Article on the Irish Situation

edwinkane

Occasionally, I read a small circulation publication which has interesting articles, or at least thought provoking ones. While I hesitate to reproduce it here, fearing that the points made therein are open, by some, to be ignored and individuals personally attacked, as a way of ignoring the points, I have decided that it's a good article to reproduce. It's from here http://critical-reaction.co.uk/2941/28-02-2011-there-s-more-and-worse-to-come-in-ireland and the full article is reprinted here;

"To say that Ireland’s general election last week garnered global headlines would be true up to a point, if typical of the local tendency to exaggerate the rest of the world’s concern for all things Irish. The New York Times despatched of the event briefly on its tenth page while even Le Monde’s usually exhaustive coverage of Europe’s vicissitudes confined itself to a short note mention of Sinn Fein’s expected surge. Yet although Ireland’s citizenry scarcely number that of a largish but not particularly populous European city, the election is nonetheless an extraordinary and revelatory event. Irish voters went to the polls only four months after the abject humiliation of being forced to accept around €100billion in new debt at the behest of its EU creditors, a so-called bail-out that burdens Irish taxpayers with impossible obligations to foreign bondholders who gambled unsuccessfully on their stricken banks. Rarely do Western democracies vote while quite so close to the abyss as Ireland just has; stripped of her fiscal sovereignty by the IMF, indebted far beyond hope of eventual repayment, and hobbled by a political culture soft on cronyism, corruption, and the extremist pasts of prominent public figures.

Although it is hard to overstate the magnitude of the political earthquake the election has produced in Ireland, some have. The performance of the victorious Fine Gael party, who might be said to constitute the backbone of the next government had the party not by now acquired a richly-merited reputation for spinelessness, has been widely called ‘unprecedented’. Yet is not quite so. While they have never before won so many seats or been the largest party in the Dail, the lower house of Ireland’s parliament, Fine Gael’s vote share was three percentage points short of their previous best. In political circumstances favouring opposition parties to a degree that truly was unprecedented, that is little vindication for the party’s tepid centre-right approximation of European-style Christian Democracy. It is still less of a triumph for the party’s insipid leader Enda Kenny, who in the venerable tradition of Irish politics effectively inherited his Dail seat from his father. Few are any more mindful to point out that the conquering hero nine months ago narrowly avoided being deposed as leader by his own exasperated colleagues in a failed putsch wit which most of his shadow cabinet collaborated.

The Irish Labour Party also recorded its best ever result in terms of seats won, but the much-heralded historic breakthrough out of its traditional urban bases and geographical catchment area simply did not happen. The slogan pushing the Labour leader Eamon Gilmore for the top job in Irish politics – ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’ – became one of the wry jokes of the campaign. By polling day, the party had been reduced to pleading with voters for a place in coalition with the embarrassing billboard pitch, ‘It’s Only Fair’, as if quota-allocated redistribution should apply to votes as well as to income or the gender balance in political representation.

Even the extent to which long-dominant Fianna Fail has been routed can be overstated, although not by much. Historically one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world, they retain a formidable membership base and a large number of local councillors. Their stunning repudiation at the hands of voters does not necessarily amount to obliteration, as the tenor of much commentary would suggest. As a party whose purpose has been patronage and power-brokerage rather than the pursuit of political principles as such, they may however find the task of self-definition as a niche party a possibly insuperable challenge.

What has been missed in the reshuffling of the positions of Ireland’s three main parties last weekend is a pronounced lurch to the left in Ireland, facilitated by the intellectual irresponsibility of the Irish establishment. The myth-making of the Celtic Tiger and the Irish economic miracle is long over. The country is being dragged down by a failure to confront the reality of its predicament alongside a retreat to Ireland’s traditional instinctive statism.

The leftward slide is sharp and has been overlooked in the concentration on Fine Gael’s victory. Most of Fianna Fail’s vanishing vote went not to Fine Gael but to movements of the left. Sinn Fein more than doubled its parliamentary representation. The unreconstructed United Left Alliance won five out of 166 seats. Taking both combined with similarly-minded independents, there is now to the left even of the Labour party a grouping amounting to almost a fifth of the Dail. That so large chunk of the Irish electorate has reverted to the comfort-blanket of class war rhetoric of an antique vintage is ominous. There is little sign that the electorate understands the extent of the austerity that Ireland must bear in addition to the cuts endured to date. With an indulgent and mostly leftist media failing to engage with the threat, the hard left is well-placed to do still better at election after this. The possibility that the next Irish government will be formed by Labour and the hard left, including Sinn Fein, is a real one. The ramifications would extent to Britain and the European Union if it came to pass.

The failure of the Irish establishment to check either the soft leftism of the Labour party or the resurgent far left is entirely in keeping with its instincts and the record of recent years. Instead, while mainstream politicians who support same-sex civil partnerships but not gay marriage face concerted calls for their summary dismissal, there is little if anything which Sinn Fein or leftist politicians can do in Ireland that will draw sincere and vocal criticism from the guardians of Irish conventional wisdom. Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore, the most likely Irish Foreign Minister, is a former Stalinist whose Cold War links included ties to Castro’s Cuba and the dictatorship in North Korea. He was an active member of the Workers’ Party during the period in which that organisation was the political front for the Official IRA, which in turn was linked to murders, bank robberies, and counterfeiting. None of this was a campaign issue. To raise the question as to whether a man with such a past is suitable for public life let alone the control of Irish diplomacy is almost universally considered to be something between a faux pas and a below-the-belt smear.

Likewise, Sinn Fein faced less hostile scrutiny from the Irish establishment during the campaign than did, for example, the entrepreneur Declan Ganley, who almost single-handedly defeated the Lisbon Treaty when it was first put to a referendum in Ireland in 2008. The contrast is dramatic and instructive, especially considering that the tacit designation of Sinn Fein as a whitewashed and normalised Irish political party contributed to it very nearly becoming the largest opposition party in the Dail.

Mr Ganley would be recognised in most English-speaking countries as a mainstream pro-market centre-right conservative but was vilified as a far-right authoritarian and xenophobic bigot for breaking with the pro-EU consensus that encompasses almost the entire Irish establishment. During the period of contention over the Lisbon Treaty, the state broadcaster RTE devoted a full episode of its flagship investigative programme to trawling through his affairs, despite finding not a single discreditable discovery. The Irish Times, a newspaper that matches the tendentiousness of The New York Times to the circulation of an American provincial daily, assigned a reporter to spend half a year on a similar, similarly fruitless trawl. The intellectual irresponsibility exhibited by the two enormously influential organisations in denouncing Lisbon Treaty opposition as extremist was closely followed by political figures across the Irish party spectrum. The determination of Ireland’s opinion-leading institutions to collapse the distinction between Euro-critical classical liberalism into a hankering after jackboots and coloured shirts helped leave Ireland intellectually defenceless against an imperial Brussels during the endgame before last November’s hostile ‘bail-out’. It is part of the reason why there has been no mainstream acknowledgement that rampant Europhilia and the catastrophic Irish decision to join the Euro are root causes of Ireland’s supplicant helplessness today. Despite the centrality of the EU membership and the euro to any analysis of the causes of the Irish crisis, neither properly became an election issue in their own right.

Equally conspicuous by the studied refusal of the Irish establishment’s refusal to raise the matter was the resurgence of Sinn Fein. Faced with what actually is a politically extreme organisation, the contrast between that party and Lisbon Treaty opponents was breath-taking in what it reveals about the assumptions and priorities of Irish public life. Gerry Adams faced no serious challenge to his suitability for office, duly topped the poll in his multi-seat constituency, and topped it off by remarking that he would never disown the IRA, all without incurring more than the most cursory of uninterested tut-tutting.

More often, the treatment of Sinn Fein has felt like a conspiracy of normalisation. A month before the election Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness was invited on to the national broadcaster’s weekly flagship programme, watched some Fridays by as many as one in four people in the country, and treated as an avuncular elder statesman rather than a former IRA commander. More spectacularly if less importantly, RTE’s Irish-language political editor emailed the family of the IRA victim Jean McConville to say ‘please do not send my anymore of this obnoxious crap’ after they issued a press release during the campaign highlighting the widely believed involvement of Gerry Adams in her murder. The political editor in question is himself a former member of the IRA, something not deemed a relevant consideration for his fitness to be in the job in the first place. There is no suggestion that he will be disciplined, let alone summarily dismissed, as would occur in any country with a minimally adequate culture of standards in public life. The consequence of the collective decision not to treat Sinn Fein as the anti-democratic force in Irish life that they are came quite close to seeing Gerry Adams become the leader of the Irish opposition.

Ireland’s election is being written and spoken of in terms that suggest that it truly does amount to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny’s description of the event as a ‘democratic revolution’. In truth, it more closely resembles is Act Two of a five act tragedy, taking the period following the 2008 banking collapse and its prelude as the first and wit a great deal of anguish and self-discovery to go.

There has, as Paul MacDonnell of Ireland’s Open Republic puts it, been no DNA-change in the Irish political culture. There is as yet little organised opposition to the Irish establishment’s enthusiasm for corporatism, Euro-federalism, and radical chic of both the communist and paramilitary varieties.

The danger of false hopes being dashed will make up the next instalment of the drama. The sense of catharsis Ireland experienced in removing Fianna Fail from office may not easily be understood outside the country but ran very deep. Expectations that the election of a new government will provide respite from the despair and dull grind afflicting the country will be roughly disappointed. The hard statistics of Ireland’s indebtedness mean that the crisis and its legacy will write off the aspirations of a generation of Irish men and women and the political consequences of such hopelessness cannot be foreseen in advance. The soul-searching and intellectual probity required after the fourth profound failure of the Irish state in ninety years of existence did not begin with this election just past. A new administration cannot but prove largely beside the point until that starts to happen."

Killer Pigeon

tl;dr

mike kelly

what a load of anti-european and anti-irish propaganda

sollar

Yeah seems the author just seems angry that we are not chasing gerry adams down the street with a big stick.

edwinkane

sollar wrote: »

Yeah seems the author just seems angry that we are not chasing gerry adams down the street with a big stick.

It seems to me the author is juxtaposing how a former murderer and terrorist might be treated by (i) the electorates of other european countries and (ii) by the political class of other countries with how Sinn Fein is treated and viewed in Ireland.

Rather than the author just seeming "angry", it seems to me more likely that youi don't like what he is saying, and so you have decided that he is angry to give yourself an excuse not to have to think about any of it.

MaceFace

I assume this has not made its way to any professional publication?

God, it was a hard read as it was just full of nonsense. Can I have those 10 minutes back?

edwinkane

MaceFace wrote: »

I assume this has not made its way to any professional publication?

God, it was a hard read as it was just full of nonsense. Can I have those 10 minutes back?

It's so easy to just rubbish work rather than make a coherant argument!

Unfortunately, to many looking at Ireland from afar, there are many truths expressed in the article. The lack of argument in your response does little to disabuse them of their agreement with much of it.

wonderfulname

That is horrifically badly written and seriously biased, oh wait, its Richard Waghorne, what else would one expect?

edwinkane

wonderfulname wrote: »

That is horrifically badly written and seriously biased, oh wait, its Richard Waghorne, what else would one expect?

It's ironic that you make a personal attack on the author, asking "what else would one expect?" ! Personally, I'd expect an argument to be discussed and the holes in it pointed out, and if the best argument you can come up with is to make a personal attack on the author, then that suggests you have no other argument.

Uncorruptable

edwinkane wrote: »

While I hesitate to reproduce it here, fearing that the points made therein are open, by some, to be ignored and individuals personally attacked, as a way of ignoring the points, I have decided that it's a good article to reproduce."

It appears your first instincts served you well, the politics forum on boards does seem to lack any real retorts other than mocking.

MaceFace

Uncorruptable wrote: »

It appears your first instincts served you well, the politics forum on boards does seem to lack any real retorts other than mocking.

Well allow me to expand on the problem I have with this poor article.

It was a momentus election result - it is the first time that FG have had more seats than FG, it is the first time the two biggest parties have gone into a collalition. We had had both a huge number of Independents and new TDs elected.
So, this is a momentus new Dail, but it is National politics and we don't expect that the rest of the world cares too much about what happened in the Dail because it is irrelevant to them.

For some stupid reason the writer then starts rabbiting on like a tabloid journalist.
Seriously, linking Gilmore to North Korea and Castro?
Talking about summary dismissal of a TD who is against gay marriage? Who has made that call?

Its all a ruse though to have a go at Sinn Fein who in the mind of the writer are just a bunch of criminals.
Does he not realise that the world has moved on and there are a large number of people involved in Sinn Fein that have never being involved with the IRA and are fully committed to democratic process.

It is just tabloid muck and I don't understand what the writer is actually trying to say because he writes it in such a condecending, convuluted fashion.

mike65

Rather long winded and offering no insights for anyone living here but its not aimed at an Irish readership.

edwinkane

I'm afraid you are guilty of the very vice of which you accuse the author! And yet you don't make a single argument, and just list your own prejudices.

MaceFace wrote: »

Seriously, linking Gilmore to North Korea and Castro?

MaceFace wrote: »

For some stupid reason the writer then starts rabbiting on like a tabloid journalist.

MaceFace wrote: »

Its all a ruse though to have a go at Sinn Fein who in the mind of the writer are just a bunch of criminals.

While you may well assume its all a "ruse" thats conjecture on your behalf, and merely displays your own prejudices.

I can't help noticing that you ignore all the arguments made in the article, and continue to attack the person making the arguments, calling him names and avoiding any actual debate!

edwinkane

mike65 wrote: »

Rather long winded and offering no insights for anyone living here but its not aimed at an Irish readership.

You are right. Can you think of another country in the civilised world who has embraced convicted murderers, and appears to think it bad manners to mention the blood on their hands? People in other countries simply don't understand how the other irish political parties just ignore that fact.

What is interesting is that the response here has been almost universally to ignore any points made in the article, and perhaps it is that feature of irish life, the abilty to ignore anything with which one finds unpleasant or with which one disagrees, which has brought ireland to the cliff edge where she sits precariously as we write. For many years so many voted in FF and completely ignored their culture of corruption and patronage, and their political and economic illiteracy.

mike65

I'm no fan of Grizzly Adams or even Eamon Gilmore particuarly but dragging up the old WP links with Cuba and North Korea smacks of desperation. His observation that much of Irelands vote has luched leftwards is to state the bleedin' obvious. Its not exactly unusual behaviour in bad times.

edwinkane

mike65 wrote: »

I'm no fan of Grizzly Adams or even Eamon Gilmore particuarly but dragging up the old WP links with Cuba and North Korea smacks of desperation. His observation that much of Irelands vote has luched leftwards is to state the bleedin' obvious. Its not exactly unusual behaviour in bad times.

Certainly, the WP links with Cuba and North Korea were not the most recent or relevant issues in the article.

MaceFace

edwinkane wrote: »

I'm afraid you are guilty of the very vice of which you accuse the author! And yet you don't make a single argument, and just list your own prejudices.


While you may well assume its all a "ruse" thats conjecture on your behalf, and merely displays your own prejudices.

I can't help noticing that you ignore all the arguments made in the article, and continue to attack the person making the arguments, calling him names and avoiding any actual debate!

My prejudices? What exactly would they be?
Oh yeah - I am prejudice against long winded, mixed message, name calling articles that would only ever see the light of day on the internet because any half decent editor would read the first few lines, realise that the author is talking complete crap.

Now, twice you have said I am displaying my "prejudices". What are these prejudices you think I am showing?

Humans eh!

edwinkane wrote: »

Ireland’s election is being written and spoken of in terms that suggest that it truly does amount to Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny’s description of the event as a ‘democratic revolution’. In truth, it more closely resembles is Act Two of a five act tragedy, taking the period following the 2008 banking collapse and its prelude as the first and wit a great deal of anguish and self-discovery to go.

The danger of false hopes being dashed will make up the next instalment of the drama. The sense of catharsis Ireland experienced in removing Fianna Fail from office may not easily be understood outside the country but ran very deep. Expectations that the election of a new government will provide respite from the despair and dull grind afflicting the country will be roughly disappointed. The hard statistics of Ireland’s indebtedness mean that the crisis and its legacy will write off the aspirations of a generation of Irish men and women and the political consequences of such hopelessness cannot be foreseen in advance. "

I think he is right on these points. There seems to be a collective relaxation of the mood of the population following the election and also a sliver of much needed optimism. Sadly I fear that Act Two of a five act tragedy will be how this period will be seen in the future. The population have been energised by flexing their power and will not hesitate to want to flex it again if their aspirations and demands are not met and people can be swayed by emotive and passionate rhetoric blinding them to realities and common sense.
The electorate may have killed the wasp, but the sting remains embedded.

Uncorruptable

edwinkane wrote: »

Can you think of another country in the civilised world who has embraced convicted murderers, and appears to think it bad manners to mention the blood on their hands?.

USA

edwinkane

MaceFace wrote: »

Oh yeah - I am prejudice against ... name calling articles that would only ever see the light of day on the internet because any half decent editor would read the first few lines, realise that the author is talking complete crap.

:

The irony is you say you are prejudiced against "name calling" yet the only name calling seen comes from you!

edwinkane

Uncorruptable wrote: »

USA

I wasn't aware that one of the political parties in america had its roots in murder, terrorism, extortion and robbery in recent years.

edwinkane

Humans eh! wrote: »

I think he is right on these points. There seems to be a collective relaxation of the mood of the population following the election and also a sliver of much needed optimism. Sadly I fear that Act Two of a five act tragedy will be how this period will be seen in the future. The population have been energised by flexing their power and will not hesitate to want to flex it again if their aspirations and demands are not met and people can be swayed by emotive and passionate rhetoric blinding them to realities and common sense.
The electorate may have killed the wasp, but the sting remains embedded.

the reaction following the election has similarities to the 1997 election of Labour in the UK, where the UK heaved a sigh of relief to get rid of an unpopular tory government which was in power for too long. However, this is not the end for Ireland as the scope for any government is so limited, and the debts so large, that they will swamp anything else in the coming years. I fear he is too accurate with the description of act two in a five act play.

It seems obvious to most irish commentators that the public debt is of such a magnitude that the change of government will, if effect, be little more than cosmetic.

The real problem in Ireland seems to be an electorate which is unable to analyse how to vote. The results of that have been years of corrupt and inept government, which has been kept in power by an electorate which doesn't largely understand that they have been the authors of their own situation by keeping in power the FF government.

The reaction by some here is to continue that grand tradition of refusing to analyse, and to attack the messenger and to continue on blindly as before.

The real problem in Ireland is this inability by surprisingly large sections of the electorate to vote for intelligent government who rules from a stance of political principles, and vote instead for a government of corruption and patronage.

MaceFace

edwinkane wrote: »

The irony is you say you are prejudiced against "name calling" yet the only name calling seen comes from you!

Pal, I think you need to get off your soap box there.
Twice you said I was showing my prejudices and I have asked you what prejudices there were. Maybe instead of waffling on you can answer the question?

I honestly don't know what you are trying to say - you reproduce what I believe to be a very badly written, over long article that maybe had one thing worth debating - Sinn Fein in the Dail, but the message is lost because it goes on about Labour and FG and how their leaders are also somehow damaged.

Even reading your follow up comments, I don't know what your point is - you say a lot without actually saying anything. What parts of that tedious article do you think warrants debate?

I wonder - have you been asked to analyse or debate this article for college or something and hence you come here looking for ideas?

edwinkane

MaceFace wrote: »

Pal, I think you need to get off your soap box there... Maybe instead of waffling on you can ...you say a lot without actually saying anything... have you been asked to analyse or debate this article for college or something

Still not a single argument and just a lot of name calling.

Uncorruptable

edwinkane wrote: »

I wasn't aware that one of the political parties in america had its roots in murder, terrorism, extortion and robbery in recent years.

1. Murder - Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's & Afghani's in a war waged on a lie.

2. Terrorism - Rendition flights bringing prisoners to be tortured in other countries, abu ghraib prison.

3. Extortion - Imposing sanctions & embargos in order to pressurise compliance with USA foreign policy, Home to the IMF.

4. Robbery - Natural resources for USA benefit from entire states for decades.

MaceFace

edwinkane wrote: »

Still not a single argument and just a lot of name calling.

Argument about what?

What is your game in this thread - you seem to be trying to engage in debate without actually saying what the debate is about. Your only real contribution is a reproduction of someone elses opinions and when you want people to discuss it.
How about YOU actually give YOUR opinion rather than this unhelpful nonsense.

I have asked you two questions numerous times now and you simply ignore answering them, so I will ask again:

1. What points in the article that you reproduced do you think it worth discussing?
2. Twice you said I am showing my prejudices. What prejudices are they?

edwinkane

Uncorruptable wrote: »

1. Murder - Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's & Afghani's in a war waged on a lie.

2. Terrorism - Rendition flights bringing prisoners to be tortured in other countries, abu ghraib prison.

3. Extortion - Imposing sanctions & embargos in order to pressurise compliance with USA foreign policy, Home to the IMF.

4. Robbery - Natural resources for USA benefit from entire states for decades.

I take your point, although also understand there is a difference between a democratically elected government acting is this way, and small group of like minded individuals acting in thsi way.

I also note that, in Ireland, there has been, rightly, enormous criticism of the american government for their disgusting actions.

The point in the article seems to be that the other irish political parties seem to think it entirely normal that someone who has engaged in murder, terror and maiming people stands for election, and they don't seem to make an issue of it. The tactics of the US government was a huge issue of their election.

Uncorruptable

edwinkane wrote: »

I take your point, although also understand there is a difference between a democratically elected government acting is this way, and small group of like minded individuals acting in thsi way.

I also note that, in Ireland, there has been, rightly, enormous criticism of the american government for their disgusting actions.

The point in the article seems to be that the other irish political parties seem to think it entirely normal that someone who has engaged in murder, terror and maiming people stands for election, and they don't seem to make an issue of it. The tactics of the US government was a huge issue of their election.

Fine Gael have quiite a murky past also, perhaps thats why they are not so vocal on Sinn Fein,

Eoin O Duffy irish facism founder (Blueshirt/Fine gael)


WT Cosgrave before a speech,



Inspecting the blueshirts,

edwinkane

Uncorruptable wrote: »

Fine Gael have quiite a murky past also, perhaps thats why they are not so vocal on Sinn Fein,

Eoin O Duffy irish facism founder (Blueshirt/Fine gael)


WT Cosgrave before a speech,



Inspecting the blueshirts,

I'm not sure I'd equate being a "blueshirt" (or even considered a fascist) with being a murderer, terrorist and gangster.

not even wrong

Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore, the most likely Irish Foreign Minister, is a former Stalinist whose Cold War links included ties to Castro’s Cuba and the dictatorship in North Korea. He was an active member of the Workers’ Party during the period in which that organisation was the political front for the Official IRA, which in turn was linked to murders, bank robberies, and counterfeiting. None of this was a campaign issue. To raise the question as to whether a man with such a past is suitable for public life let alone the control of Irish diplomacy is almost universally considered to be something between a faux pas and a below-the-belt smear.
...
Mr Ganley ... was vilified as a far-right authoritarian and xenophobic bigot for breaking with the pro-EU consensus that encompasses almost the entire Irish establishment. During the period of contention over the Lisbon Treaty, the state broadcaster RTE devoted a full episode of its flagship investigative programme to trawling through his affairs, despite finding not a single discreditable discovery. The Irish Times, a newspaper that matches the tendentiousness of The New York Times to the circulation of an American provincial daily, assigned a reporter to spend half a year on a similar, similarly fruitless trawl.

I like how the author doesn't even pause for breath when moving from how disgraceful it was that these muckraking scandalmongering journalists investigated Declan Ganley's past and made up all sorts of scare stories about flimsy links he had to various organisations, to demanding that they should have been doing the exact same thing to Gilmore instead.

edwinkane

not even wrong wrote: »

I like how the author doesn't even pause for breath when moving from how disgraceful it was that these muckraking scandalmongering journalists investigated Declan Ganley's past and made up all sorts of scare stories about flimsy links he had to various organisations, to demanding that they should have been doing the exact same thing to Gilmore instead.

I didn't see where he called for journalists to make up all sorts of scare stories about Gilmore, or anyone else.