Fianna Fail emerges as largest party in Irish election

[SouthBayDem]

Last edited Tue Dec 3, 2024, 12:53 AM - Edit history (2)

Source: BBC

Fianna Fail has won the most seats in the Dil (lower house of parliament) following the Republic of Ireland's general election.

It won 48 seats while Sinn Fein - the main opposition party in the last Dail - won 39.

Fine Gael, which has been in coalition with Fianna Fail since 2020, was third with 38 seats.

Those two parties seem best placed to form a new government, but Sinn Fein insists it will still be involved in the coalition talks.

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpdnlv8n758o

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Wikipedia on FF:

... a centre to centre-right political party in Ireland. Ideological classifications of the party vary; the party is commonly referred to as conservative, though it has also been described as Christian democratic, liberal or ideologically ambiguous.

[Polybius]

1. Is this good news or bad news?

[Prairie Gates]

2. For whom?

[SouthBayDem]

3. Fianna Fail is the Irish conservative party

in line with the UK Conservative Party or US Republicans according to this chart, while Fine Gael is a more "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" party.

FF + FG combined have 86 seats, while liberal Sinn Fein and Labour have 50.

[OnDoutside]

7. Lol, no they're not. Apart from the tiny far right fringe, most of the political parties in the Republic of Ireland are

to the left of the Democratic Party.

Sinn Fein are a populist party controlled from Northern Ireland by the Belfast based Army Council (many of whom were in the Provisional IRA). They're pro Russia, and anti US (except when they're collecting money from people who should know better in the US). You should read the hate Biden stuff coming from them.

To be fair Fianna Fail are a populist party too, but do it better than SF.

Labour, and its offshoot Social Democrats are traditional parties of the left.

PBP/SP (People Before Profit/Socialist Party) are in the Trotskyist direction.

[SomewhereInTheMiddle]

4. Sinn Fein is listed as an Irish republican, democratic socialist and left-wing party.

Wikipedia

But for many the republican part is the most important or the most frightening. They strongly support the reunification of northern and southern Ireland into a single republic. Historically they were allied with the IRA and other republican paramilitary groups. But that has changed in the last decades. They now espouse peaceful means of achieving their goal.

This is my limited understanding as an American with an Irish surname. It was influenced by my experiences living in London in the mid-1980's. There were some IRA bombings while I was there. And I was accused more than once of financially supporting the IRA simply because I was an American with an Irish surname. It was not the case, and I was never involved with or interested in republican issues. But that was sometimes hard to convince people there.

This does not even touch on a very odd St. Patrick's night I spent at an Irish pub in London where the DJ who had been playing some great Irish music broke into the playlist to announce - "You may all have heard of what happened to [names of some IRA terrorist who had been sentenced that week]. Now I am not going to say you should bomb the judge's house. But here is his address..." Then gave out the address!

I have no idea what modern Sinn Fein stands for other than reunification, but part of me thinks their not gaining a majority may help maintain peace in the region. This may be an outdated, ignorant reaction. But there it is.

[OnDoutside]

8. Nope, you are mostly correct. They took the Good Friday Agreement because they were ultimately getting nowhere and

getting older. Their problem is that the GFA deal was that a United Ireland vote would happen when the Northern Ireland secretary judged that there was a good chance of it passing, so the way demographics was shifting in NI, "catholics" would end up in a majority eventually, so they didn't have to try and work at making the NI economy better.

In fact they felt they could continue to exact a high price for the UK government in holding onto NI, by obstructing economic development, which they have done as last year it cost the UK government £16bn to balance the books in NI. Worse, they have wasted the last 25 years by not trying to add unionists to those who would be happy to accept a UI by building trust through actions. NI is as sectarian as ever, with 93% of the NI Education system split along religious lines, while there are in the region of 160 peace walls, where there were only 19 in 1998.

The Republican attitude to Unionists is we're going to win, so you can either accept it or get the boat back to England.

There are problems with this obviously, not least because there are 12,500 loyalist paramilitaries and SF continue to back them into a corner. It's an incredibly short sighted policy.

The biggest problem is that IF there were a border poll in NI tomorrow, there would also have to be one in the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Nationalists (because of the cult like propaganda) expect us to fall over ourselves and vote to take them in. However, we in the Republic moved on from 1998 and we rarely think about NI unless there's trouble. One of our chief economists John Fitzgerald did a report which estimate that taking NI in could cost us €20bn a year for 20 years. SF of course rubbished it (sending out non economists plants) but as i said, it cost the UK government £16bn this year to balance the books. Plus of course, there's the sectarianism and no one is talking about the short and at least medium term effect on our towns and cities in the Republic of Ireland because all development investment would have to poured into NI, as a cost to us in the Republic, where we would have to pay extra in tax and/or cut public services.

[OnDoutside]

6. This is good news, as the alternative was destabilising my country.

[moniss]

5. So more of the same failure

for average people. Years and years of lip service about how they are going to take care of housing etc. and then proceed to mainly take care of themselves, the people with lots of money etc. all while laying down like a dog as far as enforcement of the GFA, sitting quiet during British sandbagging of required investigations etc. They're absolutely right to have Fail in their name. There has never been doubt that Martin and others place more importance on what serves 10 Downing Street than what serves Ireland.

Hey Michael Martin could you and your rich friends at least pay more attention to the train system so it doesn't keep deteriorating? F**king Gombeen shite.

[OnDoutside]

9. That's just not true. The government of the Republic of Ireland has if anything, done too much to help NI.

SF have deliberately obstructed the economy in NI, to put a huge economic cost on the UK exchequer, and then blamed everyone else (that's not to absolve the DUP in anyway either) but they cry bitter tears when NI has a housing backlog that will take 50 years to clear, so they can go shove it.

SF would be far better served knuckling down to build bridges with unionists and improve the NI economy rather than coming whinging to us in the Republic, where we've moved on and don't care about nationalist moaning.

The housing crisis is a problem in every country in the West, this isn't solely a problem in the Republic. They are taking steps to ramp up house building but it will take time. There were 9,000 new apprenticeships taken on last year from a low base, and it was a low base because no one wanted to buy a house from 2011 to 2020. We lost a load of trades through retirements/downsizing and emigration.

[moniss]

10. This isn't mainly about

the 6 counties. But as far as deliberate obstruction it was not SF that kept Stormont out for so long. Furthermore the Unionists have continued to carry on discrimination against Catholics with an approving pat on the head from London. The giant pout they've put on over Brexit was the height of childish behavior and it was their Overseers in the Tories who wanted it all so bad anyway.

Nobody said the housing crisis is unique to Ireland and I've been on record before about how we get promises of "goals to be met in the coming years" when they haven't ever met a goal in 20 years.

Rubbish to FF and the weak in the knees in FG. Shite is the lot of them.