Sunday and other stupid statements from this week

All contributions welcome.

Here’s a few from the week.

David Quinn in the Sunday Independent today had the following over an article:

Our cartel-like political system is just impossible to break into

Is it though? Plenty of new parties getting national representation over the past decade and a half. Whether they make it to government is in the hands of voters, isn’t it?

Courtesy of RTÉ’s election coverage yesterday.

Wyse men say ‘only fools rush in’, but that wasn’t the case for Fine Gael’s Brendan Wyse, who has topped the poll in the Clane LEA to retain his seat on Kildare County Council.

 

A former Minister writes:

Pity the Independents. Winning elections is bad enough, but being forced to make a real decision or two is another country. The victories for so many non-party candidates in this weekend’s elections present a problem. Not a problem for Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Sinn Féin, but for the Independents themselves.

If we repeat yesterday’s voting trends at the general election, the first people Simon Harris and Micheál Martin phone will not be Eamon Ryan (maybe still hanging on as leader of a decimated Greens) or Mary Lou McDonald (the diminished boss of a demoralised Sinn Féin), but the Independents.

Nothing new there – according to polling that’s the case for a year or two now. But will the trends be repeated? 

What’s in a name? Some who balk at changing certain pronouns seem happy to change terms when the need arises.

Then, the same department turned what passes for its mind to the private rented dwellings market. They apparently forgot the disaster that rent control in the form of the Rent Restrictions Acts had been for the nearly half of the 20th century. They effectively froze the private rented dwellings market, introducing a period where lessors were effectively dispossessed by an unconstitutional statutory regime of rent freeze and eviction bans. Ignoring this history, the department started to freeze rents and make repossessions almost impossible for many private lessors (I prefer the term “lessor” to “landlord”, a pejorative term in Irish minds).

Electoral advice from across the Irish Sea?

It is still important, however, for politicians to demonstrate cultural literacy – something to keep them in touch with the tastes of their electorate. On Saturday, when asked by the Sunday Times, Rishi Sunak failed to name a single Taylor Swift song. It may seem a facile question but it is revelatory: Sunak is not in tune with mass culture. That strikes me as a worse PR problem than his vast wealth. So, my advice for the candidates in the looming Irish general election: you don’t have to be relatable, but you should have a Taylor song in your back pocket.

Finally, here’s a piece reprinted from the Telegraph in the Irish Independent. It’s a piece bemoaning the need to determine Biden’s mental fitness. And it concludes with this:

Instead of a partisan tit-for-tat debate over whether Biden is the same as he was four years ago, the least the American people deserve is that President Biden take a serous cognitive test supervised by independent medical authorities.

Serous? Serously? Ouch. And it’s misspelt on both the Independent and the Telegraph.