The decline of FG?

Thankfully

You could reasonably assume that whatever date they announce for the election will come true mind. Be nice if they had it on the same date as the Locals and Euros were.

Yep, and I dont believe FG have all their candidate places filled yet, so perhaps more time needed to prepare the runners and riders.

I can give you two reasons it would be a very bad idea.

Firstly, it would be an even greater mess in terms of the count length - even splitting the ballots would take twice as long; and tallying would fall to bits. Every party wants the tally data.

Secondly, the same people can and do run in all three elections. There are days where some candidates would probably win all three (Ciaran Cuffe got elected to both DCC and Europe on the same day in 2019 and would probably have won a Dáil seat too then or 2020 if he'd run; a Green candidate topped the poll in his old constituency).

This would cause a mix of immediate by-elections, council co-optees for the entire term (already happened with Paddy Holohan winning two seats on the same council; and Sharon Keoghan in 2019 - but it would become extremely common) and MEP replacement lists for the entire term - there are always people who want Europe over the Dáil and vice versa.

With regard to the longer count length I'd argue it's a symbol of democracy in action and not really an issue at all. If candidates want to run in 3 elections that's their choice, the govt could always legislate to ban the practice as it's a silly one anyway

There is also a few upsides that you may not have considered

Filling the Dail, Seanad, Council and European seats in one day creates a more unified party distribution across the political spectrum.

There would also be fewer costs for the exchequer and the environment, schools would be closed less often and politicians wouldn't need to be calling to our doors looking for local or European seats just to do the exact same thing in a few months time

As an example, under the current schedule, SF could rise to power in a few months time in the Dail while we know the Seanad will likely be filled with the civil war party candidates because of how the local elections went for them

Seanad can only delay not fully block bills; 11 Taoiseach nominees and most likely a transfer deal with whoever they go in to Government with would probably scrape a majority

However, they only had 7 Senators based on the big 2014 LE base anyway; the other parties are more easily able to get votes from Independents so there is zero guarantee that fiddling with the election dates would help at all.

Suggesting the longer count length being a symbol of democracy in action is seriously clutching at straws. While the length of the count might not really be an issue, there certainly isn't any benefit in extending the count to include three elections. Cutting short a relatively popular government (likely to be returned anyway) just to align with the EU election date would be extremely undemocratic. The negatives for democracy would far outweigh the positives.

An actual symbol of democracy in action would be separate election days with focused campaigns. The lines between local issues and national issues and EU level issues are already quite blurred in this country, horsing all together on one election day would further blur it. It would be impossible to run three dedicated campaigns focusing on the relevant issues at each level simultaneously. There wouldn't be time for meaningful debates at each level and the public would zone out from all the noise.

And now that you are saying you were talking specifically about this year, the advantages you put forward of "fewer costs for the exchequer and the environment, schools would be closed less often" is negligible. That one school day saved is unlikely to be replicated again for the remainder of the school lives of current school children. The financial and environmental savings would be barely above 0.

This could be a serious mistake by Fianna Fail. The Greens are rightly up in arms about this. There is a process to have land dezoned if farmers don't want to pay the tax.

The clever thing to do would be to announce that the tax was deferred for a year to allow those farmers time to apply to have their land dezoned. That would move things along.

At least he's wiling to appear on the news unlike Jack Cowardice Chambers

The obvious answer is that I was replying to 2 separate posts and then quoting a news article showing the in-competencies of the current govt. You choose to ignore this very obvious assumption that most people would make and prefer to make snide personal comments instead of addressing the issues posed.

A known tactic of the far right… I genuinely worry about the political direction our country is headed

What stations was Jack Chambers on? I didn't notice him or any FFG on Newstalk and was listening to that most the day. Key word here being "most" before you jump. Whatever way you feel about the multiple posts I'm certainly not being paid per post, if I was there would be a lot lot more of them!