The Irish

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)

im only led to believe, now, i dont speak either tbf

xp no fuckin thanks, anyways im listening to the freeman podcast

I learned German for a few years and can confirm. Would be useful for any language you need to make a coughing up phlegm sound for as well.

“Sinn Féin is the most notable party to British eyes”

I notice he’s pronouncing “Dáil” RTÉ style

MIKHAIL Martin, fuck me this is hard going

tis only yerself puttin ya thru it kiddo

Here’s inside one of Dublin’s new legal bedsits

You can’t open the bathroom door without hitting the bed.

Smaller than a disabled car park space. For €1,300 a month.https://t.co/VSlyiXkdPd pic.twitter.com/sFFfrWFSKe

— Paul O'Donoghue (@paulodonoghue93) February 5, 2020

“As you can see, a nice, compact studio,” said the estate agent..

the O'Donoghue piece in the Murdoch rag is paywalled though the pic and brief summary gives you most of the narrative.

Yeah housing is fucking awful in Dublin. The journal used to run a feature with the worst listings on daft.ie every month.

first time I saw bed sized rooms like that was in London in the 90's. Straight faced estate agent showing me a ground floor bedsit the size of a bed what for you'd pay for a 3 bedroom house in the north. And this was Old Kent Road - so I went to sub Monopoly board areas like Plumstead/Woolwich thinking it might be cheaper and guess what.. it wasn't. Maybe should have gone further SE like Bexleyheath or Erith!

When we lived in London we paid basically nothing for our rent comparatively, but the flat had no front door separating it from the other flats, and the shower was in the bedroom.

that seems an alright standard finish of a place at least tbf, and the single-person renter that needs a place by themselves for whatever reason is badly in need of this type of development (ideally that all the doors could open, fair enough)

course, 400 a month is the absolute fuckin max they should be paying for it, else hang everyone involved.

heh wait, that's a *2* person unit wheres me scaffold

Getting fleeced by landlords, can’t cross the threshold
Wait a minute:
"Where's me scaffold? Where's me scaffold? Where's me scaffold?"

✓

its alright to say things can only get better
when you havent been a smithfield lettor

Eat natural food baked twice daily
And leftovers again, cos you’re saving
Don't drink tea and don't drink coffee
Stare at your wall and dream of toffee