The Irish

lol I think of the way I lived in 2007/8 off basically no money and like I could never do it nowadays. Almost everything costs tons, my mother was shocked when I said £100 was a lot of money for me (lol it is), because my cost of living is a lot lower here in some ways. Even being bled dry commuting we still have a house and we don’t commute as long as the people in the article. But then I can count double figures of people I know who’ve emigrated just to have some quality of life. It’s not in people’s imagination, that the country is harder and harder to live in every year. The old sow that eats her farrow and all that.

Good points, well made. I agree that FG should have moved with a lot more swiftness and purpose on the issues surrounding housing and the cost of living. They could argue that they were preoccupied with negotiating a path through the Brexit clusterfuck, and maybe history will eventually show that they were right to prioritise that?
Mainly, though, if I’m making points in their favour, it’s because I’m appalled by the prospect of SF as kingmakers.

Think there is something also to be said for the sense of crushing reality, like my generation (and maybe deems’s too? cough) were being told in school we were a generation who wouldn’t have to emigrate, who could live near our parents and send our children to local schools, and then...you look at our parents having done these things and it’s hard not to feel cheated. People working harder and harder and never getting what they thought they would. Not surprising at all.

I mean, I’m Irish living in Britain, if I haven’t hammered that point home enough, and I wouldn’t give a fuck if Leo was mishandling Brexit if there was a home I could escape to easily.

Out of sheer curiosity gyac, why did you emigrate to the UK in particular?

Had the bad luck to be made redundant right as the banking crisis hit. Was seeing SV at the time and it just expedited what was inevitable.

Makes sense, thanks.

im mid generation, twas the class after me chronologically and the class above me societally that were told such things

in fact, familial constraints keeping me in the wesht and delaying college prob saved me from having purchased in/around 2006 tbf so yknow not entirely unlucky

VH i hear you. i think SF havent a single coherent policy that i trust them to be able to spin into action, amd i have grave doubts as to the way in which they would react to that or the changes they would seek to eg the civil service when they perceived that they were being checked in their aims etc etc

but the fair facts also state that fg will have let them in by refusing to countenance measures that hurt property prices. afaict, thats the long and the short of their policy on housing- " any type of fix ye like as long as ye buy in at 400k like everyone else did"

and the inability to consider solutions to dublin being the only show in town is the next huge black mark.

so FG served their masters as well as youd have expected, delivering the right kind of recovery to their core vote, i guess.

pls god they havent made an FF voter of me, but yknow id like to own a house at some stage, or at least pay a fair amount of rent for one that doesnt involve the current sacrifice of commute, or 35% income, or etc etc and unforch i dont see anyone emerging from this shitshow willing to buy the vote of the renter/wannabe i mean im happy to show a bit of leg and ff are the only ones even looking at me oh god

stayed west for a girl, moved to dub for a girl, jesus idk why do i bother voting at all my circumstances are purely determined by a succession of herselves tbh

I loled, even if I do feel a bit burned by your last post. But ia, they should stop men voting.

if twere as easy as stopping the right ppl from voting then sf would already be in wha

We’d already have the Mother and Child scheme!

a family in every home in every field in every county

and boys....we do mean....~~~every county~~~~~

Honestly, we didn’t deserve Noel Browne. Always one of the bits of history that made me angriest!

well you need the likes of him to take the hit bytimes, such is the nature of it

todays equivalent is peader toibin y/n?

LEAID

hee

anyway where does a voter go but towards the unknown?

More polls!

#ge2020 EARTHQUAKE poll by Ipsos/MRBI for @IrishTimes.

Full breakdown:

Sinn Féin 25% (+4)
Fianna Fáil 23% (-2)
Fine Gael 20% (-3)

Greens 8% (-)
Labour 4% (-1)

Others (Soc Dems, Sol/PBP, Inds) 20% (+2) https://t.co/VTDMw6GigI

— Richard Chambers (@newschambers) February 3, 2020

Fine Gael have been very concerned about Munster (where a number of issues including the RIC commemoration have particularly hit home)

The Ipsos/MRBI data would appear to show those fears were well founded... The party struggling badly.

Ind/Others 27
SF 25
FF 21
FG 16#ge2020 pic.twitter.com/7wn39XwnIt

— Richard Chambers (@newschambers) February 3, 2020

really depressing to see the 'adults in the room' 'difficult decisions' narrative still having traction here wrt ff/fg bipartisan structural adjustment approaches. i fail to see how falling in line with troika measures in the way Ireland did and continues to do can be seen as the 'grown up' response, in many ways the opposite. There is something desperately infantilistic about Ireland's perennial appetite for self-flagellation and it gave an easy foil for the axis powers to drive toward a vision of 'recovery' that was about all bond-ratings and very little about standards of living for ordinary people. A real grownup approach would ask real questions about what the economy is supposed to do for whom rather than solidifying the country's reliance on its status as a tax-haven without paying the dividends to its citizens that other countries operating a similar wheeze do.

It is amazing that 2008 has seemingly had such a long-lasting effect, it does seem to have knocked the presumption that one or other of the melt parties will win at each election, at least somewhat.

However I think it should be mentioned that the rise of SF in the polls is so clearly about how tarnished a figure Gerry Adams is. It would have been unthinkable for most Irish people to vote for a party led by him. Also how popular McD is, and has always been a fairly well-liked figure by the public at large. The photo someone posted does really get at her appeal, and there has long been a suspicion that SF might have have actual electoral prospects under her for those reasons combined. But I think this polling suggests something I've always suspected, which goes beyond mere populism: that republicanism has remained much closer to the surface in the irish imaginary than one might have imagined from recent cultural production. That is, despite all the enthusiasm for the queen's visit etc, republican sympathies remain fairly common but little discussed publicly. I suspect brexit and the shall we say less than grown up way that uk politicians and the media have conducted themselves wrt anglo-irish relations has somewhat inflamed this tendency.

i think thats a very good post that i agree with very little of

but if the 'melt' shite makes it way into this thread it will be a sad aul day

Yeah melt doesn’t fit Irish politics. Agree with plaxico’s thoughts on Mary Lou though.

Axis powers more appropriate?

hee its v promising certainly, run with it and we'll see where it leads

im half beginning to think martin goes before FF/SF govt forms tbh

Is there truly a portion of the electorate who were morally repelled by Adams, but who have persuaded themselves that his recent retirement (and McGuinness's death) has somehow wiped the slate clean for SF? An organisation that acted for decades as the (nominally) political wing of the IRA? I get that many people are keen to signal their dissatisfaction with the establishment, but I won't accept that the answer is to vote for a party that is riddled with apologists for mass murder.

its hard to answer from any one perspective, that

plenty of the electorate not morally repelled by adams/mcguinness (or certainly, in and out of different contexts that effect waxed and waned) post GFA

i dont buy that this suggests a simmering republican core tbh, but i do think that there is a latent willingness in the south to be convinced that the actions and justifications for those actions taken by northern catholics post 1970 can be accepted as sincere/righteous, and that widespread abhorrence within the mainstream of the ROI base of any one or any select several particularly indefensible incidents is no more a full picture of our complex relationship with republicanism than is an often obvious fondness for jarry the grandad figure who brought the provos in and got the guns silenced.

FF rump was stuffed with apologists for the ra throughout, for a start. and certainly they would not be heard proclaiming a total disregard for the cause unless it were expedient in particular circumstance to do so throughout all of haugheys tenure.

post GFA obviously everything changes, and post adams/mcguinness it changes again.

i think kenny was the last leader who would get away with casting those stones as a distraction/frontal assault and make it look sincere, and thats down to temporal factors as much as anything else.

SF are now a political party operating as far as one must treat it as any other legitimate such entity and i dont think that the historical- and i know some of this dirt goes back only as far as 2007, and i know people within the party linger that know things that ought carry more of a stench of cordite, bit hey is that not true of plenty of ppl around the political arena?- questions around this issue are as important to the electorate as you seem to expect.

personally i dont rate them as a party but plenty like what they see and hear from them, and as a third option id struggle to defend the first two getting in because of bogeyman whispers or dire warnings.

xp they have a lot of young voters and a lot of older too, the latter are surprising for that reason.

ime younger people are more strongly republican in their views, even down south, especially if they’re into politics and pay attention to what’s going on in the UK. Very different vibe from my age group, though I would consider myself republican too (not to the extent of voting SF though).

The morality point loses a bit of its strength when you’ve got the British government trying to let on Bloody Sunday wasn‘t a crime.

And not just wasn't but couldn't be, that the asking of the question is shameful.

any rate they havent run enough candidates and c.30 seats seems about likely

i think that progress but serving necessary bench time is pretty much where they are

its very unlikely that FF lead FG into a reversed supply/confidence govt next time around if only because both parties will have to have realised by now that it hurt them both more than it gained em, tho ofc FF needed to wear the sackcloth anyways

leos been a bad taoiseach and coveney will fancy it very soon after the election unless theres an unexpected seat return far ahead of the projected %

I admit I'm not clear what the '(nominally)' is doing there - d'you mean that the division between the political and the actual was in name only?

(to Vast Halo)

ferris alone breaks the winking act tbf

(xp) Yes, that's what I meant. They insisted otherwise, but the fact is that for many years, the same two men headed up both the party and the IRA's army council.

lol

Irish English replaces British English as EU working language - https://t.co/TLE5TSkMDh via @shareaholic

— Tony Connelly (@tconnellyRTE) February 5, 2020

👍

As it should be.

tairgead achieved

First the spelling, then the syntax
https://i.postimg.cc/xjbDNYY0/6793861-D-89-EE-41-DD-BEE9-5-BDBD57-A63-EF.jpg

Closer to 'avez-vous' so everyone wins.

Irish does have a number of words that originate from French, hardly surprising given the Normans. There’s airgead (money/silver), the old word for church is eaglis, bread is a sliced pan, there’s others but these are the ones I think of immediately. Or maybe just from Latin?

Anyway, here’s what’s happening in the heartlands.

Interesting!

I was thinking more in terms of the syntax, as 'do you have' is actually a bit of an odd turn of phrase from the perspective of Romance languages (and, I assume, others as well). That said, I vaguely recall reading that it was in fact due to the Celtic influence, so the plot thickens...

garsún in Munster Irish = garçon is one I remember xp

gásún/r in the west

I was hoping one of ye would chip in as I thought that but it’s not my dialect!

xps to pom Irish is a VSO language, see more here for syntax info.

I take it back, the Celtic influence re: 'do you...' in English is a hypothesis among many:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins

always thing german/irish have a lot of the same things going on

Tbf English is a Germanic language. What was that quip? 'French badly spoken by Germans'.

Are you talking about the sign? Cos that’s almost a direct translation from the Irish, and reflects the use of prepositional pronouns in the language.

English is a bastard with many parents!

always thing german/irish have a lot of the same things going on

Bbc Newsnight is doing a report on our election btw, switch over now (it’s not on yet)