Fine Gael and The Will To Power

Abolishing the Seanad is an intellectually lazy and
populist move that will compound our system's failure

I shared a plane journey to New York yesterday with a man working with NGOs, in the area of global co-ordination.  We talked about how difficult it was to control egos where righteousness levels seem to know no limit.  "People get into this," he said, "with the best of intentions - then they forget about why they're there, they forget about the children, and the starving, and the organisation becomes an end in itself.  You can get a lot done when you remind them about why they're there."

The Sindo Poll: An Inconvenient Truth

Fianna Fáil back in the lead, but
leadership is in short supply.

The Sunday Independent today published the second poll in just over a week to confirm the reinstatement of our erstwhile nemesis Fianna Fáil as the largest party in the land, coming as it did shortly after the Irish Times published broadly similar results.  In both instances, the don't know category was enormous, being 27% today and 34% last week, which gives some comfort.  But most don't know groups tend to break broadly with the trend, and therefore we need to presume that they're not all going to some consistent non-Fianna Fáil group, whether anti-bailout - a la Sinn Féin - or conservative pro-European - a la Fine Gael. Labour, I'm afraid, is indistinct.