Wonderful. Thank you, ruadh.
Sinn Fein are sepected to take 3 seats, with a strong possibility that they can take 5. Which is a great result. It’s doubtful that it will have much effect over the whole outcome seeing as Fine Gael (the current opposition) would rather let Fianna Fail (current government party ) have a minority government than allow Sinn Fein into a coalition.
Sinn Féin have won three seats, are definitely expected to take two more, have a reasonable likelihood of a sixth and a possiblity of a seventh.
Absolutely brilliant.
Would any of you good Irish folks be willing to explain the basic difference between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail in a way that would make sense to folks on the other side of the Big Pond? Thanks.
fine Gael and Fianna Fail are practically the same, if only for a difference in policy. Fine Gael are slightle more right wing than Finna Fail.
Sinn Fein have now taken 4 seats, with a close seat in Dublin south Central being recounted tomorrow.
Today has been brilliant so far.
I’d say that the only difference between FF and FG is that the latter don’t even pretend to be republican.
SF’s total= five seats (Monaghan/Cavan, Louth, Kerry North, Dublin South West and Dublin South Central), with a potential sixth (Dublin Central) going to recount tomorrow - right now they’re saying he lost by 74 votes, but I talked to a couple people involved in the counting and there were a number of irregularities that need to be sorted out. I suspect he probably won’t get past them, but at least he came close. Damn close.
I’m just back - note the time - from the SF victory celebration. The Dublin South Central winner, Aengus Ó Snodaigh, showed up and I chatted with him for quite a while - he’s an absolute star and I can’t even begin to list all the reasons I’m thrilled he got in.
The friend who invited me to the gathering, a longtime Sinn Féin worker, former political prisoner etc., said to me: It hasn’t really sunk in yet, but in a couple days I’ll realise this is the biggest thing that’s happened in my life.
Can’t wait to see the Brit and West Brit press try to spin this.
Oh, OK, I’m too buzzed to sleep so I’ll list some of the brilliant things about Aengus.
[ul]
[li]I asked him how many transfers he got from Áine Ní Chonaill (the Nazi bitch also running in DSC) - his reply: “Too many”.[/li][li]When I first met him I said “Do something about the work permit scheme!” and he said “That’s at the top of my agenda.” Of course I thought to myself, yeah right, typical pol, but when we sat and had a long talk later I found out it really is - as an SF constituency worker in an area with a lot of immigrants he’s dealt with this on a regular basis and completely agrees the system needs a major overhaul.[/li][li]At about 5 a.m. when we were all still drinking somebody said to him, “Aengus, do you know your first act as TD was to break the licensing laws?” and he said … erm maybe I should just leave this one at that ;)[/li][li]He’s adorable, in a li’l brother sort of way.[/li][/ul]
What a night.
I feel your pain. Seems we had a few “irregularities” in our last general election, too. Or so the claim has been made.
Neither party has a strong ideological basis. This leaves them free to take up or abandon policy objectives whenever convenient.
The historical difference between the two dates back to the civil war (1921-22), with Fianna Fail deriving from the Republican side and Fine Gael from the Free State side of that conflict. The political force that would become Fine Gael held power for the first ten years of the existence of the State, before losing an election to FF in the early 30s. This peaceful transition of power, combined with ruthless repression by de Valera’s FF government against his former republican colleagues, assured the survival of Ireland’s young democracy.
Civil war allegiances remained a strong influence on voting patterns for decades, indeed up to the present day. In addition, FF’s constituency is traditionally a combination of the working man and small farmers, while FG has drawn support from the middle class and wealthy farmers. Labour, possibly the oldest party in the country, has thus found its constituency usurped by FF, and this, combined with suspicion from the Catholic Church of Labour’s (not very) socialist position, has left Labour with a relatively small and mostly urban support base (as represented by people like me, for example).
The Progressive Democrats are a new party from the 1980s, a Thatcherite offshoot of FF, which espouses economic and social liberalism and clean government. It is supported by non-left academics, wealthy professionals and other bourgeois types, and has done surprisingly well in this election. We optimistically expected it would be wiped out.
Sinn Fein only began to contest Dail elections in the past ten years, and finds its main support base in disenfranchised working class areas, where people are concerned about crime, political corruption and social issues. SF got 6.5% of first preferences this time round. The Greens and other minor parties have also done well, at the expense of FG and Labour.
The only thing I’d add to hibernicus’ excellent post about the differences (or lack of them) between FF and FG is that FG were led in a more liberal, social democratic direction in the early 1980s by the then Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald. This involved a greater focus on social services and the first referendum on divorce. This also led to a sharpening of the divide between the traditional rural ‘big farmers’ side of the party and the perceived urban intellectual side. It is the latter wing that have suffered most in this election.
This must be confusing for you foreigners because we have said that FF is more left wing than FG and also the reverse. The reality is that both is the case, because of the ‘broad church’ nature of the parties. The last FF/PD administration were positioned more on the right and this is likely to continue, albeit with a greater focus on health and education.
The Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevey, said that the electorate not only voted the Government back in, they also voted the opposition out. That is as good a summary of the outcome as I have heard.
Ruadh, congrats on the good showing of SF. I’m just curious but is Aengus O Snodaigh related to the O Snodaighs who are in Kila?
The only thing that I would add to the two excellent descriptions of the difference between FG and FF is that they are both very like New Labour - Conservative with a hint of socialism. The differences are really more perceptions based on history and location.
But on the subject of the election,
The Greens earned six seats. SF got five. FF didn’t get a majority.
As far as I’m concerned it was a good result.
Also I got to go to the count and see what was going on - It is actually very exciting, despited the long periods of hanging around and it was historic as it will probably be the last manually counted election.
All, keep your fingers crossed for Kathy Sinnott and Nicky Kelly.
Haven’t got a clue, manwithaplan.
I agree with Pergau that it’s generally a good result overall, though I’d like to have seen Labour do better and the PDs do worse. And I’m still bummed about Nicky 
Oops. According to this site Aengus is their brother. Well there couldn’t be too many of them, could there? 
I wonder what difference electronic voting would have made in this election, particularly in the close races (like Nicky’s sniff). Does anyone know how that works, i.e. do voters push different buttons in sequential order to rank their preferences? One of the counters I spoke to said that there were a number of paper ballots that had to be discarded due to people simply ticking off names rather than ranking candidates by preference; unfortunately, in Dublin Central, a lot of these were (would-be) SF voters.
One of the guys caught in Colombia was Sinn Fein’s official representative to Cuba. This is prima facie evidence of an institutional link between SF, the IRA and other world terror groups.
It may turn out that Niall Connolly was acting on his own and without the knowledge of Adams etc, but the prima facie evidence is there so there is a case to answer.
Also SF and the IRA have marxist (ie extremist) political roots and the SF website still talks about the redistribution of wealth.
I’m not saying SF are “bad” or that people shouldn’t vote for them, I just sometimes wonder if some people view them with slightly rose-tinted spectacles.
No, it isn’t. One person on his own is perfectly capable of acting as an individual rather than as an “institutional link”. If it were two SF official representatives down there you might have a point.
Sinn Féin are socialists? Well that’s something nobody who voted for them knew :rolleyes:
Sorry - forgot to add that I’ve seen it argued twice recently (once by David Ervine of the PUP and the other time by a journalist, sorry can’t remember who or in what paper) that the Colombia thing is actually evidence of the IRA’s increasing independence from SF - the journalist seemed to believe that Gerry Adams’s initial denial of any SF role for Niall Connolly was genuine. The journalist was not from the republican press and as I recall the whole point of his article was to present a rather doomsday scenario for the peace process on the grounds that the politicians are not in control of the military men, an argument Ervine also made. I’m personally convinced that there is no risk to the peace process from the 'Ra but it’s quite an interesting turn of events to have even loyalists acknowledge the separation between them and Sinn Féin, don’t you think?
David Ervine has my utmost respect: not for his politics, but his brutal and extreme honesty. He’s a man people can do business with.
That’s more or less how it works - there was a demo. machine here in the Department. The first button you press brings up a ‘one’, the next a ‘two’ etc. At the end you push a ‘confirm’ button or clear your preferences and go again. Votes cannot be spoilt under the electronic system.
It will also change how votes are counted. Full proportionality will be applied to each candidate’s votes to determine where their transfers go as they are elected. In other words, all the next preferences are counted to calculate the proportion that should go to each of the other candidates and this ratio is applied to the surplus to determine the actual votes transferred. This is a marked difference to the current system, where the last transfers in (the ones on top of the bundles) are the first transfers out. In the current system you can, if you’re machiavellian enough, devise a strategy to get your vote moving in order to have the greatest impact.
The new counting system is fairer but it wasn’t used in the three trial constituencies as all 42 constituencies had to use the same method.
You can’t be serious?! This is absolutely riven with potential for abuse. For example, in the Dublin North-East constituency the boxes were opened pretty much in order from Darndale to Howth. This means that the surplus of anyone elected with a quota of 1st preferences would be drawn from the votes of the wealthier constituents for redistribution, and the second preferences from the poorer areas would go in the bin.
I assumed that some kind of attempt would be made to take a sample of votes from each of the boxes for distribution.
Thank goodness we’ll have electronic voting next time round.
I believe (i.e. someone told me :)) that under the current system preferences are allocated proportionately to the actual vote for the second count - but that for third and subsequent counts they’re drawn more or less at random. This is, indeed, a system with serious fraud potential and I’m surprised it hasn’t been challenged before.