Irish General Election to 34th Dáil; Racist Danger
The June 2024 Euro/ Local results in Ireland produced some alarming results – the racist far-right came from the margins and increased its electoral support. This could be a predictor of the coming General Election result.
Warning signs to anti-racists exist in various opinion surveys. See, for example, these numbers from a recent RedC General Election Opinion Survey) :
Aontú, a right-wing split from Sinn Féin set up by an anti-choice TD from Meath, Peadar Tóibín, is beginning to hoover up right-wing racist votes which were scattered among various mini-Hitlers in the June 2024 European and Local Elections. We can say the same for the Irish Independence party (II). When we note that a majority of independent candidates are part of the racist far-right, a disturbing picture emerges. The numbers are worse in other parts of the Irish state.
Here is the data from an Irish Times Opinion Poll :
Irish General Election November 29 2024 Irish Times Survey Results 15/11/24
First preference voting intentions
Dublin
Rest of Leinster
Munster
Connacht/Ulster
Fianna Fáil
16.00%
19.00%
27.00%
13.00%
Fine Gael
22.00%
29.00%
22.00%
29.00%
Labour
9.00%
3.00%
2.00%
3.00%
Green Party
6.00%
2.00%
1.00%
2.00%
Sinn Fein
21.00%
16.00%
19.00%
21.00%
People Before Profit/Solidarity
4.00%
1.00%
2.00%
1.00%
Social Democrats
5.00%
5.00%
2.00%
2.00%
Aontú
2.00%
4.00%
3.00%
2.00%
Independent candidate
15.00%
21.00%
21.00%
25.00%
Temptation exists : bending to “understandable” fears. For example an election canvasser from a party with one foot in the left put it to me that some voters are “uncomfortable” because their neighbours come from outside Ireland.
Let’s be clear, harsh, and unambiguous : messages like this pander to the racist view that immigrants are criminals and rapists. There is no evidence backing up claims that people born outside Ireland are any worse than Irish natives. It gives oxygen to the far right shite being whispered around communities.
Simon Harris confirmed that he’ll travel to Áras an Uachtaráin shortly to ask President Higgins to dissolve the Dáil.
The election is set for Friday 29 November 2024.
A number of radical left candidates against any coalition deal with FFFFGGG have a realistic chance of winning a Dáil seat. [FFFGGG = Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Greens, Gombeens].
One of them is Councillor John Lyons in Dublin Bay North.
Councillor John Lyons (Second left) supports Irish Left With Ukraine (Seen Here Picketing the Dublin Russian Embassy of Vladimir Putin
Rejecting any coalition deals with FFFGGG and a policy that All refugees Are Welcome should be top priorities for radical left candidates in this general election.
People Before Profit (PBP) candidates also endorse the above policy.
Carola Rackete, a left-wing German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) with a high profile, supports Ukrainian resistance against Russian Imperialism.
Carola Rackete is a consistent anti-imperialist and is also an ecosocialist activist. Here is Carola’s Wikipedia entry :
Rackete participated in several research expeditions to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and is co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative. She also supported the Extinction Rebellion movement and took part in forest protests in Sweden, as well as the occupations of the Hambach Forest and the Dannenrod Forest in Germany. Between 2016 and 2019, she occasionally volunteered for non-governmental sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean.[2] In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue vessel without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy. The custodial judge considered Rackete’s actions as justified because she had a duty to save lives at sea and ruled that Rackete should not have been arrested. In 2021, the pending investigation was formally dismissed, since the state prosecutor didn‘t see reason to proceed to court.[3]
A newspaper acting as the mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Russian imperialism (Junge Welt) launched a vicious campaign against Carola Rackete, who, as a leftist member of the EU parliament, agreed to a resolution supporting the Ukrainian resistance.
A Sinn Féin councillor has resigned from the party, saying he took the decision to do so after being “silenced” by his party on the migration crisis and the recent referendums on family and carers. Long-serving Laois county councillor Aidan Mullins announced his resignation after he was told he would be suspended from the party for three months.
Many people who knew Nell McCafferty could not get to her funeral in St. Columb’s Cathedral, Derry. An alternative was offered on RIP.IE – a live broadcast starting at 12.30pm. When interested viewers tuned in, they were mystified, seeing only a blank screen. The livestream did not start until after 1.00pm, as a priest shared the altar with three men conducting a religious ceremony containing no stories about one of Derry’s most talented writers, Nell McCafferty. At one screening venue a small group of Nell’s fans – including Máirín Johnson who travelled on the legendary Dublin-Belfast contraceptive train with Nell in 1971 – were not impressed. We learned later that Eamonn McCann delivered a eulogy in front of the altar – A report is below. Source : Nell McCafferty “Changed Ireland for the Better”
Eamonn McCann delivers a eulogy for Nell McCafferty, St Columb’s Cathedral Derry, August 23 2024
Nell McCafferty ‘changed Ireland for the better’, mourners at her funeral in Derry’s Bogside told
Campaigning journalist and author, who focused on women’s rights, poverty and social injustice, died on Wednesday aged 80
Nell McCafferty “changed Ireland for the better”, mourners at her funeral have been told.
Delivering an elegy in advance of her funeral Mass in Derry’s Bogside on Friday, the veteran civil rights campaigner and journalist Eamonn McCann said it was “given to very few of us to actually change the world”.
“Nell”, she called her autobiography, and that was how she was known.
Hold the Front Page – Nell has a story – Irish Times August 22 2024
Small, fierce and feisty. That mop of curls, the waft of cigarette smoke, the tongue in cheek smile and her distinctive walk, like a sailor ashore. Everyone soon knew her smoky Derry voice, laconic, challenging, always ready to break into laughter. You never knew what Nell was going to say next. It was often outrageous. She was a character, and she loved to play herself to the hilt. She was also one of the most important Irish journalists of the latter half of the twentieth century. She listened. She paid attention. She told the truth.
She was, wrote her friend, the historian Margaret Mac Curtain, “unequalled in the extraordinary breadth and fearless candour she has brought to bear on controversial subjects.” Her journalistic career started in The Irish Times in 1970, when the paper’s late Northern editor and editor, Fergus Pyle, commissioned her to write about the new bathroom in her family home in Beechwood Street in Derry’s Bogside.
Home was her touchstone. She vaunted her street-cred. She was part of a Bogside aristocracy that included Martin McGuinness, Eamonn McCann, Seamus Deane, Paddy Doherty, John Hume, Dana and Phil Coulter. Her mother was her biggest fan and harshest critic.
McCafferty was born in 1944. Her father, Hugh, was a clerk for the British admiralty by day and a bookie’s clerk at the dog track at night. Her mother, Lily, reared six children. Another daughter died at birth.
Her parents had to work hard to keep poverty at bay. She was fascinated and frightened by the poverty of the tenements where her father was raised. One of his brothers had died as a British soldier at the Somme. Her mother’s parents were Sergeant Duffy, a Catholic RUC man, and his wife Sarah, a Protestant who “turned”.
When you listen to this June 25 car-crash interview with former Leicester South Labour MP Jonathan Ashworth, you would be forgiven for thinking he was a member of the far-right racist party, Reform.
Jonathan Ashworth's car crash interview on returning asylum seekers to their country of origin
Jonathan Ashworth, "Rather than sending flights to Rwanda, we're going to be sending flights to the countries these people came from"
Shockat Adam was not alone. Five pro-Gaza independent candidates (including former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North) are members of the new Westminster parliament :
On the face of it this is political loony-land – and so much for the liberal reputation of Alliance Party leader Naomi Long, currently trying to take the East Belfast Westminster seat of DUP leader Gavin Robinson – the result will be known in the early hours of Friday July 5.
Political Journalist Sam McBride explains the background in two articles below.
One correspondent asked McBride a relevant question, straining to give Long the benefit of the doubt :
Extraordinary numbers are appearing from reliable opinion poll surveys in Britain.
MRP (Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification) surveys (explanation here : MRP explained) are much more accurate than traditional opinion polls – and still : we must remember these numbers are just a snapshot, the real thing might be significantly different on July 4 2024.
All of that said : Gamblegate (Tory insiders placing insider bets on the surprise date of the British general election) and Brexit neatly symbolise the self-created swamp of the 2020’s British Conservatives.
Copyright Steve Bell 2023/All Rights Reserved e.mail: belltoons@ntlworld.com tel: 00 44 (0)1273 500664
Jeremy Corbyn Might Retain Islington North
This MRP survey makes some interesting predictions for untypical constituencies. For example here is the Islington North Prediction : Expelled ex Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn (independent) might defeat the official Sir Keir Starmer candidate.
Bad six county News for the Democratic Unionist party
None of that is good news for the Democratic Unionist party (DUP). The flat earth dinosaurs of the six counties are tipped to win North Antrim (home of Ian Paisley Junior MP) but the numbers are getting tight : Antrim North Prediction
A long shot : tactical nationalist voting might cause the first Westminster Paisley election defeat since 1970 when the reverend Ian senior first won the seat.
Éirigí, a socialist-republican organisation, “is a political party that was formed in 2006 by a group of Dublin-based community and political activists. We believe that modern Ireland is a deeply undemocratic, unequal and unfair country not by accident, but by design.” Their analysis of Sinn Féin’s unexpectedly weak showing in the June 7 2024 Irish Local and European Elections highlights how the party was bounced into changing its position on immigrationand racism :
With a few notable exceptions, this new talking point was propagated without context – with no detailed critique of migration in the modern world – no attempt to explain why the asylum process is in chaos – no robust defence of the core republican principle of equality – no assertion that racism, sectarianism and xenophobia are the enemies of republicanism – no calling out the peddling of hate and division by the far-right. For potential Sinn Féin voters, the lesson was clear. The party could be bounced into changing its messaging if there were votes at stake, even when those doing the bouncing were far-right bigots. It seems almost certain that the ease with which Sinn Féin was bounced on the issue of immigration did them more electoral damage than their actual position on immigration.
Sinn Féin Election Disaster – The Price Of Putting Popularity Before Principle
Two weeks have now passed since the Local and European elections in the Twenty-Six Counties. Despite Sinn Féin’s frantic spinning to the contrary, the election was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for the party. The number of votes and seats secured by the party was even lower than the lowest expectations of pollsters, political commentators and Sinn Féin itself.
As recently as July 2022, support for Sinn Féin was at a level not seen in more than a century. The Irish Times/IPSOS opinion poll for that month found that 36% of voters in the Twenty-Six Counties intended to vote for Sinn Féin.
Irish Times/IPSOS poll results from July 2022 had Sinn Féin attracting the support of more than one in three voters in the Twenty-Six Counties. (Image courtesy of Irish Times).
Fourteen months later, in September 2023, the same poll found that 34% still intended to vote for Sinn Féin. Among voters under the age of 34, support was even higher at more than 43%. Despite this, Sinn Féin secured less than 12% of the popular vote in the 2024 Local and European elections.
So, why have two-thirds of Sinn Féin supporters abandoned the party since last September?
Prior to elections the apparent answer to this question seemed obvious to many – immigration. Immigration, it was claimed, had recently become a red-hot issue for many Sinn Féin supporters., and these supporters were now walking away from Sinn Féin in their droves because the party was too ‘soft’ on immigration. It was an open and shut case. Until it wasn’t.
When the ballot boxes were opened on this day two weeks ago, it quickly became clear that the opinion polls had significantly underestimated the scale of Sinn Féin’s woes.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 