for the most part implementing ‘sensible’ capitalist free-market policies.
But I think it would be fair to describe their economic and social policies as centre-left.
Jesus, Joe, what’s gotten into you?
LikeLike
You’re right Liberius. Still I think the point remains if one looks at the parties etc in there they fit the bill re SF more than ethno nationalists – of course SF itself is linked to the vastly more left wing group but I’m trying to get at the sort of party SF is
LikeLike
Yeah agree on the point, just the FF in EFA bit didn’t scan with my memory so I looked it up and decided to post the correction. On the point itself, I did in fact suggest SF were a better fit with the EFA way back in 2014.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ethno-nationalist? That,’d be the National Party, not Sinn Féin.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s interesting too how parties in our system appear to think they’re more left wing than they actually are (that is SF, SDs to an extent etc). That’s a different issue to them not being left wing but it does dovetail with your point Liberius re appropriate European homes for them. For example, policies in relation to the extension of nationalised or collective, or social ownership of industries. Links to unions (does SD have any?). Etc, etc.
LikeLike
You can get the voting records here:
Matt Carthy: https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term9-matt-carthy.html 89.5% loyalty to GEU/NGL.
(I’m rounding here)
Martina Anderson: https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term9-martina-anderson.html 88.5% Loyalty to GEU/NGL
Interesting these two are not voting in quasi-military coordination. But that has perhaps to do with absences.
Compare with Clare Daly: https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term9-clare-daly.html 91%
or Özlem Demirel of Die Linke: https://www.votewatch.eu/en/term9-ozlem-demirel.html 96%
This suggests to me that SF are slightly less loyal to the ‘party line’ of the Group but not that much less. Which kind of suggest SF are best in the GEU/NGL, and that SF are a left party on the European level at least.
And that MEPs feel able to vote against their grouping when they see fit, which I find generally healthy.
But I don’t have the data for the EFA averages to do a correlation with SF and EFA voting. Does anyone know where it can be downloaded.
I’d love to be able to correlate FG and Fidesz voting. 😉
LikeLike
Seriously, anyone have the entire voting record data set? For the last 20 years say.
I’d love to have a hack at it.
LikeLike
To describe SF as ethno-nationalist is pretty unfair, given their consistent record against racism during at least the last decade.
LikeLike
Actually that’s a very fair point you make re voting patterns being close enough to 90% with GEU/NGL.
LikeLike
A Sinn Fein government is now a possibility.
The prospective partner would have to commit to not being subject to sinister outside influence, such as MNCs determining economic policy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sinn Fein-led government
LikeLike
Note the disastrous showing of Labour in both polls. In the past, when Labour were out of coalition for a Dáil term, they had a degree of recovery. But Sinn Féin was not a significant electoral force in those days.
LikeLike
Greens eating them from the leafy suburb side now too.
LikeLike
We should remember that Varadkar received part of his political formation as an intern with the Republican party in Washington,-a party Chomsky has called the most dangerous organization in human history.
“with peak rents, peak homelessness, peak waiting lists, peak trolleys, peak damage to children, are FG finally and openly admitting that they govern for Some not All?
Some, like the landlords, cuckoos, vultures, not the swathes of the public desperate for social housing.
Some, like the developers of the posh slums, while ‘putting away’ the poor, this time, not to laundries and asylums, but to hubs and hotels….
Can you imagine the FG furore if a sports bag of body-parts of a butchered child showed up in Blackrock or Foxrock or Castleknock, a Latin motto peeking out on a blazer?….
Take last Sunday when the Taoiseach spoke on RTE radio about the little boy “Sam” pictured having his dinner, kneeling on a piece of cardboard, on the street. He said “we” tried to find Sam. But “we” couldn’t.
Most telling, and for me chilling, was the Taoiseach’s public speculation that “perhaps we could make sure there were no child-protection issues” around him….
The insinuation, as in the case of the man murdered in his tent in Cork, that if any fault exists it must be personal, not political. Any failure is of Their own Self, not of Our System, though for too long it is prioritising the extrinsic demands of the market over the intrinsic needs of society. And all of it in a Republic….
if Simon Harris knocks on your door ask him exactly what they mean by it being “half-time” and their being “half-way”.
Is it that the million of us waiting for healthcare is to become two million? Is the Election Speak a threat, or a promise?”
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/miriam-ocallaghan-election-speak-is-already-deafening-as-parties-try-and-outshout-each-other-38874086.html
Fine Gael’s attempt to honour the Black and Tans evoked a folk memory of republican radicalism.
It is time for Sinn Fein to assert that republican radicalism and help rid the country of this evil Fine Gael-led, Fianna Fail-backed government.
LikeLike
SF really seem the only hope to end this FFG nightmare.
Poster ‘rockofcashel’ on pie posted a comment that he’s amazed at the number of co-workers (who have never voted SF before) that they’re giving them #1 this time. Fingers crossed he’s right – really hope that 19 to 20% firms up and then some this time – it will scare the bejesus out of the smug fucks.
That’s classic classic-liberalism. Always look at the individual, the identity, never the class or the system. Beautiful way to mis-direct from the culprits, and wear a faux humanitarian expression in the process.
LikeLiked by 1 person
At this rate we’ll be seeing the same dodgy supply and confidence agreement in place now, just in reverse.
LikeLike
+1
LikeLike
Would be very interesting if SF agreed to work with FF … which would then have to be approved by an FF Special Ard Fheis……
LikeLiked by 1 person
“TAOISEACH LEO VARADKAR has said that he would be open to a three-way debate between himself, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin and Sinn Feín’s Mary Lou McDonald. …
Mary Lou McDonald ‘said that she expected that both RTÉ and Virgin Media will reverse their decisions.”
https://www.thejournal.ie/sinn-fein-debates-rte-virgin-leo-fianna-fail-4973610-Jan2020/
LikeLike
Interesting breakdown on region / age. Note support for SF in the younger cohorts! If demographics are destiny, good times ahead for them in a few years…esp. as the 65+ cohort dies off (another GE or two). And look at Labour in the 18-24 age group! 2%!!!!!!
Dublin:
FG 23, FF 20, Greens 15, SF 14, Labour 5
Leinster:
SF 26, FG 24, FF 22, Lab 7, Greens 5
Munster:
FF 28, FG 21, SF 21, Greens 5, Labour 3
Connacht-Ulster:
FF 34, SF 26, FG 22, Greens 3, Labour 0
*
18-24yo:
SF 27, FG 16, FF 15, Greens 5, Labour 2
25-34yo:
SF 32, FF 18, FG 14, Greens 6, Labour 6
35-49yo:
FG 29, FF 22, SF 19, Greens 9, Labour 4
50-64yo:
FF 26, FG 21, SF 21, Greens 5, Labour 5
65yo+:
FF 40, FG 25, SF 12, Labour 8, Greens 5
LikeLike