Are Mick Wallace and Clare Daly Irelands greatest shame?

is their story and they're sticking to it...

Yea i have ended discussion on the topic with more than a few people now - i cannot tolerate the rampant 'whataboutery' that is on display RE this War, the players involved, and who is to blame

I used to think Wallace and Daly were just eccentric, and doing their best to suck off the government t!t as long as they could could get away with it, like a lot of our politicians. Now indeed they are shameful. And whats worse the people who voted for them should hang their heads in shame.

Not according to the Dail staff who had to clean the leather seat in the chamber after them one night......

Naomi O' Leary wrote a fantastic piece about these two last year, which I have referenced several times earlier in this thread. Well she's done it again. She has a long piece in today's Irish Times discussing how Daly & Wallace are covered in state media in Russia, China and the Middle East. It's behind a paywall and is a long read but helpfully she has created a tweet thread with the same basic points in it:

New information in this piece:

• Both Wallace and Daly are mentioned more times in Chines media than any other Irish person (Conor McGregor is third)
• Wallace has been given the knickname "Golden Lion King" on Chinese social media
• They went to bat for a Lithuanian politician in an obscure case in Lithuania who had been accused of spying for Russia
• They joined pro-DNR protests with a Latvian MEP who is seen as pro-Kremlin even by other Russian speaking Latvian MEPs
• Syrian media have given extensive coverage to their praise of Qassem Soleimani
• Daly stated that the Iraqi PMF “upholds international law” and praised its “egalitarian nature” and “inclusiveness”. This is a group who are notorious for terrorising, torturing and murdering members of the LGBT community.

The reason why they are so valuable to these regimes is very simple:

So it stands to reason that if the only power that these two have is their office that they will have to stand again at the next election. They are no use to these authoritarian states without being able to say that they are MEPs. I hope that in that campaign every single one of their quotes is dredged up and thrown back at them at any debates and interviews. I don't think their views reflect those of many people in Ireland. Views that only became abundantly clear after they got elected. The next time around the electorate will know who they really are.

That's kind of it, but thats often been easy to fall for. When Clare was a shop steward in Aer Lingus one of her stunts was to disrupt union meetings and shout down other shop stewards. Hardly brokering union power. Her other stunt was threatening to call a strike because (in the words of the shop steward who told me this) "someone moved a sandwich." Aparently she was literally out with a placard every Friday, and made the union hard to take seriously by other workers.

I recall also some people saying when she was jailed for blocking bin lorries during the bin charges campaign, that someone should go down to Mountjoy with a placcard saying "Keep her in."

She is very good at creating the semblamce of being a great friend of the people, but all she really just is should the opposite of whatever is currently in power or likely to be in power. Except, funnily enough, Putin, Assad, etc

All of this may be true, but it makes it all the more bizarre that this great ''champion'' of human rights declared, when faced with reports of one of the vilest instances of atrocity and the violation of human rights, namely Chinese persecution of the Uighurs, that these reports were ''gross exaggerations''. Considering the report released recently by Michelle Bachelet, I'd say this is a great example of egg-on-face, but it will run off Wallace like water off a duck's back.

All they ever have is whataboutism. Whenever they are challenged for their tacit support of murderous regimes their tactic is typically to make some passionless general condemnation before then launching into attacks, with great enthusiasm, on the USA/EU/NATO. It's clear as day that they have zero fundamental core beliefs.

Their entire schtick is to get on the opposite side to whatever the USA and EU are doing. They then take advantage of loop-holes in the European Parliament to get as much speaking time as possible, in order to show up on pro-Chinese and pro-Russian social media. There's a reason why the Parliament is generally empty when they speak - it's because they get speaking time on some obscure, nondescript bills and then use that time to instead go off on their social media theatrics.

Think this is an old speech but it's doing the rounds on pro-Russian twitter and is a good example of what was outlined above - note all the empty seats.

I expect after their resounding electoral defeats they'll retire to Russia

Nah. Western Shills don't actually want to live in Russia. I mean the people in the regimes that they go to bat for don't even want to live in Russia!

Russia, for people like Clare Daly is a state of mind. A mythical place that exists in opposition to the USA and NATO and the EU. A kind of utopia for the hard-left who are actively uninterested in learning the truth about it.

The dirty little secret about these people is that they love to live in the West. In the case of these two, they love living in Brussels. They love to claim their expenses. They love to give jobs to their friends and family and milk the system for all it's worth.

I have no idea where they will go to when they lose their seats but it certainly won't be Russia, that's for sure.

Taiwan and Ukraine seem to be doing pretty good out of it too.

The out of control beast at the moment is the Russian one. It takes another beast to counter it.

BTW, the longer term trend is for military expenditure to account for a falling share of GDP. I remember when UK expenditure on the NHS overtook Defence expenditure (late 60s). Now it's out of sight.

The Russian military beast is the proximate cause of likely famine in Africa and. Middle East.