The National Party

Could say something similar about the whole Gaelic revival thing though which those same revolutionaries piggybacked on, twinkly eyed nostagia for an Ireland that in most respects hadn't existed for hundreds of years and in other respects never existed at all, e.g. there was never really a united, self-goverened Ireland.

how many members voted Reynolds in?

(Re-reading parts of Labour in Irish History by Connolly online just now because inspired to by this thread. I read it cover to cover years ago.)

Not exactly critical but he thought that Irish people at the time should have seized grain and land, and ripped up railroads, in an insurrection. Not flee.

He thought that the groups and leaders who were in position to stage a rising had lost their nerve at the last moment. Meaning especially Thomas Meagher, William Smith O'Brien and a few other senior figures in the Young Irelander movement. (Who did have a half-hearted rising in 1848, which was too late for Connolly's liking.)

But then again the modern Irish person of today would probably be angry with Connolly's analysis of the Famine since he goes into detail around Lord John Russell's (Prime Minister) deliberately allowing demand bottlenecks to build up around food prices by disallowing new supplies of Indian Corn into the country until all existing food supplies had been completely sold, among other things. Connolly: "Private dealers made fortunes ranging from £40,000 to £80,000." (Equivalent in today's money would be something in the ballpark of £1.5 million to £2.5 million according to an online inflation calculator I just found on Google.)

That implies to me that Lord Russell and friends knew exactly what they were doing and got rich standing over a big pile of human skulls. Which is both utterly bleak and way too close for comfort to "conspiracy thinking" for the average 'nice' liberal person. But there it is.

And Scottish mmigrant, who tried to get the British to leave and not actually invite them here to make it look like there are people supporting them.

But then again they and others like them aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the box, and as for the various people who form the "leadership" well there is no cure for being a cúnt.

Sorry, I wound myself up (posting last thing at night). Please disregard that part of it.

Bit strange how NONE of the many opinion polls have picked up any sentiment like this?

Barrett et al consistently quote Mein Kampf.

It's almost as if they don't want to get elected.

There's a difference between the type of Nimbyism we've seen in Ireland relating to asylum seekers and actual hard and fast far right sympathetic types.

The NP received 4773 votes in 2020, since then they've very publicly been falling apart and allowing their mask to slip. I'd be astonished if they enjoyed a similar level of support next time out.

Nonsense.

No socialist party anywhere else in the world would oppose property taxes. They are populist nationalists.

Why? It demonstrates that they are not socialist.

SF self-identifies as socialist, so it would be the first Irish government led by a self-identified socialist party.

The left being what it is, there are plenty of other people who identify as socialist but who deny that SF is socialist. That particular argument rapidly degenerates into competing claims about what constitutes True Socialism™, which is not a very interesting argument. Internationally, SF is generally placed by commentators on the left, and categorised as a left wing, or populist socialist, party. Given that, if SF leads the next government, it will be the first Irish government to be led by a party of the left.

In reality they are populist nationalists with a centre left tinge. A lot of their performance in government in Northern Ireland couldn't particularly be described as socialist either.

The "lack of choice" though also tends to be indicative of a lack of popularity. So the lack of a mainstream "conservative" party is probably more indicative of a lack of an opportunity for the far right than the existence of an opportunity. Indeed, FF have probably suffered from coming across less proactive about social progress than SF and FG — while Aontu have not made any serious dent in terms of stealing away conservative leaning people from the main parties.

Sometimes the choices (if by choices we mean parties with the capability to make a meaningful impact) available in a democracy are simply reflective of a lack of popularity. The other problem is that the right seems to perpetually plagued by rifts caused by one person failing the conservative purity test of another person.

That would be illogical.

If people voted right of centre, they would be much more inclined to give to give their vote to centrist parties then they would to some far right fringe.

Take from the General Election results from 2020;

I presume the inclusion of the Social Democrats here is just an artefact of the screen capture. Nobody would class them as "far left".

PBP/Solidarity are further to the left but, between them, they only got 2.6% of the vote, as the screencap shows. The notion that there are "hundreds of thousands" of votes for " any party that is brave enough to push back" against them is not very plausible, since in fact the mainstream parties do push back against them; PBP/Solidarity have negligible achievements precisely because they are on the political margins.

Jackiebt's post only make sense in the context of their stated belief that "there is no conservative party any more here, the are no right of centre parties". Not only are there such parties in Ireland; they are, and always have been, the dominant parties.

I'm not disagreeing with you, i think. Left wing parties have always had minority support with a couple of TDs. Right wing parties have never had any kind of support and long may that continue. Being blasé about the possible threat they face is not the way to go though.