GOD they’re a dull lot.
The most boring election campaign in Irish political history has been as inspirational as watching someone wait for the green man before crossing the road.
Insipid stuff. Three weeks of stultifying charmlessness, of empty promises, of pretend bickering. And another week of it to go.
As inviting as a two-days-on-the-Guinness fart that wafts carelessly through a packed pub.
Simon ‘bag o’ bones’ Harris, Micheal ‘middle of the road’ Martin, Mary Lou ‘both sides of the mouth’ McDonald.
Yawn, and roll over back to sleep.
All with multi-billion-euro giveaway manifestos designed to bribe fools of their vote.
No vision for the country’s future, other than wild, unattainable figures plucked from backsides.
We’ll build 50,000 houses a year; no, we’ll build 60,000 a year; no, we’ll build 100,000 a year.
An election campaign steeped in deceit, designed to pull the wool over your eyes, so you’ll vote for more of the same, like obedient sheep. Those that bother to turn up, that is.
Turnout at Irish elections has been on the slide since 2011. Then, 69 per cent of the electorate cast a ballot. In 2016, it dropped to 66 per cent. In 2020, it dropped again to 62 per cent. It’s a safe bet to conclude turnout will dip below 60 per cent for the first time ever.
My bet is it will drop into the mid-50s, because in the heel of the hunt, most folk of sound mind now realise it matters not a jot who’s in power.
The world will continue to turn. You’ll still have to pay your taxes.
Your newly-elected TDs will disappear into thin air like they always do.
The Dail will sit from time to time. They’ll all have great debates. They’ll produce fine, expensive reports. Experts will be appointed to A***forces. Nothing much will get built.
And they’ll come scurrying back five years hence with another bag of ludicrous promises that will never see the light of day.
MIRAGE OF PROGRESS
Irish politics. ’Twas ever thus. The art of appearing to walk while standing still. The mirage of progress.
Now that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are formally joined at the hip after a century of faux separation, we can look forward to decades of governments involving both.
A tasteless soup of mediocrity on the menu until I die.
How brilliant.
It’s time you realised too that there is NO viable alternative to what Mary Lou called ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’ politics.
ANATHEMA TO VOTERS
Sinn Fein, the only other party remotely capable of leading in the absence of either FF or FG, are still anathema to most voters.
Rightly or wrongly, the IRA remains front and centre for voters who lived through the Troubles. Memories like that take generations to fade.
A recent poll in the Irish Times showed that 40 per cent of voters DON’T want Sinn Fein anywhere near government.
The ‘change’ Mary Lou demands is not the change the Irish people want, just yet.
TASTY CARROT
Ní tiocfaidh ar lá.
As for the rest of the Irish left, a tasty carrot has been dangled before the eyes of the Social Democrats and the Greens by Labour leader Ivana Bacik.
She has said Labour will talk to both parties about forming a left block after next Friday’s election — a move that would give it greater clout.
The Greens have just exited government and despite achieving lots during the last five years (all those new buses and trains in our cities, the local link services all over rural Ireland, new greenways, cycle paths, rewilding initiatives, renewable energy farms, waste reductions, climate targets largely achieved, to name but a few) they will be the electorate’s whipping boys next Friday, because hey, we love to give the little guy a good kicking.
DAIL COMEDY ACT
When we need them most in power again — the climate emergency isn’t going to disappear — the Greens look on course to lose as many as 11 of the current 12 seats they hold.
It would be the greatest act of political self-sabotage if voters were to do that. Even so, joining an alliance with Labour and the Social Democrats may well be the Greens’ only chance of re-entering government and holding Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in check.
Elsewhere on the left, People Before Profit remains the Dail’s comedy act. Its four TDs want to nationalise everything, a politics perhaps more suited to Soviet Russia.
The other hard-left outfit in the Dail is Right To Change, a party of one — Joan Collins TD — which emerged from the anti-water charges movement.
ROARING AT THE DEAF
The world view of PBP and RTC is to be against everything all of the time.
Appealing to the perpetually angry, but as a way to lure new voters, it’s like roaring into a deaf man’s ear.
Then, depressingly, you come to the Independents, whose purpose is NOT to govern for ALL Irish citizens, but to look after the whims of the constituencies they represent.
Why these people are ever elected to the national parliament shall always remain a mystery. They are nothing but glorified county councillors, pothole botherers, gutter cleaners, double- yellow-line painters.
GRIM REALITY
But, the grim reality is that there will be many more of them after next Friday’s election. One in five intend to vote for some Independent or other.
Electing as many as 35 Independents to the next Dail (out of 174) would turn the Dail into a proper circus.
Nothing much gets done now. Can you imagine how much worse it will get with the equivalent of 35 Healy-Raes droning on about where they come from?
This election should only be about the common good. Solving our crises in housing, infrastructure, public services and climate.
But, as ever, the local sod will inspire a significant number across the land, with the result that post-election we’ll end up with a Dail full of Me-feiners, another five years of inertia and more and more of us saying: To hell with this, I’m off.
POSTER BOY HUTCH COULD TOP THE POLLS
THE Monk, Gerry Hutch, may be in with a good shout of being elected in Dublin Central.
Some have even suggested he may well top the poll. It’s not as far-fetched as you might think.
It would be some turn up for the books, but remember this: Dubs have a habit of thumbing their noses at convention. It’s in their DNA.
There he was the other day in Sean McDermott Street in the capital’s inner city, atop a telegraph poll putting up his own posters, if you will.
When it comes to grammar, however, Gerry comes bottom of the pile.
IM sure you’ll have noticed too.
ROOM TO IMPROVE ON HOUSING
HOUSE prices are up a massive ten per cent in the first nine months of this year.
And they’ll continue to rise as long as demand outstrips supply. It’ll be many years, possibly a decade or more, before supply meets demand.
It has been the No1 priority of every political party during the election campaign. It’s serious stuff, but the solutions on offer are weak.
The Government has the money to build all the houses we need, but the planning system is tortoise-slow. It remains to be seen whether new legislation to make the planning process more efficient and timely will work.
Throw in the fact we can’t find the bricklayers, the carpenters, the electricians, the digger drivers and so on to build the bloody things and you can see why the State’s home building promises are essentially pie in the sky.
Vulture funds continue to invest — because they can — in entire apartment blocks and estates. They then rent them out at extortionate prices, driving individual buyers out and driving prices ever higher.
The Government introduced a ten per cent stamp duty rate on bulk purchases by vulture funds, but that’s like trying to stop a raging river with a wet blanket.
A 50 per cent rate would soften their cough. But that won’t happen.
In Ireland if you’re got money, there are no obstacles to what you can do.
If you happen to be cash poor, you’re on your own.
GO STEW, MORON
THE first person convicted over last November’s Dublin riots got his just desserts in court on Wednesday.
Degenerate dope Declan Donaghey, of William Street in Dublin, set a Garda car on fire, jumped on the bonnet of another and attacked an accommodation centre for refugees.
The brain-dead moron, 28, admitted arson, criminal damage and violent disorder. When interviewed by cops he confessed: “I made myself look like a scumbag.”
That you did, son. Now you’ll have six- and-a-half years to stew in the hellhole that is Mountjoy.
Good riddance. Here’s hoping you’re the first in a long line of convictions arising from that shameful night.
TULSI IS PUTIN ON A SHOW
AS Trump fills his cabinet with a Russian stooge, a child sex accused mannequin and an anti-vaxx lunatic, Putin smiles like a Cheshire cat.
America is on a mission to placate the Russian warmonger, and he knows it.
Trump’s pick to be Director of National Security, Tulsi Gabbard, is a one-time Fox News presenter, who, the day after Putin invaded Ukraine, BLAMED the United States and Nato for provoking Russia by ignoring their “security concerns”.
Ever since she has parroted the same anti-American Russian propaganda that flows from the Kremlin. She is nothing more than a Russian asset, as Hillary Clinton has noted.
How in God’s name could anyone like her be contemplated for the job of defending America’s national security, let alone given it?
But that’s Trump for you.
His former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said last week: “Donald Trump is a blunt-force instrument applying blunt-force trauma to the system.”
Yep, he is, to the detriment of the entire system.
Don’s choice for Attorney General, the highest legal office in the land, Matt Gaetz, has been accused of sex with a minor and sex trafficking.
His Health Secretary pick, Robert Kennedy Jnr, is an anti-vaxxer who wants to take fluoride out of the water system. There are many other clowns in Trump’s tent.
His one goal, it seems, is not to Make America Great Again, but destroy it from the inside out.
RING THE CHANGES
THEN there’s Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, one-time World Wrestling Entertainment boss, Linda McMahon.
Yep, she has no experience at all in education, but she knows her way around a wrestling ring.
For many years Republicans have defunded education programmes across the states. And she’ll probably keep to that.
Why? Well, the uneducated voted overwhelmingly for Trump. You have to keep the conveyor belt of the stupid running to keep hold of the reins of power.
To put McMahon’s appointment into context, it’s the equivalent of appointing Conor McGregor as Minister for Education here. Bonkers.
