Month: April 2018

One of the things about the current Confidence and Supply Arrangement between FF and FG is that neither side want’s to be the one that ends it…… and subsequently be blamed for an unnecessary election and suffer the consequences electorally.
After Seán Canney was not reappointed to the Junior Ministerial role, it now appears that he may leave the Independent Alliance.
If he does go, then Dail arithmetic were FF to abstain is getting very very tight. There are 51 FG TD’s. Katherine Zappone,  Denis Naughten, Shane Ross, Boxer Moran, Finian McGrath and John Halligan. Which makes 57

Against that 13 Independents * (including Canney and Lowry), 2 Greens, 2 Social Democrats, 4 Inds4Change, 6 Solidarity PBP, 7 Labour and 23 Sinn Fein which also makes 57.

So the casting vote would go to the Government from Ceann Comhairle Seán Ó Fearghaíl.
So it would be worth FFs while goading a few of the Independent members of The Government to see if they break. Have Independents rather than themselves causing an election…… and of course nothing better for FF and FG in an election campaign than to blame Independents for instability !!!

http://eureferendum.com/

I love Richard North’s blog – but I laughed out loud last week at some of the images that he had selected – gloomy, depressing, images of matters getting worse (example A here). I have to wonder, given the sheer weight of what is happening, at what point does he run out exhaust the supply available on the internet of such imagery?

The Phoenix recently pointed to the fact that little is being said about how the 8th will impact on FG and FF if it is lost, and in particular how the leaders of those parties will fare. I tend to the view that FF might be in greater trouble. The Phoenix makes much M. Martin’s ‘obsessively seeking the Holy Grail that is the floating urban, liberal vote’, but in truth given a good portion of the FF vote has decamped to the more socially liberal SF it is difficult to see what Martin can do.

A friend in SF suggested to me a month or two back that Martin is thinking not just of the referendum but of the situation five, ten and fifteen years down the line when that ‘larger section of the FF support base that sees the party as the custodian of family values’ as the Phoenix puts it may well be a rather smaller cohort (and just by the by to judge by polling figures Martin has lost no support at all for allowing his flock to go every which way).

By the way, I have to wonder about this part of a particular line in the Phoenix…

Martin’s determination to modernnise his party has led him to relinquish FF’s core principles on family values.

But what principles are they? I can’t think of a single issue that Martin has relinquished in respect of same, bar forcing all in FF to follow a single line on abortion, which is an absolutely impossibility given that a good half of the Dáil contingent are now pro-choice. Perhaps others can help.

Though, in fairness, I think this, a continuation of the same line, is just about spot on…

…while his efforts to stave off SF have seen him take up anti-national positions on the north while Vlad comes over as a reborn Michael Collins.

And interestingly the Phoenix notes that Martin Mansergh has been criticising Martin for being anti-republican in its determination to attack SF using Brexit as the means.

Pat Leahy in the IT suggests that an election, even on foot of a successful referendum outcome, might scupper legislation which would be brought in, all things being equal in the Autumn. He even suggests that some TDs might line up on a platform of not supporting legislation.

The Dáil will return in mid-September and pass a budget in mid-October. After that, with the confidence-and-supply agreement expired, we are in election territory. In those circumstances, the chances of abortion legislation getting through the Dáil are highly uncertain, to say the least.

You don’t have to be a student of politics to realise that this raises the prospect of a general election in which candidates’ attitudes to abortion and especially the proposals to introduce abortion on request up to 12 weeks will become an important question.

And;

…there are anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand of such hardline anti-abortion votes in every constituency, depending on where it is. So where do they go? There may well be single-issue, pro-life candidates, but they won’t be elected. Instead, I expect the votes are likely to transfer to the most pro-life Fianna Fáil candidate in the constituency – and there are plenty of them – but only once cast-iron assurances to vote against the abortion legislation were supplied. How ironic if these anti-abortion votes were to deliver an electoral boost for Michéal Martin.

And yet, and yet. Again the point mentioned elsewhere today comes into play. With a good chunk of FF support gone to SF, FF isn’t quite what it used to be, even with more TDs. And it would not be difficult to cobble together a (presumably) FG led coalition of like minds, who along with the far from insignificant cohort of FF TDs who are pro-choice (words many of us never thought to write) would be able to draft the necessary legislation.

Which isn’t to say it would be easy, but as Leahy himself notes, even if the margin of victory is something in the 55/45 range that would still be the express will of the people.

To download the above please click on the following link. communist-comment-ico-1970.pdf

Please click here to go the Left Archive.

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive.

This is a very interesting document dating from 1970 and the Irish Communist Organisation (the precursor to BICO). A number of issues are addressed, ‘Too Many Unions?’, ‘Anti-Partitionism’, ‘Socialism ‘Comes in From the Cold’’ and Stormont. But the front page piece is on ‘Recent Riots in the North’.

The ICO did not support these riots, in the sense that it did not involve itself physically in furthering them (and no other sense is worth considering). In failing to support these struggles the ICO is not distinguished from many other organisations claiming to be socialist. In stating clearly that it did not support such struggles the ICO is distinguished from all other socialist bodies.

And it continues:

In the current issue of the trotskyist ‘Workers Republic’ for example, the ICO is described as pro-imperialist mainly because it does not give phrase-mongering ‘support’ to these struggles… but neither the L.W.R. nor any other trostskyist body has participated physically in these riots.

It suggests that:

When the ICO was of the opinion there was a progressive element in the military conflict in Belfast – in the defence of the Falls in Augsut 1969 – it did not issue incitements to resistance from afar. It participated physically in the struggle in a very definite manne, and in the critical days made a very substantial contribution to this defence.

There’s much more including a piece on ‘Why would Stormont go?’.

And rightly so. But who next? And what impacts on Brexit?

Anyone happen to use this facility or similar?