After the rout of Fianna Fail yesterday, a lot of people are assuming the monster is dead. But FF is a vampire. They’ve sucked the country dry and unless you drive a stake through their heart and cut off their head, they’ll rise from the grave to do it all again.
The only thing that would kill off FF is another few years of coalition – this time as the junior partner with Fine Gael. Of course, because they shot each others grandfathers 90 years ago, that will never happen.
So FF will go onto the opposition benches, where, relieved of the huge problems that the country faces, they can snipe at FG, who will inevitably have to make very unpopular choices over the next several years.
For the parties forming the new government, the stakes are very high. They have to produce tangible improvements in the economy or they will face the wrath of a fickle and forgetful public.
RTE are citing a poll where only 37% of people polled foresaw FF leading a government within the next 10 years. I wouldn’t bet against - after four or five more hard years – the electorate suffering mass amnesia, forgetting that FF caused the problem in the first place (Micheal Martin has forgotten already) and voting them back in because – really – what’s the alternative? Sinn Fein? Fat chance.
What happened on Friday was that a large section of the electorate who usually vote FF switched from one centre-right to the other under duress. The political comfort zone for this part of the Irish electorate is precisely four letters wide – FF or FG.
The real story of this election, though, is not the collapse of FF or the (likely temporary) triumph of FG. It’s the slow rise of Sinn Fein. Like black water seeping through a ruptured dyke, they’ve gained seats in a lot of constituencies that haven’t seen a SF TD since the days of the Free State. They now have a base to hold and expand, outflanking Labour on the left.
Like FF, they have the luxury of being in opposition where they can promise the sun, moon and plough in the stars without ever having to make good on a single pledge. If Labour do go into coalition and don’t produce tangible results, Sinn Fein will eat them alive in working class areas.
So when people say that the worst has already happened – consider the prospect of Taoiseach Gerry Adams and think again.
The only thing that will reverse SF gains is a spell in coalition, preferably with Fianna Fail, the political nosferatu, adept at luring naive victims into their clutches and draining them of their popularity.
For now though – it is Fine Gael and Labour’s day. Let’s see what a government with Leo Vradakar and Lucinda Creighton will bring…
The outgoing FF government thinks that while the country is distracted with the election that we won’t notice them adding a few laws here and there.
In its final days, the Government is believed to be rushing through a statutory instrument that will amend the existing Copyright Act and which will give judges the power to grant injunctions against ISPs in relation to copyright infringement cases.
The move is believed to stem from October’s court case between the music industry (Warner, Sony, Universal and EMI) and UPC in which the judge pointed to a key gap in Irish copyright laws.
The legislation is expected to be sanctioned by the present Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Mary Hanafin TD before Friday.
Sources in the digital media industry say the nature in which the legislation is being pushed through could be damaging for Ireland’s image in the eyes of the major internet giants that have located operations here.
They warn that if the statutory instrument proceeds it could have “major implications for the freedom of the internet in Ireland.” It could also result in ISPs being ordered to implement three strikes and filtering systems.
So to recap, in its last days, one of the most disastrous and unpopular governments in the history of the State is, in the days leading up to a general election, rushing to sneak in a law that would bring far-reaching changes to the operation of the Internet in Ireland without due consideration of its impact or democratic consultation on the wisdom of such a law.
Well, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all does it? I’m sure Mary Hanafin and her department are doing this purely out of their concern for the integrity of the law and not at all because the massive lobbying power of the music industry.
Of course, slyly screwing the general public to satisfy special interests on the eve of an election is just the kind of ratfuck that Fianna Fail specialise in. In 2002, FF Minister for Education Michael Woods signed a deal with the Catholic Church to limit their liability for clerical child abuse to €128 million, leaving the Irish state to pay out another €1.3 billion to victims.
The excuse that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation is coming out with is that this stealth law is required to ensure that Ireland complied with European law “as soon as possible”. However, the Irish ISPs argue that this isn’t true, citing a case before the European Court of Justice at the moment. Well, perhaps if there were more consultation and consideration, things might be clearer – but no, Mary Hanafin and her department seem hell bent on getting this law dealing with the trifling matter of the internet passed – without a vote in the Dail – as soon as they can.
I mean what can possibly go wrong? It’s not as if this government has an appalling record of incompetence and mismanagement…Oh. Wait…
Responding to speculation regarding possible changes to copyright law, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, Mary Hanafin TD, today [Thursday] said: ‘there is absolutely no truth in the rumour circulating in the media that I am about to sign a statutory instrument relating to the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 and/or the EU Copyright Directive 2001.’
Minister Hanafin said that ‘in light of the recent High Court decision in the case of EMI & Others vs UPC my Department has been working, in consultation with the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, to address the question raised in regard to Ireland’s compliance with the EU Copyright Directive. However, these consultations have not concluded and there is no question of legislation being rushed through by me as the responsible Minister.’
Concluding Minister Hanafin said: ‘it would be normal practice within the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation to consult all the relevant stakeholders in advance of legislation such as this being enacted. I would expect that this consultation will take place when the Department and the new Minister have a clearer view of the best way forward on this issue.’
So she’s not doing a Michael Woods, but is leaving a draft internet filtering law for Fine Gael to pick up and run with. And chances are they’ll be only too happy to.
Whose bright idea was it to have two centre-right parties again?
So, having kept schtum for nearly the entire election campaign, Lucinda Creighton finally shows her true colours on gay equality…
THE FINE GAEL TD Lucinda Creighton tweeted yesterday that she “supported the Civil Partnership Bill fully” but added that she did not support gay marriage, saying that marriage was “primarily about children”.
Creighton said she believed the main purpose of marriage was to “propagate & create environment for children to grow up”, so while she believes that gay couples should be treated “fairly and justly” in matters such as tax and inheritance – marriage is “different”.
For anyone who’s followed Ms Creighton’s career over the past few years, the surprise is less about what she said, but that she’d actually admit it a few days before the election. Perhaps she thinks she’s already secured her seat in the next Dail, that she can say what she wants and still ride the Fine Gael wave all the way to Leinster House. Of course, Lucinda can say and believe what she likes, but she should know that her beliefs relegate a significant number of the people she hopes to represent to the status of second class citizens.
It’s not just gay couples she’s slighting here. People get married for many reasons. Having children is only one of them. Marriage solemnizes the love, companionship and commitment between two people in the eyes of the law (and if they so choose in the eyes of what ever god they believe in). Equally, many fine people have been reared by couples who were not bound by the legal contract of civil marriage or the vows of the religious ritual of the same name. To say that procreation is “the main purpose of marriage” reduces the whole spectrum of human relations to matter of breeding and husbandry. It demeans those who remain childless – by choice or by accident of biology. And it directly insults families where the parents are unmarried, implying that they are somehow less worthy, less loving, less capable of rearing their children simply because they did not enter into a legal contract with each other.
And let’s not forget, when we talk about gay marriage in this country, we are not talking about forcing the Catholic Church to change its sacraments to accept something it regards as an anathema. We are talking about the secular and legal institution of civil marriage. But Lucinda Creighton wants to conflate a secular matter with the tenets of her faith – to impose Catholic ideology on her constituents and the country at large. Public representatives, are of course, entitled to believe what they like, but in a republic, they have a responsibility to represent not just their coreligionists, but all of the people, and to maintain the separation of church and state.
Of course, there is strong reason to suspect that Lucinda Creighton has a few problems with that particular separation. Before the publication of the draft Civil Partnerships bill, she came out with similar guff about her concerns about civil partnership being equated with marriage. Said she…
“Marriage promotes children and the right of children to have a mother and father. The benefits that attach to marriage are designed to fufill a societal objective – that objective is to provide a stable upbringing for children. The advantages that pertain to the traditional family unit must not be eroded by the proposed civil partnership bill.
“I would be very reluctant to see the tax credits that apply to married couples, apply to non married couples in a civil union situation. Certain benefits apply to marriage, such as being taxed as a single unit rather than individually and the continued payment of a pension to a surviving spouse. These benefits of marriage are designed to assist married couples with children.
“I believe that the tax benefits which apply to married couples must be safeguarded”, she added.
God forbid the gays should get some extra cash! Sure they’d probably just blow it all on fabulous shoes or something. And if straights didn’t have some tax breaks to sweeten the deal, wouldn’t they just give up on the marriage thing altogether. If only Sodom and Gomorroah had just put some more thought into its tax codes, a whole lot of trouble and smite could have been avoided.
Once the Civil Partnerships bill was published, Ms Creighton softened her line on civil partnerships themselves, sounding almost reasonable at times. However, she pushed amendments that would give immunity to prosecution to people or religious institutions for refusing to carry out, participate in or play any part in civil partnerships. While there’s some validity when it comes to use of religious property, where that religion enshrines bigotry against gays in its tenets (and let’s face it, that’s most of them), it’s also valid to say that such amendments risk giving religions licenses to discriminate. And let’s not forget that many religious properties – such as schools – receive funding from the government.
Don’t be fooled, though, by Lucinda’s apparent reasonableness. In 2009, Lucinda and FG MEP Gay Mitchell lobbied for mention of family diversity to be dropped from the European People’s Party European Parliament election manifesto, and for the inclusion of statements of opposition to abortion, destructive research on embryos and euthanasia. This won her plaudits from the right-wing Catholic think tank, the Iona Institute.
The greatest irony in all this is that Ms Creighton is Fine Gael’s Deputy Spokesperson on Justice & Law Reform with Special Responsibility for Immigration, Integration and Equality.
Is this the image Enda wants to project for his party? Everyone’s equal, unless you fall foul of Lucinda and her Catholic dogma in which case, you’re shit outta luck, because she doesn’t think sinners are good enough to raise a family.
This election is supposed to mark a break from the past, to be a “new start” with new politics”, as FG’s election material puts it. Lucinda Creighton doesn’t represent new politics, but rather the bad old days when politicians danced to the beat of the bishop’s crozier. Lucinda Creighton doesn’t represent equality and she certainly doesn’t represent me or, I suspect, many other people in Dublin South East. And that’s why she and the party of which she is a member won’t be getting my vote on Friday.
The 2011 election campaign has been depressing to watch.
Fianna Fail and the Greens desperately running away from their criminal mismanagement of the country. Fine Gael playing stupid media games to keep the charisma vacuum of a leader off the airwaves. Labour trying to score points against the future coalition partners by shouting about Enda’s empty chair. And Sinn Fein showing that their knowledge of the banking sector seems limited to which branches their members have robbed in the past (not so much “tax and spend” as “smash and grab”).
Saying it resembles rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic lends the whole unedifying spectacle an unwarranted level of dignity. It’s more like watching a troupe of monkeys fling shit at each other while the inky waters rise inexorably around them.
Meanwhile, the sucking wound that is the banking sector swallows another €7 billion we don’t have, while the Germans and French try impose tax harmonisation – a pleasant euphemism for economic suicide.
And on the streets – people are angry.
Anger is palpable on doorsteps, in the streets and outside shopping centres. Last week at the doors of a Tesco store in Ballybrack, the poorer end of the otherwise prosperous Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown constituency in south county Dublin, shoppers’ bitter resentment towards the outgoing government was stark.
Across the country, Fianna Fail bashing is all the rage. People look at their shrinking pay packets and the fact that their house is now worth half what they paid for it. They shake their fists at the government. They rant about the incompetence of Brian Cowen. And they blame everyone but the people who put Cowen and Fianna Fail in government in the first place – themselves.
In 2007 20,471 people out of a total of 58,713 cast first preference votes for Fianna Fail candidates in “bitter and resentful” Dun Laoghaire (another 4,534 had the Greens as their first preference).
Taking the country as a whole – 858,565 people (nearly 42%) gave Fianna Fail their first preference vote (and we can thank another 96,936 for giving the Greens their first preference). In nearly every constituency in the state, Fianna Fail won a plurality, if not an outright majority of the votes cast.
All in all, just shy of a million people in this country – nearly half the people who bothered voting – expressed a preference for the coalition parties over all others.
So who’s fault is the economic mismanagement of the last 4 years again?
You get the government you vote for.
In the last election, people were presented with the choice of Bertie Ahern, the corrupt, but charismatic incumbent and Enda Kenny, the stiff and charmless challenger and they went for the devil they knew, the devil who gave them eternally rising house prices and investment properties in Bulgaria and Cape Verde. Yerragh, weren’t we all cure hoors like Bertie now?
And alongside the cute hoors, there was the people for whom the parish pump is the big picture and the Fianna Fail die-hards who not only not only tolerated the outrageous corruption of Bertie Ahern and his mentor Charlie Haughey, but applauded it as a virtue. Anything to get one over on the Blueshirts. And sure, didn’t he fix the road?
Fianna Fail deserve electoral annihilation. But they probably won’t get it. As the Guardian points out:
…the overemphasis on the local man and woman underlines another important axiom about Irish elections: they are in fact 43 separate byelections often fought in many cases on localised issues.
If we are really stupid enough to let “they fixed the road” or “where’s Enda?” or all the other monkey shit trump “they bankrupted the state to save their pals in the banks and left us to pick up the tab”, then we will truly have earned every hardship that befalls us from here on out.
It’s election time. The country is overrun with politicians kissing babies, posing with grannies and shouting over each other like children on TV. And while Ireland is distracted with this unedifying circus, the economic fate of the Republic is being decided in Europe.
GERMANY AND France may press for changes to Ireland’s corporate tax regime as the price of key reforms to the euro-zone bailout fund, senior European diplomats warned ahead of a European summit today in Brussels.
The [German] chancellor has been pushing for the adoption of common corporation tax rule as part of a “grand bargain” to strengthen Europe’s response to the sovereign debt crisis, and Mr Sarkozy has long pressed Ireland to increase its 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate.
With a modest reduction in the interest rate on Irish bailout loans on the table, diplomats believe the EU’s two dominant powers may seek business taxation concessions from Ireland in exchange for more favourable bailout terms.
So this is where the Irish banks’ casino capitalism and the Golden Circle’s cosy cronyism has brought us – being bullied by Germany and France on economic matters vital to the national interest.
Ireland’s rate of corporation tax and the foreign direct investment it brings into the country is about the only thing keeping us above water at the moment. And now Frau Merkel and M. Sarkozy present us with the choice of committing economic suicide or being smothered by punitive bailout conditions.
Of course Germany and France would love to remove Ireland’s competitive advantage and welcome with open arms the multinationals fleeing our shores. Those corporations could join the quarter of firms on the CAC40 who pay not tax at all. But what’s a little hypocrisy when there’s advantage to be gained for a large country at a smaller country’s expense?
The post-war generation that founded the European community is dead and their spoiled children have forgotten its purpose. Backing Ireland into a corner like this not the act of a community of friendly nations. At best, it is extortion; at worst it is an act of economic warfare.
It is vital to Ireland’s future that we resist this self-serving bullying and tell Merkel and Sarkozy where to go in no uncertain terms. Ireland’s debt problems are not ours alone. If the punitive rates of interest on the bailout remain, then Ireland will default on its sovereign debt as surely as night follows day. As painful as that will be for us, it will put the entire Euro project at risk. While raising our rate of corporation tax would hurt Ireland alone and benefit the great powers, defaulting on our sovereign debt would hurt everyone in the Eurozone.
If Germany and France want to play hardball on the future of Ireland, we can play hardball on the future of the Euro.
Of course, calling Merkel and Sarkozy’s bluff would require balls, and looking at the parade of crooks, clowns and cronies that pass for the Irish political class, testicular fortitude seems to be in very short supply.
