General Irish politics discussion thread

Was it in an intermediate count that Dick Spring came within a few votes of being eliminated?

End result wasn't that close according to the below (3 seater):

Jimmy Deenihan Fine Gael   10,087

Denis Foley Fianna Fail 7,611

Dick Spring Labour    6,739

Declan Finucane Sinn Féin   668

Dan Kiely Fianna Fail 2,939

Thomas McEllistrim Fianna Fail 6,161

William Leen Sinn Féin   559

Unfortunately a count-by-count breakdown is not given.

Brian Farrell talks to Dick Spring and mentions five votes:

? Spring got FG transfers, FFers got FFer transfers. No surprises there. But only one FG candidate to transfer to Labour. FF and SF weren't going to transfer much to Spring.

Mad having three FF candidates in a three seater, yes many votes will transfer but some will not. Given how tight it ended up, 2 candidates would almost certainly have produced 2 TDs.

Older people for the most part paid for those things themselves through their tax. Same as we are paying now for our future benefits.

No one should pay for a GP. Most other civilized European countries manage it somehow.

Ya we are paying for the current pension out goings and the people now on pensions paid for their elders and young people will pay ours when older so it's semantics.

GP care in the EU is actually harder to look up than I thought. France charges but you get it back, Belgium you get some back, Germany and Sweden are free at point of use from what I can see. Outside the EU the UK is free.

Theres no way young people will be paying for our pensions, the worker vs retiree ratio here is going to crater in the next 2 decades from 4:1 to 2:1 and theres no way the system as it currently stands will be economically feasible. The UK and many other western countries are on their way to a similar situation.

I've mentioned this before in the Brexit thread and basically the lack of conversation around the 2:1 ratio and the dismissal of it from Brexiters really really angered me

Or had been conditioned to blame everything on "others" which is what happened during Brexit. Unfit unemployable losers blaming hard working tax paying foreigners for all their problems.

We are nothing more than lucky in Ireland that we are behind other EU countries in terms of our average age.

Its going to involve a massive political, cultural and economic shift which nobody is willing to discuss let alone follow through on yet.

Pension age absolutely has to be raised but every party is too afraid of the Grey vote to even start an honest discussion of the problem. Beyond that a discussion of completely revamping the entire caring of retirees and pensioners needs to have started 10 years ago specifically in relation to healthcare. As bad as the current beds crisis is its only going to get worse every year as our population gets older while living longer and simply adding more beds to hospitals isnt going to make the problem of caring for the increasing numbers of elderly who cant take care of themselves magically disappear.

Having children needs to be made drastically less expensive as soon as possible. This wont fix the problem we are facing but it might help stabilise things 10+ years after it really begins.

The people who have too many kids than they can care for are nothing close to being part of the problem when dealing with the billions of euro it will take to solve this problem and neither are the "spongers". They are a drop in the ocean compared to the pension time bomb.

We absolutely need to fix how punitive it is for the average person to invest in the stock market, its one of the main reasons why property is seen as the only viable investment strategy for the average person which obviously has led to the housing issue and thus less people having children.

Im not a politician nor civil servant so really I dont know what the solutions are and honestly its not my job. I do make it a point to raise this issue online, with family, friends and politicians whenever I can which realistically is all I can do to affect things and the above ideas are probably only a few of the solutions that might work to help get us anywhere close to solving the problem.

When we can't afford to service our state debt due to pensions eating up 20% or more of our budgets it might happen and it will be far too late

Paschal Donoghue falling on the mercy of SIPO, a body successive governments have hindered from being an effective disciplinary body is peak Irish politics really.

Thats like going after benefit frauds fixing recidivism etc would come nowhere close to solving the state pension crisis that is coming. Get rid of it because you think its unfair etc but its got nothing to do with solving this state pension issue being discussed.