Is it just me or have SF vanished?

Redgirl82 wrote: »

Did they?

At the time of the Good Friday the IRA was in a cease fire for 4 years. So politicians like John Hume, Bertie Ahearn, Clinton etc delivered the Good Friday Agreement and peace.

At that stage the IRA where exactly what they are now, just a criminal gang. More concerned with washing diesel than giving anyone independence.

do you remember how adams and humes got vilified for starting the peace talks no - didnt think you did.

If you knew anything at all even remotely about the PIRA when they were active in the north then youd realise fuel smuggling is a border thing, not an IRA thing. No border - no smuggling - and that includes all those who have nothing to do with republicanism who are at diesel laundering etc, which are the majority

Waste of time though bothering even mentioning facts as a lot of naysayers dont really have a clue

Mortelaro wrote: »

That doesn't change the circumstances

'He' doesn't have to have a point on the topic she raised probably.

Redgirl82 wrote: »

No they don't. You can discuss the advantages/disadvantages of policies without constantly pointing at every other party.

Sinn Fein shouldn't care what other parties are doing, they should be confident their own policies are what the people want.

But they are not, majority of posts have some reference to another party. Why would anyone need to do that? all of it seems to be coming from there Sinn Fein supporters, why do you feel the need to constantly discuss other parties?

It doesn't happen on any political thread here. If is annoying you that much report it.

Redgirl82 wrote: »

I responded to this post by you



Why would anyone be defending FG policy on a Sinn Fein thread?

I suggest you look back over the last posts. Take note of the amount of times FG and other parties are mentioned by posters, mostly by those who seem to be Sinn Fein supporters.

If you really want to discuss Sinn Fein policies then why are you concentrating on other parties?

Are you going to do this on all the politics threads? Try to stop people mentioning other parties? Because it happens on them all.

If it's an issue for you, report it.

Jinglejangle69 wrote: »

Few words of advice I've gave posters who ventured onto this thread the last while.

You're wasting you're time with the 4 comrades.

They will twist, lie, scheme, manipulate, deflect etc etc any valid point you make that makes SF look in any way bad.

You're not gonna get any satisfaction.

What you're witnessing is a full time operation by a political party group.

https://www.sinnfein.ie/sfos

"The internet and social media are transforming politics around the world and here in Ireland. Never before has there been so many ways that you can help influence and make change happen through this global online community we live in.

Thousands of people from every walk of life have already signed up from across Ireland and beyond to become Online Supporters for Sinn Féin.

We are asking you to take the step today to become a Sinn Féin Online Supporter and join our campaign to reshape politics in Ireland and in doing so usher in an era of radical change that puts the interest of our citizens at the heart of all we do.

For your sanity I'd advise to leave them at it:)

Thats quite the paranoid post.

maccored wrote: »

Thats quite the paranoid post.

Or correct.

Redgirl82 wrote: »

What are so good about their current policies? what are they doing to deserve peoples vote?

They're proposing to restart the state social housing program and do something about price gouging in the rental market. If you picked a random hundred Millennial or Gen Y voters who voted for SF this February and asked them why SF was their choice, I'd bet my bottom dollar that at least three quarters of them would cite the absolute hell that is renting in modern Ireland since the recession ended as their reason for doing so. The other parties, for different reasons depending on which one we're talking about, have demonstrated that they either openly don't want to fix the problem, or are most likely bullsh!tting for the sake of tricking people into voting for them, when they claim they do want to fix it. Sinn Fein, at the very least, might want to fix it.

That's a good enough reason in the eyes of many, many people to vote for them. The last three years have, at least for the time being, created an entire generation of single-issue voters, and the single issue they're voting on is one in which only SF, PBP and the SocDems (a) claim they want to fix the problem, and (b) have no track record which suggests that this claim is a lie.

I'm honestly surprised we're still debating this so many pages later. Others berated me for using the term "stagflation" in the Irish context, but even the Financial Times acknowledges this as the reason for this year's election result:

https://www.ft.com/content/26a7a74e-4d8a-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

According to an exit poll published on Saturday, some 63 per cent of voters said they did not feel they had benefited from an improvement in the economy.

The housing shortage is a particular concern, especially among the under-35s. A recent study by the Central Bank of Ireland showed that only one new dwelling was built for every seven additional people in the population between 2011 and 2019. Rents have increased by 40 per cent in the past five years, while average earnings have grown by just 14 per cent.

Sinn Féin is promising a big increase in public housing, a rent freeze and interventions in the banking system to cap mortgage rates, policies that have sent bank and property stocks down since the election amid anxiety about a leftward turn in Irish economic policy.


If that isn't stagflation then what is? The cost of living has accelerated far beyond increases in peoples' income during the course of this decade and the result of this is that many people are feeling more squeezed now than they were before the "recovery" got underway. Those who aren't dependent on rental accommodation simply don't empathise with this because they're not experiencing the drop in living standards that anyone who's been renting since the start of this decade has been. The lack of empathy is central to why the last government is particularly despised by the voters I'm referring to, but most of those voters were just becoming young adults when FF's corruption completely destroyed their prospects back in 2008/9, so even if FF claim to want to fix the problem, nobody believes them because they have a track record as corrupt, lying bastards. FG, on the other hand, aren't even claiming they want to fix the problem, instead openly telling young people that they should learn to love the decline in living standards which they are experiencing.

SF may or may not succeed in fixing the stagflation issue, but at least they want to. Or at least they're saying they want to. Of the other two main parties, anything FF says is automatically assumed to be BS because of their track record in bullsh!tting the public, and FG are openly unsympathetic and don't give a bollocks. Of the smaller parties, Green propped up FF during the worst years of the banking collapse when people were desperately clamouring for them to pull the plug, and Labour utterly sold out in supporting not just austerity, but a government and cabinet beset by scandal in which nobody was ever held properly accountable for wrongdoing.

That leaves the SocDems, the lefty parties and a smattering of reactionary right wing parties formed on the basis of splits over socially liberalising Ireland away from church rule. The young are obviously not going to break for the latter in large numbers, while the lefty parties did very well on the back of SF's transfers. SocDems are the only mystery to me in this election, I can't understand why they didn't do far better than they did. My uncle, a lifelong political activist and an avid follower of current affairs (annual attendee of the McGill summer school among other things) suggests that the SocDems lost all credibility when they had their very public spat with Stephen Donnelly, and this is why they didn't have a bigger showing. Personally I'd still give them a very high preference myself, but he points out that Donnelly's involvement gave them a layer of credibility which they just don't have without him, since he was such a popular and outspoken member of the 2011-2016 Dáil session in particular.

If you've read this post, and are still confused as to what SF's supporters find so good about their current policies, then I'm honestly curious - which part of this analysis is falling down for you? Are you disputing (a) that people are being seriously, seriously hurt by the current clusterf*ck that is the Irish rental situation, that (b) none of the other parties have either the ideology or the credibility to convince anyone that they'll make an honest attempt to fix that problem, or that (c) Sinn Fein have claimed that they'll make an honest attempt to fix it and don't have the credibility vacuum that FF does? Is there some other reason for discounting this explanation?

I feel like I and many other posters have explained the mentality of the SF surge ad nauseum in this thread and yet people are still saying "but why did people vote for them" without actually countering any of the specific explanations which have been offered. That's why I'm trying to spell it out as clearly as possible and I apologise if I came across as condescending or anything in this post - but I'd love it if someone chose the specific parts they don't believe are true before the next "but why vote for SF?" post comes along, and actually offered some kind of rebuttal.

To summarise briefly, young people are being utterly f*cked over by obscenely high rents which are making many, many people truly miserable in their day to day lives regardless of how well the macroeconomy might be doing, and Sinn Fein are the only party who tick both the ideological and the credibility box when it comes to "which party is most likely to pursue policies which might get my rent back to a level which doesn't leave me having to re-use teabags five times and choose which days I can afford to have breakfast". Until that problem is sorted, every other issue will take second place in young voters' minds - and every party which doesn't explicitly address it in a sympathetic manner will take the lowest boxes on those voters' ballot papers. It's that simple. While this issue is dominating peoples' lives, no other issue is going to be powerful enough to overcome it as an election force - not even Coronavirus.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

They're proposing to restart the state social housing program and do something about price gouging in the rental market. If you picked a random hundred Millennial or Gen Y voters who voted for SF this February and asked them why SF was their choice, I'd bet my bottom dollar that at least three quarters of them would cite the absolute hell that is renting in modern Ireland since the recession ended as their reason for doing so. The other parties, for different reasons depending on which one we're talking about, have demonstrated that they either openly don't want to fix the problem, or are most likely bullsh!tting for the sake of tricking people into voting for them, when they claim they do want to fix it. Sinn Fein, at the very least, might want to fix it.

That's a good enough reason in the eyes of many, many people to vote for them. The last three years have, at least for the time being, created an entire generation of single-issue voters, and the single issue they're voting on is one in which only SF, PBP and the SocDems (a) claim they want to fix the problem, and (b) have no track record which suggests that this claim is a lie.

I'm honestly surprised we're still debating this so many pages later. Others berated me for using the term "stagflation" in the Irish context, but even the Financial Times acknowledges this as the reason for this year's election result:

https://www.ft.com/content/26a7a74e-4d8a-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

According to an exit poll published on Saturday, some 63 per cent of voters said they did not feel they had benefited from an improvement in the economy.

The housing shortage is a particular concern, especially among the under-35s. A recent study by the Central Bank of Ireland showed that only one new dwelling was built for every seven additional people in the population between 2011 and 2019. Rents have increased by 40 per cent in the past five years, while average earnings have grown by just 14 per cent.

Sinn Féin is promising a big increase in public housing, a rent freeze and interventions in the banking system to cap mortgage rates, policies that have sent bank and property stocks down since the election amid anxiety about a leftward turn in Irish economic policy.


If that isn't stagflation then what is? The cost of living has accelerated far beyond increases in peoples' income during the course of this decade and the result of this is that many people are feeling more squeezed now than they were before the "recovery" got underway. Those who aren't dependent on rental accommodation simply don't empathise with this because they're not experiencing the drop in living standards that anyone who's been renting since the start of this decade has been. The lack of empathy is central to why the last government is particularly despised by the voters I'm referring to, but most of those voters were just becoming young adults when FF's corruption completely destroyed their prospects back in 2008/9, so even if FF claim to want to fix the problem, nobody believes them because they have a track record as corrupt, lying bastards. FG, on the other hand, aren't even claiming they want to fix the problem, instead openly telling young people that they should learn to love the decline in living standards which they are experiencing.

SF may or may not succeed in fixing the stagflation issue, but at least they want to. Or at least they're saying they want to. Of the other two main parties, anything FF says is automatically assumed to be BS because of their track record in bullsh!tting the public, and FG are openly unsympathetic and don't give a bollocks. Of the smaller parties, Green propped up FF during the worst years of the banking collapse when people were desperately clamouring for them to pull the plug, and Labour utterly sold out in supporting not just austerity, but a government and cabinet beset by scandal in which nobody was ever held properly accountable for wrongdoing.

That leaves the SocDems, the lefty parties and a smattering of reactionary right wing parties formed on the basis of splits over socially liberalising Ireland away from church rule. The young are obviously not going to break for the latter in large numbers, while the lefty parties did very well on the back of SF's transfers. SocDems are the only mystery to me in this election, I can't understand why they didn't do far better than they did. My uncle, a lifelong political activist and an avid follower of current affairs (annual attendee of the McGill summer school among other things) suggests that the SocDems lost all credibility when they had their very public spat with Stephen Donnelly, and this is why they didn't have a bigger showing. Personally I'd still give them a very high preference myself, but he points out that Donnelly's involvement gave them a layer of credibility which they just don't have without him, since he was such a popular and outspoken member of the 2011-2016 Dáil session in particular.

If you've read this post, and are still confused as to what SF's supporters find so good about their current policies, then I'm honestly curious - which part of this analysis is falling down for you? Are you disputing (a) that people are being seriously, seriously hurt by the current clusterf*ck that is the Irish rental situation, that (b) none of the other parties have either the ideology or the credibility to convince anyone that they'll make an honest attempt to fix that problem, or that (c) Sinn Fein have claimed that they'll make an honest attempt to fix it and don't have the credibility vacuum that FF does? Is there some other reason for discounting this explanation?

I feel like I and many other posters have explained the mentality of the SF surge ad nauseum in this thread and yet people are still saying "but why did people vote for them" without actually countering any of the specific explanations which have been offered. That's why I'm trying to spell it out as clearly as possible and I apologise if I came across as condescending or anything in this post - but I'd love it if someone chose the specific parts they don't believe are true before the next "but why vote for SF?" post comes along, and actually offered some kind of rebuttal.

To summarise briefly, young people are being utterly f*cked over by obscenely high rents which are making many, many people truly miserable in their day to day lives regardless of how well the macroeconomy might be doing, and Sinn Fein are the only party who tick both the ideological and the credibility box when it comes to "which party is most likely to pursue policies which might get my rent back to a level which doesn't leave me having to re-use teabags five times and choose which days I can afford to have breakfast". Until that problem is sorted, every other issue will take second place in young voters' minds - and every party which doesn't explicitly address it in a sympathetic manner will take the lowest boxes on those voters' ballot papers. It's that simple. While this issue is dominating peoples' lives, no other issue is going to be powerful enough to overcome it as an election force - not even Coronavirus.

Pre-election promises from all parties on social housing/building of new houses were more or less the same. SF maybe a tad unrealistic. FF/FG have been in power long enough so its plausible to dismiss their proposals as vote seeking. Which leaves SF who have never been in power in the South to judge how they will follow through on election promises.

They are in power in the North and do have to be held account to their actions in a power sharing government.

https://thedetail.tv/articles/social-housing-bb946a8a-43df-450d-b8cd-66d71030cdf3