Irish electorate

conorlechance

Just watching Vincent Browne, one of the people on the panel think she is from the Tribune said that the newspapers in Ireland are right wing, mainly because the 'Irish electorate are right wing'.

Do you agree?

I'd also say 90% of them are sheep but thats just me.

who_ru

extremely conservative yes - but right wing has more serious connotations.

dave-higgz

Yeah we're definitely not American right wing instead we lean to the centre. We're over 90% catholic and we've voted the same centre right parties in since we've had a vote. Labour is not a strong left wing party, Sinn Fein don't count and the Greens are in bed with FF. So ye "right" is a fair enough comment

r0nanf

Absolutely. We are a non secular state, where abortion is still illegal and we have only in relatively recent times made divorce & contraception legally available. There is also a nationalistic undertone (not the nice flag waving kind) in many walks of society. I would consider both conservatism and nationalism as right wing societal movements.

Our economic policies (despite Bertie's protestations and our pseudo-welfare state) are right wing, although that may begin to change in the ashes of our economy.

Never mind the inability of a sober adult to purchase alcohol after 10pm...

Extremely conservative.:(

Sand

Socially conservative...theres not much else right about Ireland though.

The government is heavily involved in "managing" the economy through social partnership, cedes vast amount of state power to trade unions and holds a lot of the economic actors in state ownership, price controls and laws set to appease particular interest groups ( laws made to restrict off licence sales to help publicans for example). About the most right wing the state has done is introduce and retain a low corporation tax, which has been very successful.

The_Minister

I would say that the Irish media actually is pretty left-leaning generally.

Riskymove

I do think that the succesful tiger years resulted in a lot of people moving to the right (its usually a consequence of an increase in wealth), particularly on social issues (welfare, crime and rehabilitation, etc)