Could the people force an election? Looking for suggestions.

zig

Hi,
It is clear FF have made many mistakes in the past 10 years, but the lack of responsibility they have showed in the past 2 years is nothing but disastrous.
There's no point any more in getting into details of FF, and I understand either way this country will have face very harsh measures for the next few years. Many of which will be as a result of a bailout, but even if not the measures will have to be harsh.
We currently have a government that the vast vast majority of people in the country do not want, currently 82% of voters feel this way as it stands.

Every one wants an election but I guess the public in general is quite passive in its actions. Theres a few reasons for this, some people just dont care, thats fair enough. If they dont care why put in any effort. Other people do care, but have a helpless feeling, I think this is the case for most people that do care. And others just don't have the time. This is the reality of the situation so you have to be rational in trying to think of ideas for the people to force an election. I hate the use of words like 'revolution' and 'rise', because it makes the whole thing sound a bit romantic , but in a nutshell this is what is needed.

Is there ANYONE in this country that finds it insane to have such an unpopular government still in power?

Im looking for realistic suggestions in how this could be done. One idea I had was a semi rotating permanent protest outside the Dail until an election is announced. This would probably have to include mostly unemployed people for a few reasons:
a: Theres plenty of them (im one myself)
b: They have the time , you cant expect people to take days off.
c: Unemployed people probably represent the biggest group that has been affected by FF decisions.

Lets say theres 500K unemployed (if someone could give me more accurate figure it'd be great), Im going to try and be realistic and conversative and say out of that, 10% would be willing to protest, I worry that Im probably even being too generous there. But thats 50,000 people. If you could divide that by 10 days, you could have 5000 people outside the dail for a straight 10 days, this could repeat itself until a result is achieved.
In theory this would be a realistic because it means someone only has to make the trip once every ten days so not much effort is required. The figure is also realistic as I am only referring to unemployed people, what about the other 100s of 1000s that might be interested.

Anyway, probably alot of naivete in my post, and alot of presumptions, like one of the biggest headaches, how on Earth do you actually organise something like that cost free. Other things like, how do you keep people occupied all day, are they just going to stand around and refuse to move for the Gardai?? What are the legalities with protests and what laws might you have to break (if any) for this to go ahead succesfully?
But I thought id use this thread for a place to discuss PRACTICAL methods on removing FF from power.
Thanks.

Biggins

I wouldn't worry too much now.
This FF/Green shower are on their last legs - if not days or weeks!
There is too much rocking of the boat now.

(FG says they won't support them - Labour won't - so it comes down to the Greens and Independents.)

For example:

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/fianna-fail-revolt-threatens-budget-2410771.html

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/pressure-on-cowen-to-reveal-what-he-knew-months-before-bank-guarantee-2410676.html

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/john-drennan/john-drennan-rebel-td-declares-war-on-taoiseach-2410770.html

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/budget-figures-are-all-wrong-says-economist-2410747.html


...and thats just one day!

zig

Good point, and I hope you're right! It seems for now they are all content on leaving it till after christmas, but I guess Id be willing to wait that long.

The Volt

Every day this shower stay in government causes more damage to this country. The sooner they get out the better. The absolute cheek of them appealing the high court decision to set a date for the bye-election in Donegal S/W. There's actually no depths to which they wont go to stay in power it seems.

It leaves us with the situation where it appears they'd rather stay in government for another 4 months at the cost of utter humiliation at 4 seperate bye-elections. Then their majority will have been lost and the long overdue general election will be called.

greendom

With the demand for a budget projections for the next 4 years, there really needed to be a general election or concensus between major parties (yeah right!!) before the next one. It's not going to happen now, unless something really major happens. The short-sightedness of the political elite is really annoying and will continue to bring the country down.

Skrynesaver

One possibility is a mass protest outside the Dail on budget day that doesn't allow FF politicians through, thus forcing the failure of a finance bill and precipitating an election.

A sort of "if you won't allow us to vote ... " protest.

cavedave

I dont think this should be done. It would be cutting your nose off to spite your face.

But the only thing the government care about are the banks. If people started withdrawing their money until an election was called one would be called very quickly.

imme

there seem to be a lot of these type of threads nowadays.

the people could:

-engage in politics
-have a revolution
-stage a coup
-take part in civil disobdience
-strike

other than that there's not much more you could do

HellFireClub

I've little doubt at this stage that there is some kind of a backroom deal being knocked together between FF and FG or Labour in order to get this budget through the house, "in the national interest"...

alang184

None of the parties have the bottle to do what is in the Irish citizens interest, because whoever gets into power next will have to try to keep good relations with Europe. FF have blatantly put party-before-people by not letting Anglo's loans default, or at least dramatically renegotiate, and the worrying thing is the other parties would probably follow the same line.

The secrecy bothers me. There's so much stuff going on in the background within government, within parties, and right now probably between parties; things which the citizens must not find out about. Labour is possibly the only party with any shred of credibility. But they have a terrible lack of talent (cue, McBrearty Junior).

The best chance of the government failing is, in my opinion, FF backbench revolt, or possibly even Green's refusing to support. A catalyst for this may be mass protest over the proposed pension reform, or any other protest for that matter.

What it all comes down to is individual TDs deciding on when is the right time to get out of government for the sake of their own chance in an imminent election. FF backbenchers and Green's seems to be the most likely for this, particularly the Greens. Their reputation is shot. But they may choose to bring down the government to try to salvage their own reputation.

Sleepy

Aside from murdering enough government TD's or otherwise ensuring that they don't have the numbers, there's nothing the people can do.

Perhaps Gerry and the boys could hone up their kidnapping skills in the genuine national interest this time?

zig

Sleepy wrote: »

Aside from murdering enough government TD's or otherwise ensuring that they don't have the numbers, there's nothing the people can do.

This is the attitude im talking about though. Its not that theres nothing people can do, its that theres nothing people will do.

greendom

zig wrote: »

This is the attitude im talking about though. Its not that theres nothing people can do, its that theres nothing people will do.

This is very true, if France (for example) was as fecked as Ireland is, there is no way Sarkozy would still be in power. Just recently we've seen the demonstrations over the relatively minor issue of raising the retirement age is to 62.

If the will was there to do something the government would have to take stop and reconsider

ei.sdraob

Sleepy wrote: »

there's nothing the people can do.

I said this before

get a few thousand people thruout the country to avoid paying taxes as a form of civil disobedience until an election is called.


watch the government crumble, they simply dont have the resources to jail everyone and doing so would look very bad abroad especially once foreign media find out we are being denied a democratic election.

Mr.Applepie

Skrynesaver wrote: »

One possibility is a mass protest outside the Dail on budget day that doesn't allow FF politicians through, thus forcing the failure of a finance bill and precipitating an election.

A sort of "if you won't allow us to vote ... " protest.

I think this is actually illegal. Someone mentioned on a thread a few months back that it is illegal to stop a TD from entering the Dail

greendom

Mr.Applepie wrote: »

I think this is actually illegal. Someone mentioned on a thread a few months back that it is illegal to stop a TD from entering the Dail

I think you're missing the point there.

RedXIV

The thing is though. who would you vote for?

I can honestly say I'm not happy voting for FF, FG, Labour, Greens or Sinn Fein, I can't see how any of them would get the necessary work done.

I'm actually really confused about this.

When's boards.ie's political party coming to fruition??

Sparks43

Mr.Applepie wrote: »

I think this is actually illegal. Someone mentioned on a thread a few months back that it is illegal to stop a TD from entering the Dail

Wouldnt take much work to stop them

Look at the amount of empty seats in the Dail

Most of them dont bother to turn up anyway:rolleyes::mad:

Sleepy

zig wrote: »

This is the attitude im talking about though. Its not that theres nothing people can do, its that theres nothing people will do.

The people of Ireland can protest til they're blue in the face or on the bread line having lost their jobs for non-attendence and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to the shower in power at the moment. They're not seeking to do the best for the country, they'd have called an election last year if they did. All they want is to eek out their political existence and huge salaries for as long as they can and get as many of the lads over the line to be entitled to ludicrous pensions as possible.