FF/FG/Green Government - Part 3 - Threadbanned User List in OP

Popularity among the electorate doesn't make you mainstream. Le Pen's party in France is around as popular as SF here over the last decade or so. Does that make them mainstream? No, absolutely it doesn't.

If you want to take the 60s as the era for defining politics, well Sinn Fein were the fundraising arm of a gang of criminal thugs. The apple hasn't fallen far from the tree with some of the current front bench.

Politics across the world is taking a lurch to the extremes, Sinn Fein are the Irish manifestation of that.

Certainly FF and FG have made it easier for the extreme populists like SF to get a foothold, but as long as people are more concerned about trivial issues like part-time jobs rather than the major issues of our time like climate change, then there is plenty of space for the likes of SF to work with.

What has that to do with my comment?

I bring up the North because the main opposition party here in the South are in power there and they have the same issues up there as down here. So, if people are angry about housing and want SF to fix it, then I promise you, they wont.

The plan is a bit more complicated and has much more in it than the Shared Equity scheme, which I actually do not agree with. Now, If you just focus on that, without acknowledging some of the positives, then you have an agenda.

Again, your characterisation of FG as a far right party is historically inaccurate and nonsense.

Simply put, individuals do not represent the policy position of a particular party, and Oliver J Flanagan wasn't even a member of FG in 1943. As for Varadkar, his personal struggles at the time put his comments in perspective.

This desperate attempt to paint FG as some kind of far-right party is quite simply pathetic and silly and a distortion of history. As usual, there isn't even a single mention of policy, not a single attempt to consider the Just Society crusade and the many reforms over the decades led by Fine Gael in the face of huge resistance from the Church and from the conservative elements embedded within Fianna Fail. Fine Gael were ahead of their time in this regard and it is one of the biggest reasons why they were never able to maintain two successive periods in government.

They do need to change, they need to embrace the climate change agenda much more forcefully, they need to focus on improving public services and ensuring that everyone makes some contribution from their income and wealth to society.

If the north and the south are so different, that must make unification nearly impossible and hugely expensive, so at least we have cleared that one up.

OK, to you they are the same party. So what makes you think this party would make housing work in the Republic where they have failed in the North?

As per your debate. As I already said, the Shared Equity scheme is only a very small part of the plan. Do you even know what else is in the plan? Repeating the same point again and again, is pointless.

Read my post again, where I deconstructed your argument and exposed its shortcomings.

FG do not have a far right past, that is utter nonsense, fabrication and Orwellian rightthink. Still your comment about FG voters being traditionally the type to have problems with jews really exposes your lack of knowledge.

This is the one issue successive governments are paying lip service to...

Pensions timebomb waiting to go off unless we take action now (irishtimes.com)

In this case the Government has had time to plan, be prepared and act and that time is now. Luckily, much of the work identifying what needs to be done is already there. The last government set out a detailed plan when it published its Pensions Roadmap almost three years ago. There were a number of different strands to the roadmap but the main ones included reforming the State pension, introducing an automatic enrolment savings system, and improving governance and regulation of private sector pensions.

It is in every one’s interest that this Government gets ahead with implementing the recommendations of the Pensions Roadmap so that we prevent another crisis being visited on us in the near future.