who now for bertie??

constitutionus

seeing as its exactly two weeks since this affair started and with no word from Macdowel all day , which must be some kind of record, it looks likely that the PD/FF gov will fall.

now this doesnt mean an election. berties riding all the critisms out and FF will only turf him out if the cynicism spills over to your avereage FF voter and he becomes a liabilty to the party so the question now becomes who will be the new bedfellows for Fianna Fail?

i'll confess im not that au fait with the make up of the independants but commentators in FF say they'll have no proplem wooing partners for the rest of the government term so what do you reckon. who are the likely suspects? and which ones do you think are the dark horses. and more importantly, with 8 months left what do you think they'll get for their troubles??

have fun

Akrasia

i think any independent who rallies behind this moribund government will be very foolish indeed.

Darragh29

It just goes to show how power crazy the FF members of cabinet actually are. In 9 years they have manged to put house prices far beyond the reach of most Irish people starting off in their adult lives, they are responsible for traffic gridlock becoming a permanent feature of living in the capital, they are responsible for the cost of living being basically unaffordable, I believe the health service could do with more investment and beds, to care for more people in the country, however this government have wasted the fruits of the most recent years to make this investment, but they want to stay in government for another lousy 8 months to fu*k up more, to waste more on projects that are never delivered or are detective like e-voting or PPARS, to reduce the quality of life of Irish people further.

For my own two cents worth, if the PD's walk and the government gets propped up by the likes of twats like Jackie Healy Rae et al for the sakes of eight more months of bums on ministerial Merc seats, I'll be outside the Dail with my plackard.

Darragh29

Any independent who get involved in this FF scam for 8 months of power would need their head examined. No matter what list of demands they make, they won't get them delivered in 8 months, no matter what the most cunning and devious of them all has to promise them...

Collie D

If the PDs do walk (and I pray that they do as I can't see how any party with such a low support can have so much power) then FF should bite the bullet and call an election instead of hanging on for another few months. Will be watching closely to see who aligns themselves with FF should they decide to stick it out (and let's face it, they have the bare-faced cheek to do so) and I hope the country remembers them come election time.

LostinBlanch

You have to remember that there is a €2.5 billion budget coming up in two months so the Independents will get a slice of that for pet projects for their constituencies.

The Cavan Monaghan hospital candidate was on Newstalk this morning saying that he was elected to make sure that the hospital was upgraded / protected and that was his price basically. Given that 10,000 people turned up to throw gravel at Rory O'Hanlon recently I think he'd be safe to think that this is one issue that his constituents would like to get sorted whoever is in power.

I wonder how the PDs would spin it if FF threw them out of govt in favour of the independents (assuming they had the numbers). PDs would have lost the moral high ground (well whatever little of that they had left) and would be out in the cold while FF are throwing our money around like snuff at a wake in the budget.

Nuttzz

bertie will keep the head down for a while, cowen will open the purse in december and by spring the average joe will be too happy with his tax cuts and his ssia to give a feck about this, as one person said to me (rather stupidly i might add) 8 grand sure I got more from my ssia....the fact that he had to save for most of it was lost on him....but that is some of the attitude out there

constitutionus

well macdowels come out and said he's fully supporting the government so it looks like thats it for the PDs. they had to choose between power and principles and they chose power. i reckon theyre gonna reap the whirlwind big time on this one. this time next year i reckon they'll only have two TDs and mary and macdowel wont be among them. its extinction for the party now, the enduring image of the PDs at the last election was micky d going up a lampost saying he'll be the watchdog against FF. well to use higgins analogy he pissed all over that now. to any rational voter now theres no difference between the PDs and FF so why vote for the much smaller former when you can have the bigger latter

as a comentator on newstalk said earlier if O Malley was still in power he'dve walked. the partys finished, at least for a decade. it seems the PDs moral high ground was just the nadir of a deep deep valley

SeanW

I was away for a couple of weeks. What happened?