Irish politics discussion thread

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.

ALthough presumably they are the kind of people that Fine Gael will soon be appointing to head the new Dept of Finance.

dont believe but maybe a tenth of that. Mcwilliams is an arse.

ff mo was to outsource all decisions and therefore political responsibility.

lol @ dave "yah sure"

Can't afford to come home to vote, tho can't really see what merit it'd have.

i'll vote for the best independent, labour, fg candidates i have to choose from locally, in that order

the most o_o thing abt that quote yesterday was the $9m paid to merrill lynch for a shoddy nine page term paper of panglossian wishful thinking

i mean ilx could have done that for £50 to the server fund

that is not o_o to anyone even slightly intimate with the governmental culture of the past fifteen years.

the multimillion reports were then shitcanned or brought out as gospel depending on political convenience.
The knowledge economy how are ya

oh i don't claim any such knowledge obv xp

but for the desensitized, i can say that is a particularly terrible and stupid and unforgiveable example of corruption/stupidity/etc

mayo prediction, fwiw:

3 fg, 1 ff, last seat btwn fg, lab, ind

thats proporsh rep rite

wher do the fine fael ppl in mayo live

Not entirely informed Wicklow prediction: 3fg, 1lab, 1ind (ex-ff), "Jaws" Roche retires on a ministerial pension.

the ff ppl in mayo live all over the county, and will be enough to get their man home.

If i detest anything more than ff, it's cute hoor ex-ff defector inds

He has served since then as an independent TD, and has voted for and against the government, based on his assessment of where he believed the public interest was being served whether it would help his reelection prospects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Behan

To be fair, Michael Martin should be surreptitously encouraging his people to go "independent" and rejoin the party when they scrape into the Dail.

yep, a good ff stroke that would be.

Is there anything to prevent it, i wonder? Prob not.

have asked before, but is anyone aware of a site/resource that records td voting records.

Given that it's their actual function, it's really a hugely underreported aspect of their activities.

Course, party politics renders each vote in the dail pretty irrelevant anyway.

fuck, i meant to ask where do the fine gael ppl live, obv the ff ppl are everywhere like nitrogen or dogs

fine gael live around the ffailers, but in smaller houses and are envious of their good teeth

cant vote