Seanad Result: An Irish Identity Crisis

There are those who would argue that the Seanad result is a vote against the government, a protest vote. Others say that it is a vote in favour of reform. I think it runs deeper than that, however. What we are seeing in this country is a pattern of negativity and absence in our politics that has become progressively worse over the last ten years.

The problem is that there is no vision, no direction being articulated by our elites.  Elites have never been a problem in this country, we are a people seemingly happy to subjugate ourselves before our betters, whether that's the British, the Catholic Church, or Fianna Fáil, though each of them found that there was a limit to our patience.  Each represented a kind of vision, an identity, a belief that we could attach ourselves to.  With the British, we were a part of Empire; with the Church, we were a Catholic Leader country, with education, healthcare and the entirety of our social fabric tied up in the Church; and with Fianna Fáil it was the political extension of the late nineteenth century Gaelic Revival, a kind of Irish exceptionalism, we saints and scholars, a cult of the extraordinary that was almost fascist in its design.

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.