Ireland's political and cultural magazine
The recent General Election was a very good one for Sinn Féin. We increased our number of TDs from 14 to One thing is clear: the after-math promises to be far more interesting than the insipid election campaign, a campaign defined by the monotony of the government’s ‘Keep the Recovery Going’ message. It may have resonated […]
Transfers matter under proportionate representation though perhaps more for psephologists and party tacticians than in terms of actual electoral difference. Noel Whelan, for example, notes that: “only 12 or 13 of the 158 deputies in the new Dáil will win their seats because of transfers. If we stopped counting after the first counts and declared […]
The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the […]
The story of an election is much more than a few headlines, but the Irish Times front pages mercifully, if languidly, devoid of the kind of blatantly partisan positioning seen elsewhere, provide in hindsight a neat narrative of the campaign, with the slow realisation that Fine Gael was in trouble, the lack of a clear alternative […]
The election is over, but the prospect of forming a government is still somewhat distant. This probably shouldn’t surprise us. Apart from the outgoing Fine Gael-Labour government none of the other parties were really proposing to go into government. Their campaigns were based on a critique of the incumbent government. The Irish people roundly rejected the […]
Will the 2016 election bury the idea that the left-right divide is the key one in politics? For most of the 20th century choices facing voters in Europe were to go for parties that said they’d tax more and spend the fruits on public services (the left) or those who would provide fewer public services and […]
Electi On Right, Villager thinks there’ll be a hung Dáil. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will struggle to work out whether they should coalesce, risking their exposure as ideological charlatans and the long-term growth of Sinn Féin. Another election within a year. The prognosis is tentative since around here there is no worse crime than […]
In 2011 we wrote in this space, “You would think from our recent history of some of the most notoriously bad governance on the planet, that we would have learnt that our political classes need to be replaced. In fact, this election time we see no new ideas”. Sadly democracy in Ireland needs an overhaul every bit […]