General Irish politics discussion thread

Will be interesting who they put up for the nomination.

Will it be Buttimer again, or will Shane O'Callgahan get a chance? He is much younger than Buttimer who isn't all that popular.

Will also be the first time in 43 years a Coveny was not up for election in that constituency.

I am not re-debating Brexit, it's been done to death.

But the idea was put forward that Brexit was the result of FPTP, which ignored the actual large groundswell of opinion that was in favour of it, and in a PR system, that support would have coalesced to a party more aligned to its values and would have had a large number of seats in Westminister.

Will John Mullins be the replacement for Simon Coveney?

It creates a great opportunity for Harris to reinvent his party with a new image, new leader, new candidates.

It is a pity that O'Gorman is not doing the same.

Dear Christ.

Why are you right-wingers so obsessed with other people's genitalia?

Would everyone all of a sudden be happy that the populist right is in government, where they make policy and legislation to row back on this like clean air and water, public transport, abortion, divorce, drunk driving

To be honest, I'd be happy if Independent Ireland were in government with FF, FG or both, and then they proposed these things for a vote. The new policies would fairly obviously not pass, and the optics of attempting to row back such popular legislation would likely tank their vote amongst the swing voters. They'd be a 1 shot coalition party.

This is one of the stronger points about our voting system - a minor party has minor power and can't do these kinds of things with the support of the majority party, who has the majority of the power by virtue of obtaining the majority of the popular vote.

II don't offer answers to anything. I call them the Ballygobackwards Party. A crystalisses of what they are, a new Soc Dem Cllr is seeking to remove prayers from the start of each Cork County Council meeting, II come out opposing it before there's any discussion. A variant on Ulster says NO.

I'm not vehemently against prayers, but I would have a rational discussion on it. Do we really follow through on the separation of religion and state?

@Water John we talk a good game about being a secular republic but in reality there is no separation of church and state in Ireland, almost 95% of our primary schools are religious controlled despite being fully state funded, and they indoctrinate kids with the state’s blessing.

Michael “Opus Dei” Woods decided the taxpayer would pick up the vast majority of the RCC’s abuse compensation and that was that. €1bn+ and counting.

I’m thinking of setting up a religion with prayers of minimum length one hour, then forcing the councils to recognise it because it’s sectarianism if they don’t 😎