Why is the Irish Labour party such a failure ?

You know that FG led that Government, right? Gotta laugh at voters who give Labour a minority position and are then surprised when FG as the largest party implements FG policies.

If you want Labour to explain themselves, maybe go ask Labour. If you want to blame Labour for every action of the FG led government, where they had close to an overall majority, that’s your choice, but it’s a bit like blaming Belarus for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sorry if I wandered into a thread where speculation is not allowed, even about the true reasons for the Labour Party crisis. The Labour Party love to lecture others about transparency but their delicate sensibilities shall not be disturbed by probing questions on Boards.ie.

I’ll go elsewhere to figure this out. Or maybe not. In a couple of elections from now, as a few survivors gather to wonder over the demise of our oldest political party, they might consider whether they lived up to the exalted standards they demanded of others.

That identity politics,woke (and i hate that word) nonsense appeals to a sizeable minority of people on twitter and fcuk all people in real life.

The Labour Party are about to find that out but in fairness they can't fall much further than where they are,maybe that's why they're taking a punt on Bacik.

They have wandered so far from any credible grass roots that she is now set to be leader........of the LABOUR Party????

Who is going to vote for them now? Anyway it doesn't matter as they are already an irrelevance at the polls.

Look at the intimate details that were published of de brudders previous difficulties. If your speculation was true, there would be no issue about publishing it. Stop trying to make a conspiracy out of nothing.

Let's be serious here for a minute,what percentage of the supposed Labour grass roots can relate to this lady?

They are a joke party now.

Taking Dublin bay south as a barometer for Ireland will not end well.

Fortunately or unfortunately for the Labour Party they are starting from a low bar and have nothing to lose.They are an irrelevance.

It's sad really because there are plenty of people like me would would like a change to FF/FG but will never vote for SF.

I'm amazed Bacik didn't jump ship to the soc dems a few years ago, she fits their profile far better than Labour.

Labour are a meandering mess with no clear direction, there's a few decent councillors and people on the ground, I'll admit I voted for Labour in the last election, on the strength of the candidate rather than the party and my disdain for FF/FG & SF. But when you go from Gilmore, to Kelly and now presumably to Bacik, what is the actual purpose of the party?

No. For a start, most pundits are idiots. What happened in DBS was simple. FG screwed up its candidate selection due to Varadkar's hissyfit about Kate O'Connell and made a mess of the campaign. FF ran a very weak candidate and also screwed up its campaign. SF gave a candidate a run to test out the possibility for a second SF seat in a GE. With the three main parties effectively not really contesting the seat, Bacik managed to get elected in a very odd bye-election. In a General Election, the big parties and the Green parties would be fighting hard to get elected and that would be a very different election. Voting patterns would revert to traditional party patterns.

Regards...jmcc

The SocDems and Labour would be closer. The Greens are quite a different kind of party and have very different supporters. They are some dedicated eco types but they are politically more astute than Labour/SocDem supporters. After 2016 and the implosion of Labour, the Greens seemed to get a lot of the type of supporters/members who would previously have joined Labour ("issues" and identity politics types not unlike the current Labour TDs). There was an attempt by these entryists to remove Ryan as leader and it failed. The Greens were not Labour. The demographics of the Greens supporters also seem to confirm a kind of "FG on bikes" description.

RTE has always had a Stickies/Labour element due to the poxification of the station by Stickies/Official Sinn Fein/The Workers Party/Democratic Left. There was also an "our kind of people" element with the way that Ryan was on lots of RTE political programmes for years despite the Greens having no TDs. The same promotion by RTE of Labour as a major political party can be seen today despite Labour being just a fringe party.

The best thing that the SocDems could do is to leave Labour destroy itself with identity politics and other dimwitted rubbish and then pick up former Labour support. The worst thing that the SocDems could do is to merge with the tainted Labour brand. As long as Shortall is a co-leader of the SocDems, there will be a reluctance to merge with Labour.

Regards...jmcc