General election 2020 (2 Viewers)

[ernesto]

when is the rotating taoiseach thing meant to rotate next? Was it 2 years? So, next spring..

I wonder will this shitty govt last that long

No one is going to put up with varadkar being Taoiseach again.
The plug will be pulled as soon as he's back in the door

 

[magicbastarder]

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i bet he's one of them lads who has read 'the art of war' and has post it notes up around his monitor with his favourite quotes.

 

[Cormcolash]

So, Shit, shit or shite

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[magicbastarder]

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[Cormcolash]

I'm so shocked

 

[xsteox]

So the FF collapse, is the rot going back to Berty and the gang, or just that disaster that is Cowen and the the last/current recession?

 

[Unicron]

So the FF collapse, is the rot going back to Berty and the gang, or just that disaster that is Cowen and the the last/current recession?

Bertie is happy to tell peole that things were going just fine under his watch. Never mind the impending disaster he allowed to happen in the run up to the financial crisis.

 

[magicbastarder]

the whole FF raison d'etre is 'we should be in power and that's the natural order of things', so not having enjoyed a clear position of power (or at least being the considerably senior partner in a coalition government) in over 10 years is like watching a 13 year old start to question if god really exists or not.

 

[egg_]

Is there any information on what sort of ages are most impacted by long Covid?

women of childbearing age. a theory is that it's because of the different way their immune systems react.

also being linked with M.E. now too, which was never really investigated because it mainly effected women of the same age too.

Long covid mostly affects middle-aged women - i.e. at the end of childbearing age

Covid-19: Middle aged women face greater risk of debilitating long term symptoms

It's not accurate to say M.E. "was never really investigated". Some things are just very hard to figure out

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=myalgic+encephalomyelitis+research&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

 

[Unicron]

Long covid mostly affects middle-aged women - i.e. at the end of childbearing age

Covid-19: Middle aged women face greater risk of debilitating long term symptoms

It's not accurate to say M.E. "was never really investigated". Some things are just very hard to figure out

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=myalgic+encephalomyelitis+research&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart

How is Mrs. Egg getting on these days? Any improvement?

 

[egg_]

After the most recent ambulance trip (early May, cos she was having weird spasms in the middle of the night) she went on a low-histamine diet, and has improved a good bit since. Hard to know if it's the diet that has made the difference, or the vaccine, or the warmer weather, or just random fluctuations. She's better atm than she has been at any time in 2021, but, alas, still a good way from actually better ... maybe at 60% of her pre-covid energy/strength levels

 

[chris d]

Christ. That's a rough deal. Sorry to hear it.

 

[ann post]

So the FF collapse, is the rot going back to Berty and the gang, or just that disaster that is Cowen and the the last/current recession?

I honestly think it pre-dates Bertie - he was merely passing the torch - the mechanism that public office is for doing deals to favour certain people or entities for financial gains within a closed circle is thier reason to exist - not being in majority they can't really do these things these days so toys are going to fly out of the pram.

 

[magicbastarder]

FOT was writing on this very topic in this morning's IT

For a long time, whenever I thought about Fianna Fáil (which was far too often for my mental wellbeing), a particular phrase came to mind. I knew it off by heart. It encapsulated an undeniable truth that was at the core of Irish politics for eighty years.
The words were uttered in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin in 1992. The background noise of Irish public life at the time was an endless tribunal of inquiry into shenanigans in the beef industry and their governmental ramifications.
Albert Reynolds, who was then taoiseach, was due to give his evidence. He was obsessed with the inquiry. He was worried in particular about being cross-examined under oath by one of the sharpest barristers in the business: the late Adrian Hardiman, then a senior counsel, later a Supreme Court judge.
In the small world of the law library, one of Reynolds’s own lawyers was a close friend of Hardiman. In the Shelbourne bar, he explained to Hardiman’s wife why it would be a good idea for her husband to be unavoidably detained on the day of the taoiseach’s cross-examination and leave the job to a more junior (and less dangerous) colleague.
He uttered, by way of warning, a truth then universally acknowledged. Hardiman’s “future work and long-term interests could be affected if he carried out this cross-examination himself because the Fianna Fáil party was likely to be in power for a long time and had a long memory”.
These were essential facts of Irish life. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Fianna Fáil is the permanent repository of power. It does not forget its friends – and it remembers its enemies even more clearly.

Political weather
In this reality, there was little difference between power and the perception of power. So long as people believed that Fianna Fáil was going to be running the country far into the indefinite future, they had to accommodate themselves to that fact. Other parties might sometimes make the political weather. Fianna Fáil was the climate.
In this, the party was very like the other institution to which it remained so closely allied: the Catholic church. The church, too, was likely to be in power for a very long time and had, if anything, an even longer memory. Together, these two forces formed the Irish matrix.
For both organisations, this power was deeply corrupting. It meant that everything could be, in both senses, fixed. In the perpetual light that shone on these twin pillars of control, setbacks and scandals were temporary. The matrix would always regenerate itself.
The problem with power based on the perception of its own perpetuity is that, as the ad says, when it’s gone, it’s gone. And for Fianna Fáil, it has been gone since 2008. The crash, and the consequent loss of national sovereignty, destroyed it.
This process is cumulative. A byelection in which the party finishes fifth with fewer than 5 per cent of the votes is not just a disaster in itself. It makes Fianna Fáil look weak and a weak Fianna Fáil is the political equivalent of a homeopathic remedy – it is the watery memory of a once-potent substance.
Without perpetual domination, ideology matters. In its pomp, Fianna Fáil could stand for everything and nothing because everybody knew what it really stood for: power. It could befriend the oligarch and the oppressed. These were mere shadows; the substance was control of the State.

Battery
But turn the power off, and the shape-shifting becomes merely vacuous. The battery – you’d better be with us because we own the freehold on the inside track – goes flat.
Who’s afraid of Fianna Fáil now? Its enemies list is like that of Graham Norton’s Father Noel Furlong in Father Ted – only joking! And conversely, who thinks that the way to advance in Irish life is to be in a party that had difficulty persuading even its own local councillors to put their names forward for the byelection?
In the Irish body politic, Fianna Fáil is a vestigial feature – the tailbone or the appendix. These bits survive their own redundancy, but they have no function. We don’t eat grass or have tails anymore, and we don’t believe that there is a party that will always be in charge.
This problem is existential. To believe it can be solved by replacing Micheál Martin with Jim O’Callaghan or Michael McGrath is magical thinking: the crops have failed because the king has offended the gods, so let us ritually slaughter the king.
Ritual slaughter would add greatly to the gaiety of the nation, but it will not save Fianna Fáil. It can carry on indefinitely as a ghost in its own electoral machine. It cannot, however, answer the question – what are we for?
What is the purpose of a machine that has become obsolescent? It can only be displayed at fairs like a steam-powered threshing engine that exerts a nostalgic fascination but goes nowhere.
Fianna Fáil has had two long lives. It created de Valera’s Ireland. And it then created contemporary Ireland through the Whitaker-Lemass revolution of 1958. The first is long gone. The second has run its course, as Ireland seeks a new paradigm.
There will not be a third act.

 

[ann post]

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Interesting to read through the last draft and see how much work Alice Mary Higgins did on that in the Seanad.

 

[Unicron]

After the most recent ambulance trip (early May, cos she was having weird spasms in the middle of the night) she went on a low-histamine diet, and has improved a good bit since. Hard to know if it's the diet that has made the difference, or the vaccine, or the warmer weather, or just random fluctuations. She's better atm than she has been at any time in 2021, but, alas, still a good way from actually better ... maybe at 60% of her pre-covid energy/strength levels

Jesus that sounds shit. Hope there's a steady recovery, but that's rough, not just on her but I'm sure it's impacted your whole household.

 

[Lili Marlene]

Oh, in regards the Clare Daly and Mick Wallace stuff, they did an interview with the Tortoise Shack lads there last week, if yiz are interested

587. Irish MEP’s Clare Daly & Mick Wallace – Tortoise Shack

tortoiseshack.ie

my thoughts are

a) they are very much on the defensive, although that is understandable,
b) their basic argument seems to be "we're actually trying to do stuff as MEPs, which most can't be bothered with"
c) I can't be bothered fact checking every single claim made by everyone
d) I have so little idea as to what MEPs do at the best of times

 

[ann post]

d) I have so little idea as to what MEPs do at the best of times

I kinda deal with them and I'm mostly doing this post as a self refresher but TLDR.



A: join a wider european party - FG join the european peoples party (EPP), greens join greens etc, S&D are labour, FF are Renew (just edited this).
B: join committees which are almost like our ministries but a bit more technocratic
C: vote on legislation / things.
D: take part in plenary / dail questions type thing which i think is monthly because covid
E: have these eurocratic linkedin looking websites

Home | Luke Ming FLANAGAN | MEPs | European Parliament

Profile page - Luke Ming FLANAGAN - Home

www.europarl.europa.eu

 

[Unicron]

I kinda deal with them and I'm mostly doing this post as a self refresher but TLDR.

View attachment 14979

A: join a wider european party - FG join the european peoples party (EPP), greens join greens etc, S&D are labour, FF are ECR I think.
B: join committees which are almost like our ministries but a bit more technocratic
C: vote on legislation / things.
D: take part in plenary / dail questions type thing which i think is monthly because covid
E: have these eurocratic linkedin looking websites

Home | Luke Ming FLANAGAN | MEPs | European Parliament

Profile page - Luke Ming FLANAGAN - Home

www.europarl.europa.eu

The little less than 108k a year they are paid. Are they taxed on that in Belgium or do different MEPs come away with different nett salaries depending on the rates in their home countries?

 

[Lili Marlene]

Thanks Ann, i'm kind of none the wiser though.

Like, that sounds like the things I assume they would do but the more paranoid part of my brain says it's all cover for the Euro-Elite to create Euro-Dungeons in Euro-Pizza-Express.

A little less jokingly, the more I learn about how it works the more I fall on the "euro-sceptic" camp, aside from a vague surely everyone getting on is better than digging in and starting wars feeling that I inherited from the 90s.

and a real desire to not be a gammon.