General Election and Government Formation Megathread (see post #1)

markodaly wrote: »

Not at all.

FG, for example, are not going to row back on their pension retirement age.

This is the second\third election in which FG have pledged to get rid of USC, build a metro, etc . Perhaps they aren't populist but what's the terms for pledging to do things you've no intention of doing

silver2020 wrote: »

I'd get that telly of yours fixed

Not even those in SF can say she did well. She was a long way back in 3rd place

Did you miss the neutral pundit winding up RTE's analysis giving the debate to Mary Lou?

My opinion was they all had their good moments and they all had their bad moments.

MM may have just edged it though.

I don't feel like I really have the authority to say who has the "best" night or the "worst" night here, because I don't feel incredibly in touch with the average voter and I have my own biases, but that performance really cemented my feelings against Sinn Féin. I had previously marked them down mostly for their disasterous economic policies that will do nothing except exacerbate the problems they decry previous governments for, but the debate really drove home how loyal the party still is to the IRA, despite attempts at rebranding it that I guess I had kind of bought into. The absolute refusal of McDonald to address accusations of being opposed to the Special Criminal Court was really eye-opening. She couldn't even come up with some kind of alternate reason for being opposed to it to give her plausible deniability that the party's opposition to it is not purely based on wanting to protect the Ra. On top of that, I found her pathetic attempts to court female/feminist voters with nonsense buzzwords like "these men" and "mansplain" extremely off-putting, and I hope that voters don't buy into hollow gestured like these.

It's not that the other two were what I would call "good" either of course, just that SF are coming off more and more as unthinkably bad.

I thought the moderation on the debate was generally quite good, with the exception of the final question about making mistakes. It would be nice if they had actually made the candidates answer it, but we got 3 textbook non-answers instead. "I can't say what the mistake is, but I've learned from it!", "A big mistake the public could make would be voting for one of these two. But really I'm just too honest, although I'm working on fixing that!", "I've made many mistakes, but I don't want to get into what they are". There's no point asking a question like this if the answers are just a load of waffle from all three.

The word ‘mansplaining’ is justified occasionally. I didn’t think it was justified last night. It very much came across that Mary Lou was going to use the word at some point during the debate, no matter what was actually said.

Didn’t like “these men” either.

The chan chan man wrote: »

I will vote..but seriously, what’s the fu€king point?!

If you have any preference whatsoever for one party over another, then you have a reason to vote. The only reasons not to vote, imo, are

1) You don't have the time or inclination to do some homework and figure out what each of the parties are about and what the state of the country is, or
2) You find every single party/candidate to be precisely as appealing as one another.

I think the latter case should be exceedingly rare, especially in an election system that usually has 10+ candidates on the ballot, and that almost all people who claim they are in category 2 (usually saying some vague variation of "they're all the same anyway") are actually in category 1. Although personally, I do still think not voting is better than casting an uninformed vote just for the sake of doing it.

I am also a little biased, but I thought MM did very little to convince people that FF have changed from the party that bankrupted the country.
And M-LMcD was very short on detail in a number of areas. She would have us believe that they can fund billions if additional spending with tak on bank profits and on the very wealthy. Both of which would find a way to avoid that tax through acquisitions, off-shore trusts/salary arragnements, and clever book-keeping. There is no point in complaining about how it it, it's just how it is!

FG remind me of Obama - come into power on the back of a mess, and get a lot of grief for not fixing everything in jig time.
I don't believe that changing now will do anything except allow the new government to benefit from some of the groundwork they have done.

There was however, a clear loser in MLMc. Whether it dents their 1st preference vote or not is hard to tell, but what it did do is lock SF out of transfers. People who might have given them a nod for 2s and 3s won't.

C14N wrote: »

Every party is to some extent, but I think that FG not making any motions toward popular but bad policiy ideas like perpetually low retirement ages, rent freezes, or massive income tax cuts.

FG have promised massive income tax cuts.

Only watched a little bit of the debate. Mary Lou was in trouble after the Special Criminal Court question.

Sounds like things got worse for her after that. Disappointed she used the word "Mansplaining" (that should have been picked up by the chair).

Will only vote for SF if Pearse Doherty becomes party leader.

Leaning towards FG at the moment. Simply because of Pascal Donohue (leader in waiting) and a reasonably decent local guy here in my local constituency.

Augeo wrote: »

The banks will just pass on any extra tax costs to the customers if they can't avoid paying it.
Wealthy folk will manage away nicely too, the SF plans are a load of t0ss, the dept of finance just tallies up the numbers, the revenue SF are using to balance books will as you mention not materialise in the future or come out of the working person's pocket via some extra spend/cost that pays for the banks extra tax liability.

SF seems to be completely unaware that taxes and regulations change peoples' behaviour. If you increase taxes on banks, they won't just say "oh well, I guess we just have less money now". You're making the business of being a bank more expensive, and that means they will adjust how they operate to compensate for that. As much as we have a huge anti-bank sentiment in this country, we're all customers of banks, and we need them for things like loans and savings, as well as to facilitate other businesses we use. The reason it's a bad idea isn't just "think of the poor bankers".

Same with their proposed wealth tax on anyone with over €1 million. Sounds like it's just free money from greedy rich people, but similar taxes have been tried in many other European countries and almost always repealed. The administrative overhead of trying to track who has assets at that level and how to value them accurately is enormous, and other countries who did it saw very little return on those expenses. The biggest effect is to simply cause massive capital flight, because the very wealthy are able to easily move assets or even themselves overseas.

Think I was on pint no.5 when the debate started and no.10 by the time it finished.

I thought Mary performed well but screwed up her message, whereas Leo was much better at sticking to script. Remark about USC and those in the €30-50k bracket stuck in my mind. Micheal just seemed left out.

meeeeh wrote: »

She used manspalaining to create impression she was dismissed as woman and not as a president of SF.

She used it because she wanted to create the impression that she was being talked down about taxes to for being a woman, when really she was being talked down about taxes because she's clueless about taxes. It's a pretty effective rhetorical tool, because it means you don't have to actually defend your tax policy and can instead focus on portraying a situation that a lot of women, especially women who identify as feminists, can relate to. I personally do think that tactic is itself quite patronising to women though.

hotmail.com wrote: »

FG have promised massive income tax cuts.

As I said, everyone is populist to some extent. But the FG tax cuts are far smaller (I believe a 1% point reduction on the minimum USC rate, and raising the higher PAYE tax band, which is actually more of an elitist tax cut).

Water John wrote: »

There was however, a clear loser in MLMc. Whether it dents their 1st preference vote or not is hard to tell, but what it did do is lock SF out of transfers. People who might have given them a nod for 2s and 3s won't.

AS you say it is hard to tell if last night will dent the SF vote, but with last night`s debate, where over 650,000 tuned, in I cannot see them adding to it.

The SOR show interview with Breege Quinn mother of Paul Quinn today will not have helped their cause either.
Both of those will most likely bring them back to their old Achilles heel electoral problem, low transfers.

With SF only running 42 candidates, if the poll numbers carry through then transfers will not be that much of a problem.
If the poll numbers do not carry through, it will most likely at this stage be due to last night`s debate and the SOR interview.
While that will not cost them seats, it will curtail the number they will gain imo.