Mick Fealty 
Thinking of all our readers as we run down for Christmas. One of the few times of the year we all get to slow down together (ie, at the same time). As we occasionally do I’m asking for your contributions to a Slugger Christmas playlist. Starting the ball rolling with this young Cork woman with an amazing voice, LYRA… Thanks for all your trust, your scepticism, your insight and your inquiries, and may the conversations on Slugger continue to flow …
I’ve put off writing an analysis of Sinn Féin’s fate in the southern general election on Feynman’s principle that “if you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” I’m still not sure I do, so only time will tell if what follows is right. The party made two seat gains, but largely because of the addition of 14 extra seats in the 34th Dáil. All three of the larger parties lost vote share but Sinn Féin lost …
To be honest about the election it felt more like a dour mid winter scoring draw than any victory. Yet, after all the shouting’s done, the two main parties of the outgoing coalition still have the ball. This was a secure consolidation in tough conditions. Let’s look at some of the key numbers in order to distinguish what actually happened from of the weird party spin that conjured alternative realities from the RTÉ Exit Poll which rated Fianna Fáil at …
Counting is under way, so all we have at the moment is the exit poll. There’s just 1.6% separating the three main parties. But if the actual result is close to these figures it means steady as she goes for the next five years for the FG/FF core coalition. As Olivia O’Leary notes in the IT this morning, the voters aren’t eejits… 14.28 Update: 80% of the country tallied: FF 20.8%, FG 20.0%, SF 18.2% Mick FealtyMick is founding editor …
If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor. James, Sit Down After years of enduring glad handed propaganda about how well the Republic is doing (and economically it is) the testimonials of real people during the last three weeks of the election campaign show the depth of misery that many are currently enduring. Housing was the key issue in the 2020 election and it remains a huge issue, but it’s clear from various polls and many …
This week in the Irish Times Fintan O’Toole asks why is this election so dull? There are probably several answers to that question, the most obvious being that in calling the shortest possible campaign period the government parties likely wanted that way. The other is that because of multi member constituencies Irish elections are esoteric affairs making it impossible to guess at how each party is likely to fare. Opinion polls measure at most first and second preferences nationally, not …
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. -HR Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe “Game, set and match to Trump”, said one of his biggest supporters, Elon Musk. If you do subscribe to the idea that Trump is, to use Mencken’s words, ‘a downright moron’ then ask yourself why the ‘smarter’ Democrat party has lost twice …
…novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognise that something has gone wrong. Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions Every time this storm around Sinn Féin looks like abating, something else kicks it off again. Wednesday’s committee meeting may have been a cynical attempt to strong-arm an Assembly committee into silence, but it also raised an important question. Is there an impermeable boundary between the First Minister’s civic …
I’m putting this up with a minimum of comment. It’s the Stormont Committee for The Executive Office (TEO) which has accumulated 1.7k views within hours of the session finishing. The reason being is that it is utterly shambolic. At the heart of the spectacle is an odd confusion about committee rules that have in place for 26 years. It’s not actually obvious if anyone on the committee (possibly even including the clerk) understood those rules up to the point they …
You knew Sinn Féin was in some trouble when it called for Paddy Kielty to be censured for a joke at the start of the Late Late Show, even though their ongoing saga has been pretty much the only thing in the southern domestic news for the last fortnight. Then on Saturday evening the Sunday Independent dropped a bombshell in the form of aa personal testimony from the young person Niall O Donnghaile sent the inappropriate texts which eventually lead …
In the weirdest consensus of post Belfast Agreement Northern Ireland Sinn Féin has agreed to a TUV proposal to cancel former Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile. Just days ago he was using X to attack journalists for following the McMonagle story. That was before we knew about his own behaviour, and the real reason for his stepping down with a fine encomium from party leader Mary Lou McDonald. Along his official portrait, all evidence of his existence on Twitter has …
So Sinn Féin’s troubles continue, this time they are merely deepening in the south. Over the weekend the party lost its second TD in a week to resignation. It wasn’t over the McMonagle case but the result of internal machinations. Kildare South TD Patricia Ryan resigned last Wednesday citing internal censorship by the national leadership of any criticism of the party’s dismal performance in the local and European elections, and the vetting of questions for Mary Lou McDonald. Then on …
You’d wonder what Pearse Doherty was on yesterday in the Dáil when his colleague and leader of the opposition treated their party’s liabilities around McMonagle with lurid insouciance, as it becomes ever obvious the whole party needs to go into rehab. Political parties are a particular type of voluntary organisation which plays an important role in gauging public sentiment and mediating between ordinary people and ultimately the institutions of government be it in opposition or as party of the executive. …
“…uncertainty eases the way for con artists to make fraudulent claims” -Rob Nelson Listening to Carlo Gebler’s new podcast series for BBC Radio 4 on the Provisional IRA’s mass escape from the Maze Prison back in September 1983 you cannot fail to be impressed with its meticulous planning and ruthless execution by the prisoners. Organisation was to become the hallmark of Sinn Féin’s electoral success as they moved from a twin track armed/democratic struggle to a latter day commitment to …
A messy few days in, and some inside Sinn Féin must be questioning the party hierarchy’s decision to make its head northern spin doctor carry the can for what increasingly looks like a much wider screw up. In 22 years I don’t remember anything like it. The problem with secrecy, be it that of the Catholic Church or in more recent times Sinn Féin’s problematic handling of sex cases within its own ranks, is that eventually it gets hard to …
It’s a sniper’s rule you only get two shots at the enemy. A third and they will figure where you’re hiding and you’re a goner. This is now Sinn Féin’s fourth scandal and it is very clear it just cannot deal with child sex abuse cases that involve its members. Being the fourth ‘shot’ the party can no longer expect to have the benefit of the doubt. Their defence on previous occasions was that they were historic, but policies were …
“…we don’t so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things”. – Ben Evans, via Memex 1.1. Like queuing for paper tickets for space trips once imagined in 1950s sci-fi, confident predictions of a near term border poll miss the fact that the future will track through possibilities adjacent to the present, not a linear projection of that present. Before I get to what I want to say, let me be clear about what I’m not …
There was a time when I paid more attention to polls than I have over the last six or seven years. To be honest I lost interest in trying to analyse them because with the increased frequency of each publication the variation between them became limited. In yesterday’s Inside Politics podcast from the Irish Times there’s a superb conversation hosted by Hugh Linehan with Theresa Reidy and Aidan Regan on the apparently sudden collapse of sentiment for Sinn Féin in …
…they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections. -Benjamin Allen, researcher at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard I was asked on Nolan yesterday to comment on Lee Reynolds analytical piece in The Critic magazine (brutally titled “Unionism has to wise up”), timed no doubt ahead of this weekend’s DUP party conference and the new leader’s first big set piece speech. The focus was consideration of a name change, to signal to the Northern Irish …
In The Irish Times Trevor Ringland challenges an oddly identitarian idea that’s been in vogue recently in ways it was not during the actual Troubles (especially if you had read An Phoblacht regularly) that it was the IRA that brought civil rights. This odd philosophy (which the comedian Andrew Doyle correctly acknowledges is present in both mainstream right and left discourses elsewhere) associates wrong doing, not by the individuals responsible, but layered for guilt primarily by identity. This has been …
