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

Yeah, I have to laugh at those passing off the Greens increase. The Greens are here to stay. The climate change issues are not going away. They will lose out on seats if the election was held tomorrow, but there will be increases in votes and seats in every election after that.

Just look at Malahide this last week with the high tides. They are only the start, incidents like that will become more common and the green agenda will seep into people's minds. Nobody will ever vote for the Greens because they like what the Greens want to do, they will vote for the Greens because they recognise it is what has to be done even if they don't like it. The most mature and self-aware voters in the country vote Green.

The Greens are dead in the water, the everyday person is more interested in what they have in their pockets and how good their day to day life is, instead of how the world and environment is in 50 years time, the decisions Ryan and his cronies have made these last few years have killed that party dead in the coming years..

The optics of having an unelected senator who was only appointed to the Seanad as part of a deal and who was then made a minister commenting on Neasa Hourigan's 15 month ban was bad for the Greens. At the moment, it is a race between the party fragmenting and the party's demolition in a GE.

Regards...jmcc

It is honestly never ending with the plonkers...cute hoor using the Irish version of his name

The ignorance of what happened with the Greens in 2020 is quite astounding but understandable.

The number of seats that the Greens won was out of proportion to their support before the GE and it was transfers from SF that won many Green seats. That's a rather uncomfortable fact.

Some of the increase in Green votes was down to the Greta Thunberg hysteria that had gullible people voting Green not realising that the Greens were quite a Middle Class party that was otherwise economically Right of centre rather than a populist party with broad support. As with most policies, when they became popular with the electorate, the larger parties absorb them as their own. The most obvious example would have been the Progressive Democrats. They were only ever Provisional Fianna Fail but when their policies became popular, FF and FG "borrowed" them and that was the end of the PDs.

The same thing has happened to the Greens. Due to the Greta Thunberg propaganda in 2019/2020, it became cool for the fashionable but politically non-sentient voters to be green (with a small 'g'). The media, most of whom never saw a press release they couldn't recycle, jumped on the bandwagon. The Greens (the Irish version) benefited from this as did many other green parties throughout Europe.

When the Greta Thunberg hysteria dissipated like a fart in a breeze, a lot of water melon voters found out the hard way that they had voted for the wrong party. Some Green members and politicians also discovered this and left to form Green Left. Neasa Hourigan's 15 month suspension is an example of how the expectation of the Greens being a happy-clappy bunch of Leftists talking about "climate justice" and other aspirational f*ckwittery differs from political reality. (Ryan apparently wanted an indefinite suspension.) The more pragmatic Greens understand that they have to be in government to get their policies enacted into law.

Many of those who call themselves Green voters are just virtue signalling. Traditionally, the Greens have been a Middle Class party for those who did not wish to vote for FF/FG/Labour. The Greens benefited, initially, from the implosion of Labour in 2016 but many of those new voters and members found out that the Greens were not Labour when there was an attempted leadership coup. The Greens also had a similar splintering in 2007 over going into government with FF and the splinter group formed Fis Nua. That party seemed to have fizzled much the same way as Green Left.

The support for the Greens, since the GE, has declined. The decline is consistent across all opinion polls. On its current polling, it stands to lose most of its seats and will be lucky to return about 4 TDs.

Some of its saner policies are being taken over by larger parties with the aim of also taking over the Green votes. Even the Labour party (stuck between 4% and 6% for years) is trying to take votes from the Greens wiith talks of a "Red-Green government. That might have worked in student bedsits in the 1980s decorated with the obligatory Che Guevara poster but this is the 21st century and the Soviet Union is gone. Even SF has moved to the centre but like the gerontocracy of the old Soviet Union, Labour hasn't noticed. It abandoned the Working Classes and the Working Classes abandoned Labour.

Some of the increase in the SocDem support in the opinion polls may be due to support shifting from the Greens to the SocDems and it is partially an AB-SF vote. For many of them, Purple is the new Green.

Regards...jmcc

Of course, Sinn Fein don’t fit within any European social democratic definition. That’s because they aren’t a social democratic party (or (mainstream) socialist / Labour Party as they are sometimes called.

At EU level, Sinn Féin have always chosen to align themselves with the GUE/NGL group. That group is basically the former Communist group (and it largely consists of parties that either were the countries that ran the Communist dictatorships in eastern Europe or were the western Communist parties that suddenly renamed themselves just after the iron curtain fell).

And for many years, completely abolishing the Republic and replacing it with a Marxist state was SF policy in Ireland.

DCC and its councillors should just look at themselves, and their actions in prolonging the housing problems. They object to their own decisions, they refuse to allow high-rise, they are the biggest disgrace in the country.

Anyone who is holding up DCC as a good example of anything is showing a lack of understanding of the housing problems.

What have the Greens achieved since 2020? I see lots of plans and targets but what have they actually achieved?

Their highest profile plan is an utter disaster.

Scheme branded a 'failure' with just 89 homes retrofitted out of target of 62,500 (irishexaminer.com)

The Government’s marquee retrofitting scheme “has utterly failed”, with just 89 homes in the entire country completed out of a “pie in the sky” target of 500,000 homes.

Despite a need to retrofit 62,500 homes this year to remain on target, just 681 homes have so far been approved, it can be revealed.

Are you talking to yourself?

You have called out one of your own posts as spoofing???

I was calling the Green Party spoofers but well done lads on being outplayed again. 😉

The question was very very very simple...What have the Greens achieved since 2020? You couldn't answer so resorted to baiting. No honour in that.

Scheme branded a 'failure' with just 89 homes retrofitted out of target of 62,500 (irishexaminer.com)

The Government’s marquee retrofitting scheme “has utterly failed”, with just 89 homes in the entire country completed out of a “pie in the sky” target of 500,000 homes.

Despite a need to retrofit 62,500 homes this year to remain on target, just 681 homes have so far been approved, it can be revealed.

It is ignorance because it completely ignores the results, the dynamics of elections and the impact of propaganda in influencing voters.

The Greens regained seats in 2016 and that was a natural rebound because the 2011 GE was a highly abnormal GE that realigned the 2.5 party model (A government wolud typically be (FF or FG) and Labour) and led to its eventual demise from 2013 onwards and its replacement by the Big Three model where no two parties of the Big Three would have enough seats to form a government.

The Water Tax scam started to damage the government and caused serious problems for Labour at the LEs. As Labour imploded, some of its soft/floating vote drifted to the Greens. In the 2016 GE, the only other GE between 2011 and 2020 saw the Greens win 2 seats. That was a natural rebound from its 2011 obliteration. The Water Tax protests destroyed Labour in 2016 and damaged FG. Again, the opinion polls indicated that such an electoral shock was on the way for the FG/Labour government but they also indicated that the Greens would win seats in the 2016 GE.

The Greta Thunberg hysteria allowed easily influenced people to think that they were doing something about saving the planet by supporting a child who was being manipulated by adults to be converted into votes. It was nothing more than a PR exercise. It was ridiculous First World fakery that allowed simpletons to feel righteous while doing nothing about helping the regions under threat from climate change, drought and famine. The terrible irony about the way that the hysteria spread was that it depended on Social Media on devices that used rare earth elements. The extraction of those elements by what are effectively slaves never changed. And as for "carbon footprints", all that travel certainly increased that metric, didn't it?

The Greens would have been extremely incompetent not to have benefited from the Greta Thunberg hysteria because it shifted easily influenced votes from previously virtuous parties like Labour to the Greens. After 2016, Labour had become a busted flush. Ironic given its part in the Water Tax scam. However, in 2020, despite all the wishes of its friends in RTE and the media, that floating/soft vote was not going to return to Labour.

This virtue signalling set of voters doesn't really vote on politics. It votes on fashion and making others think that they are sophisticated and clever. Labour benefited from this in 2011 because it became unfashionable to be an FF supporter and FG was a bit too "establishment". So, all the fashionable people voted Labour because it was "either Frankfurt's way or Labour's way". It was, of course Frankfurt's way after all. That soft/floating Labour vote was on the move after 2016. In 2020, some of it drifted to the Greens. Coupled with the Greta Thunberg hysteria influencing gullible, virtue signalling voters, the Greens outperformed their opinion poll support and won many more seats than even they expected.

With the media, you are not dealing with extremely bright people. Often, a fad will generate imitation from journalists eager to create their own version. There was a very good example of this with the media's attempt to create an Irish version of Greta Thunberg for the Greens. It didn't work because the candidate in question was not running in Dublin which is the Green heartland in terms of support.

The Irish media landscape also changed from 2016 but few of its "consumers" would have noticed. An analysis by DIT's Future of Journalism group of newspaper coverage of the 2016 showed that the Sindo/Indo had been fanatically anti-SF to an extent far beyond other newspapers and media. Dinny O'Brien was forced to sell his 500 million Euro worth of shares in Independent News and Media (IN&M) for a loss of about 450 million to Mediahuis (a Belgian company). He also sold his Communicorp radio stations to Bauer (a German media company). That effectively changed the Irish media landscape in just a few years. The Sind/Indo had been very pro-FG but more importantly, very anti-SF. Having a more balanced media landscape in 2020 caused massive problems for FF/FG in that SF was competing on near equal grounds in the media. The Greens also benefited because they were the AB-FF/FG/Lab/SF vote and don't people who vote Green like to be seen as smart and sophisticated while caring for the planet?

The Greens benefited hugely from the Greta Thunberg hysteria and it might be difficult to find a sane Green supporter who would deny that. This part might be a bit more complex as it involves the dynamics of elections using the Single Transferrable Vote method. The Greens benefited from SF transfers and how SF voting changed the dyanmics of the 2020 GE. Because of the count system where candidates with the lowest votes are eliminated before moving on to the next count and redistribution of their transfers, when these transfers came into play became important.

The best example of it would have been O'Cathasaigh/Green in Waterford. Cullinane/SF had a major surplus that could have easily won SF a second seat there. FG had enough votes to easily win a single seat but the votes were split over two candidates. Those votes stayed where effectively locked out of having any positive effect for either FG candidate because they stayed in the count too long and allowed a candidate with marginally more votes to survive longer. That candidate, who benefited from SF transfers stayed ahead of the FG candidates long enough to be elected without reaching the quota.

It was a classic example of the Fratricde Effect where two or more party candidates will work against each other by splitting the vote and keeping the votes out of the counting for long enough to allow a candidate with fewer votes than the combined votes of the party candidates to win the seat. The important point is that it isn't just the volume of transfers (SF in this case) that matters. It is also the point in the counts at when transfers come into play. FG screwed up its candidate selection strategy and ran too many candidates in 2020. SF screwed up and ran too few. Got that? Good! Now, what happens in a situation where SF, or the other larger parties, run enough candidates to benefit from the votes they receive?

The STV system of voting is based on transfers but those transfers only come into play after the poll toppers are elected and their transfers are distributed. A party running an optimal number of candidates would concentrate the votes for its candidates to ensure that they would get elected in the earlier counts and would be less dependent on transfers to get weaker candidates elected. A party running an optimal number of candidates would see their candidates become vote magnets because rather than transfers going outside its candidates in significant numbers (as happened with SF in 2020), they would help get the party's candidates elected earlier. And the impact of this optimal candidate strategy would have stronger canidates getting elected earlier thus reducing the number of seats that would be decided by transfers. That would reduce the number of counts required to fill all the seats in a constituency. It would also hit parties that are almost completely dependent on transfers. At this stage, you are probably thinking that there's no way that such a thing could happen on a large enough scale to change the outcome of a GE.

The reality is that it did happen in 2016. FG took a major hit based on its support in the opinion polls. FF gained seats. Labour, which had a very low core support and was always dependent on transfers from FG and FF took a major hit. It went from winning 37 seats in 2011 to just 7 in 2016. FF and FG transfers were concentrated and did not benefit Labour to the same extent as in previous GEs. A GE where larger parties manage their transfers to keep them with party candidates would seriously reduce the chances of smaller parties getting their candidates elected.

The 2020 GE was an abnormal GE in that it had multiple differences to previous GEs. The most notable was the changed media landscape that few noticed. FG had screwed up by allowing Charlie Flanagan's neo-Unionist effort to commemorate the Black and Tans/RIC. A competent FG leader, which Varadkar is not, would have stopped Flanagan immediately.

The dithering FG wannabe Martin kept giving out mixed signals about FF and gave SF an opening which it exploited. FF should have easily won more seats and have been the largest party after the GE. However, Martin's incompetence led to FF and SF winning the same number of seats.

The Greens benefited from this highly fractured electoral landscape. This does not mean that the Green party's gains in 2020 are stable seats that will be retained in the next GE. Most of the Green TDs were simply elected because there was a lack of candidates from larger parties that could have used the larger number of first and second preference votes cast for those parties. Without the Greta Thunberg hysteria influencing gullible people to vote Greens, the Greens would not have done so well and in marginal seats, those votes may well have helped Green TDs get elected.

No sensible Green supporter would be stupid enough to argue that all those Green TD gains are the result of a massive shift to the Greens. The next GE will be fought with large parties paying a lot more attention to their candidate selection strategy and they will focus on keeping transfers within their candidates. This will intentionally hit smaller parties like the Greens. Without the free media coverage generated by the Greta Thunberg hysteria in 2020, the Greens will have their more successful policies and ideas plundered by other parties. That's the nature of electoral politics.

Regards...jmcc