Is there a Labour Party?

Well it doesn't really matter about free houses and so on. The Border Poll is the first item on the agenda and pinned to the top. And feck the consequences.

The Dail has not been sitting for the last few months. Things generally slow down during these over-generous holidays.

Regards...jmcc

The Labour TDs were well-paid with salaries and pensions for their betrayal of those who voted for them. As I said earlier, most voters are not party supporters. Most of those who voted for Labour in 2011 were not Labour supporters.

Those votes shifted again in 2016. What happened to Labour was a disaster in two parts. The floating vote shifted. More importantly, the transfers on which Labour had always depended stayed within FF and FG. Without these transfers, the effect of 2016 was far greater on Labour. Its impending obliteration was glaringly obvious from the opinion polls and it was even possible to call the spread between the largest and the smallest of the Big Three parties before the GE. The media, with their rather clueless seat estimates were still waffling about Labour getting 15 seats or so. They thought that the 2.5 party model still applied despite what happened to Labour in the 2015 Local Elections. The 2015 LEs were an indicator that the Big Three political model (where no two parties had enough seats to form a government) was in effect. (I think that some of the media use the Big Three term now.)

In terms of transfers, the patterns for 2020 suggest that the electorate is beginning to consider FF and FG as the same party. That's going to be quite dangerous if FF and FG do not have a joint candidate selection strategy and electoral pact for the next GE. FF and FG candidates will end up knocking each other out in later rounds where there would be enough votes for a single FF or FG candidate to get elected. This Fratricide Effect happened in 2020 on a smaller scale.

A party needs to be consistently over 5% in the opinion polls to be considered a "national" party. Otherwise it is almost completely dependent on personal, rather than party votes to get TDs elected. Even though the usual caveats about opinion polls being First Preference polls apply, Labour is not really a "national" party with a brand. It is a group of political z-listers running for election.

Those students and their families who were let down by FG/Labour may have shifted their votes to SF. Both FF and FG seem to be bouncing around the 20% mark in opinion polls. Labour is bouncing around 2% to 6% in various polls. In the last GE, the SocDems won the same number of seats as Labour (6). PBP won 5. RTE and some of the print media still treated Labour as a major party in the run-up to the 2020 GE. There has been a distinct change away from Labour as the party of some of the media. The SocDems now seem to have moved into that space.

Regards...jmcc

Your expectation that those voters would move to the Greens is about seven years too late. A lot of the water melon vote (Green on the outside and Labour on the inside) shifted to the Greens in 2020 but the drift had been apparent since 2016 when the obvious party for those voters imploded. There was even an attempted coup against Eamon Ryan to replace him with Catherine Martin. Many of these "issues" types Greens then went off and formed Green Left and haven't been heard from since. The water melons are quite different to the typical Green voter in that they would have been Labour-leaning pre-2020. The problem for Labour is that now the SocDems appear to be picking up a lot of that younger Middle Class demographics. This obviously has created a bit of panic within Labour and the idea that there should be a SocDems/Labour merger is being pushed by Labour and its supporters in the media. Ironically, the SocDems have a young, dynamic and most importantly, media-friendly, leader. Labour has Bacik.

Regards...jmcc

In name only. The Labour Party was killed by the craven support they gave in their last involvements in collation. In fact not only did they cravenly support the austerity measures, but actively cheerleaded. I’m thinking in particular of pat rabbitte, Brendan howlin and Joan burton. Reprehensible inviduals .no amount of waffle from polical nobody ivanna bacik is going to reverse that.

SF's two main media performers have been unlucky with health issues lately - O Broin had a suspected stroke. Mary Lou has been in and out of hospital.

Some of the other front benchers can't be let talk to the media unminded unless they say something very stupid

Well then they are in trouble, as a lot of the recent growth is I believe related to spin on both conventional and social media.

No great fan of Shane Ross, but as he reports in his book, project MaryLou has been long in the making.

They raised expectations of what they could do beyond what was deliverable. That is not betraying anyone.

Raising expectations before elections is 'food & drink' for every political party. They all do it.

They should merge with The Social Democrats and call themselves the Social Democratic Labour Party, or SDLP for short.

What's that?

The name's taken?

Well darn.

The Pat Rabbitte excuse for lying?

Regards...jmcc

Bland, beige, unappealing, centre-centre (not even centre-left anymore) with a waffler of a leader.

SF and the alphabet soup of leftie parties ate Labour's lunch years ago. Now it stands for nothing, other than making well-meaning woke noises.

Labour were the party of the virtue signalling upper middle classes. The Greens have now moved inti this space and are more fashionable due to climate change being a big issue.

You’re very bitter Furze about Labours demise. They brought the house down on themselves. The smug self satisfied pat rabitte who could no longer get a shirt collar size to fit him off the peg. The horrendous Joan Burton , on air 24/7 for all the good it did her and her final confrontation with the great unwashed while barricaded in her car, and the great waffler himself, Brendan Howlin, patiently feathering his nest all these long years. “Lady Wicklow” Liz McManus who forgot her roots…..good riddance to the lot

Liz McManus retired in 2011. Bar a brief period of Minister for Housing, during which time we actually built council houses before FF crashed that to promote buying off private developers, she was not in Government.

Can you at least try to remember dates and facts when doing this.