Irish politics discussion thread

ff front bench

So there's an election in about a month and FF won't have a new leader for a while? Yikes.

I think that photo reminded me of the white fellow here:
http://angrybirdsgoldeneggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Angry-Birds-Where-the-Eggs.jpg

givin me kindof a chicken boo vibe

http://www.dareland.com/Chkn_boo.jpg

not to be racist or pointing fingers necessarily but why is the white fellow not questioning the missing egg????

ok i am kinda prejudging this, bc he looks guilty as fuck, let's be real

What with his suspiciously egg-shaped beak you mean? I dunno. (xpost)

possibly he is the egg, and has just crudely fashioned a beak out of some shell, i mean they're only birds he has to fool and not partic smart ones by the look of it

is this like a metaphor

not to my knowledge

guys if you want to derail a thread with random unfunny interjection we already have excelsior.

-_-

eh, jays, that wasnt 100% in earnest youse clowns

what percent was it?

you grill like miriam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHdchsdkfz4&feature=player_embedded

let's console ourselves with this fine piece of art, celebrating everything that's good about being irish.

what in the actual fuck

man i hate surfing on my phone i miss all the craic

Again, as i said earlier the only ones who are bitching about this song are cultural racists from Ireland who are having a piss fest over the fucking IRA pin, no one gives a fuck. It's not a fucking political statement. You Ireland born people are fucking lame all you do is go around and look for Irish Americans on youtube and put them down. This is why no one takes you seriously you are all about as smart as fucking rocks. Stupid cunts.
PWDforlifebrah 21 hours ago
PWDforlifebrah 21 hours ago

all true imo

tell yis what, it is hard to live up to the expectations of irish americans on youtube in general ime

lmao feelin this heavily

green white ornge

stylophone breakdown

a+ wld never watch again

You guys know this is gonna place in the ILM tracks poll, right?

don't be silly nothing irish-american cld ever be connected with electoral fraud

Just sayin, we got about 20 ballots from ILXors with names like "MackleMore1111" and "MackleMore3142".

I figured they were just lurkers.

they've agreed on the bill/schedule. surprised at that tbh

oh yeah, we are having an election.

Eurosong 2011 is on Friday!

Not being in the country, I don't have a good read on what's going on apart from the general narrative that FG > Labour >>>>> FF. Did anyone watch the debate?

i watched gilmore v. martin for a while before turning to the ireland wales friendly. martin's way better than gilmore on tv if u don't h8 his guts already. was a good bit when gilmore was all "lol u created the hse" & martin was all "why u always talk abt the past?". i doubt gilmore picked up a single vote from the debate tho.

have delighted in missing these shambolic debates

laour and FG should have thrashed out a joint manifesto three months ago. this last-minute jostling for position based on fucking red c polls is unseemly, distracting and manna from heaven for the all-new FF

I don't think putative coalition parties in Ireland have ever gone into an election with an agreed manifesto.

They sorta did last time (Rabbitte and Kenny's Mullingar Accord)

there would have been a lot of advantages to it this time round

Any noteworthy election posters doing the rounds? With all the independents running this time, I'm hoping for more of the calibre of this 2007 champion:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/237/522242086_6db4c7e333_z_d.jpg

sf dude in limerick misspells consensus fwiw

my election picture album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inuitmonster/sets/72157625848744561/

election poster album. duh.

see also: http://www.flickr.com/groups/irishelection/pool/

what do ppl think- is there now any way to remove or radically downgrade the toxic bank guarantee, or is our only opton a renegotiation of terms of repayment?

It strikes me as insane that the state has taken on these liabiities, but has anyone put forward a coherent plan of how the removal of the guarantee could be viable 'going fwd'f

I think there should be some kind of discussion about what the costs of letting the banking system collapse would have been - how paralysing of the economy, how long to get over that paralysis and so on. If you start thinking like that you can start heading towards quantifying those costs, which brings you to the stage where you can say "well, the cost of guaranteeing the banks is enormous, but it is less than letting them fail", or vice versa.

To be honest, this should really have been done before the bank guarantee scheme (or the world's cheapest bailout, as Lenihan called it) was implemented.

he'll never budge on insisting that it needed to be put in place in full, there and then. Quite what he spent the interim between that and renewal doing is a mystery.

From David McWilliams' recent book, Follow The Money: The Tale of the Merchant of Ennis, we learn that Lenihan, a lawyer by training, received his first lessons in banking and finance at McWilliams' kitchen table - on the 17th of September 2008.

Before that, McWilliams tells us, Lenihan had learned everything he knew about finance from a biography of Alan Greenspan(!) that he had picked up over the summer. We learn that Lenihan had no idea that Irish banks were in trouble until after the failure of Lehman Brothers just two days before.

Less than two weeks after that late-night cram session at McWilliams' kitchen table, Ireland announced to the world that it would fully guarantee its banks liabilities -- for both depositors and bondholders.

We now know that this hasty decision would lead to national bankruptcy and the specter of sovereign default. But at the time, Lenihan -- not unlike a number of other clueless politicians scattered throughout the formerly industrialized world -- was only following the advice being offered by the "experts" who surrounded him. Shockingly, among those "experts" were none other than a team of advisors from Merrill Lynch.

Turns out that a week after the Finance Minister's introduction to basic finance, the Irish government paid Merrill Lynch $10M for a seven-page report that told them:

* "All of the Irish banks are profitable and well capitalised.”

Lenihan is one of the best-respected members of the outgoing government btw. FF are basically the opposite of technocrats.

Nakhchivan - I am pleased to hear that it was bozo private sector consultants who supplied this bad advice.