Isn’t striking the way the establishment chooses to act when an election is up ahead?
In 2014, Gerry Adams was arrested and held with a brouhaha of publicity shortly before an election in the North. Then released without charge. Now there’s a vital election soon to happen in the South, the search for the body of Joe Lynskey,one of the disappeared, has resumed amid announcements and headlines. No one for a moment should underestimate the tragedy and pain that Lynskey’s death involved; but likewise we all should be aware when the deaths of others are used for political purposes.
Which, oddly enough, leads us to Friday’s election itself. During Tuesday’s TV debate, both Micheál Martin and Simon Harris dismissed any question of their party going into government with Sinn Féin. Why is that? Micheál Martin expressed astonishment that he should even be asked the question; Simon Harris said something about the Sinn Féin policies not being in line with those of Fine Gael. But essentially it was the same old “We wouldn’t dream of going into government with Sinn Féin and sure why would anyone think we’d even consider it?”.
Could it be that this is intended to produce a cordon sanitaire around Sinn Féin, election after election, until public opinion has been pummeled into believing that of course, no political party that is self-respecting would have anything to do with Sinn Féin? Even though Sinn Féin is a hugely popular, completely legal party, a moral exclusion must be created and Sinn Féin must be frozen out of any possibility of government, until eventually nobody in the public will so much as say “Boo!” to this holier-than-thou approach. This would appear to be the goal of the two traditional, tedious and terribly upright parties that tonight have left 4,000 children homeless, while they, the government parties, sit on mounds of cash.
Chilling, I call it.
It makes my eyeballs bleed. And Malcolm McDowell bloviating in the Anglo Irish Times.
FFFG continue to undermine the GFA at every turn, their endless, transparent attempts to isolate & demonise SF for their own electoral ambitions. Surely having voted in favour of GFA, they should be guardians of the hard won peace, instead what we see is the naked hatred directed towards SF, aided by the very biased media here.
No. It is called normal party politics. Very tame in comparison with what Republicans and Democrats throw at each other in a US election cycle when they go all hyper-partisan and cultural warr-like. Populist parties that dish it out and are no strangers to using situations themselves, backed up by their enormous electoral war-chests, have to be prepared to take it back when it comes their way. You cannot go all moral pontificating and virtue-signalling on speed and not expect others to challenge your bona fides.
Very good jude free Palestine
As an old collegian of Arc Macha myself, I find myself thinking along the same lines as the sentiment so eloquently expressed by Mr Collins. Indeed, further to that I think both FF/FG ( or are they one party really?) forget where they have emanated from in the bloody history of the Free State, they – and in particular FF- truly talk out of both sides of their mouths. I am not a SF supporter by any means at all but in the relatively trouble free history of the Free State since the thirties surely the electorate will wake up one day and realise the mess, and continuing mess that will continue to evolve from the ruddermanship of this money grabbing self interested junta, and give another major party a day in the governance of our Island. In my view this FFFG double act couldn’t run a tap never mind a government ( see the housing crisis for an example of that)