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

Big Jim O'Callaghan actually had quite a few cuts at FG on the radio this morning. He essentially blamed them for the housing crisis by reminding everyone they were in power for 10 years before the housing 'plan' was produced by a FF minister.

I can see FF TDs changing the rhetoric and making waves when Leo takes over. They will be on an election footing from that point and will try hard to prove they are somehow different to FG. It wont work.

Coalition competition heats up at halfway point (rte.ie)

Fine Gael has said it will develop its own policies on housing and, according to Mr Varadkar, will examine "what solutions we could bring forward to speed up Housing for All" – a policy being steered by the Fianna Fáil housing minister.

After Fine Gael TDs held a meeting last week to discuss housing policies, the response in Fianna Fáil - where there is a belief that they are picking up the pieces from where Fine Gael left off - was best summed up by Jim O’Callaghan, who observed: "I would be very interested to see what ideas Fine Gael come up with after 12 years in Government."

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It seems FG have been holding back on FF and have all the answers on their housing disaster.

IT has an Ipsos poll today. FG up 4% and FF up 1% with SF down 1%. The problem is that the last poll was in July so it is not possible to accurately attribute the changes to the Budget but the IT is puffing up FF/FG as usual. Labour was down 1% and that's a loss of 25% of its support since July. ;) The Margin of Error was 2.8%. Ipsos is generally a good pollster and it uses face to face polling. B&A also uses face to face polling. The other pollsters use online/phone polling and that does not favour FF's older supporters so FF always under-performs in online/phone polling. What is interesting is SF's stable support level since the GE.

Regards...jmcc

Already some very worrying trends are happening in the .COM gTLD. The .COM is to the US what the .IE is to Ireland. While the US has the .us as its country code TLD, most of US registrations are in the .COM and the .COM has been struggling for the last year. When an economy is doing well, more domain names are registered and more websites are developed. The .COM and some other TLDs have been losing registrations and developed websites. That's a bad indication. There's normally a downturn in new registrations between April and September but this year has been exceptional in that the rebound that starts in September hasn't appeared yet. The official data is published by ICANN with a three month delay so it is only those of us with access to the zone files (the lists of domain names and their nameservers) that are watching this play out each day. Some people have been trying to attribute the decline in .COM to the price rises in registration fees but this is not supported by the trends. There is an economic realignment in progress and if it is happening in the US market, it will spread. Ireland has more .IE domain names registered than .COM or other TLD registrations so the Irish economy may not be impacted by some of these trends. The economics are worrying because indicators of an economic downturn show up in the domain name market first with increasing numbers of deleted domain names and abandonment of websites.

Regards...jmcc

I think you are right about carrying on like children but surely SF's childish budget ideas are for the relevant thread?

Varadkar was 100% correct in drawing the parallel between Truss/Kwasi and SF. You let naive idiots like them run the country and look what happens.

The agenda is clear. The minute that a pointed jibe at Pearse "Kwasi" Doherty hits home hard, the moral behaviour police are out in force decrying childish behaviour. Where were they when the childish no-confidence motions were being discussed?

The FFG legacy and decades of failure are laid bare here...

'Failing our children' - warning over teacher shortage

Principals warn of 'devastating' impact of teacher shortage

Primary school principals in Dublin city say the chronic shortage of teachers in the capital is having a "devastating" impact on vulnerable children including those with special educational needs.

All of these school leaders, as well as others who have spoken to RTÉ News, say the main causes of the crisis are the acute shortage of accommodation in the capital and its cost, coupled with the prohibitive cost of transport.

"Do they stay in Dublin and make peace with the fact that they will never be able to afford a mortgage, that they will struggle to find rented accommodation ... They are going to Dubai, Australia and Canada, and I don't blame them."

Wouldn't trust anything O'Connor says without independent verification. The problem for FFG is that all the movements are within the Margin of Error. The FG supporters are different to FG voters because a lot of votes in a GE are actually non-party supporters who vote a particular way. The demographics in the RedC polls and all polls have a higher MoE because they are slicing and dicing even smaller numbers from a small survey. What is very interesting is the stability of the RedC polls in that there has been no movement outside the MoE for the last 4 RedC polls. FG gaining 3% could be due to the Budget but FF losing 1% is going to worry FFers as they may consider that FF is on the way to being the new Labour party and getting absolutely hammered in the next GE.

RedC is a strange poll. It doesn't use a random sample like other polls. It uses a panel of 40K voters that it thinks represents the electorate. That is a much smaller number than the electorate so some panelists will be in more than one survey through a year. That gives it some aspects of a tracking poll where the same people are surveyed continually. FF would have been hoping for a boost from the Budget but it hasn't happened. That could cause trouble for Martin but he only has a few weeks left. Being cynical, the Budget bought some popularity for FG but not FF.

Regards...jmcc

Unfortunately our libel laws are too strong, and politicians hide behind them.

What is interesting is that only a few weeks ago, there were posters on here effectively predicting that MacSharry would return and take out Martin. You would hope that they would have learned the lesson and not be predicting the demise of Martin every single time a nonentity backbencher opens their mouth. Prior to MacSharry, we had McGuinness, O'Callaghan and others as the kingmakers but all have been found to be more mouth than action.

Not a FF voter, but hilarious to watch the hopes being pinned on Martin being taken out. Rather than calling the comment about Martin interesting, a neutral observer would note the bitterness of someone who lost.

Be interesting to see what side deals MacSharry extracts from the government in return for his support in close Dáil votes.

I really hope that Martin is still FF leader for the next election. A link to their dodgy past and one of the crew that initiated the housing disaster that FFG have created.

Big Jim showed that he will probably struggle to keep his seat in DBS.

Mac Sharry's just somebody's son.