Meanwhile the Irish are going to the polls on February 8.

According to the Irish Times, 70% of the Irish are wanting a "change" and feel the country is going in the wrong direction.

D'uh.

Ireland, ever since the "Celtic Tiger" economic era, slowly at first, and now rapidly, has been busy changing itself from a country that was really culturally distinct to a lesser version of England.  That's a radical change, but like most changes, people feel they want the change, find it dissatisfying for which the answer is more change.

According to the Times, Fianna Fail now has a small edge over Fine Gael which would mean that Taoiseach Varadkar would be on his way out.  Varadkar has a track record for going back on at least one major policy matter as a candidate and can claim to being responsible for a lot of the legislative changes in recent years.  Fine Gael itself started off as an Irish Christian Democratic Party which leaned to the right, sometimes pretty strongly, but can now be looked up on as just another European social party (social, not socialist).  It deserves to lose this election.

Fianna Fail is the old Irish Republican Party and is a catch all party.  Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail share the same position on the European Union, which the Irish have been eager to please in recent years, so how much of a change FF would bring over FG is difficult to discern.  Sinn Finn, the party associated with the Irish Republican Army, is trailing third.

As Ireland has a parliamentary form of government there are a multiplicity of parties, but none of them poll as well as FF, FG or SF, all of which have been around for a long time, and therefore Ireland suffers from the same sameness of political parties that the United States does.  Disgust with this situation, in part, lead to the formation of a new Irish political party, Aontu, which is actually Irish rather than the WannaBeEuropeanCentristParty that FF and FG now are.  That party was formed just a year ago but already has won some local seats and has one member in the Dail.  It'll be interesting to see where it goes in the future.

As an interesting element of this, both FF and FG have been backing a plan to raise the Irish retirement age to 68 from the current 66. This is interesting in that it already has positions that are much broader than just dissatisfaction with Ireland's direction in recent years.  It'll draw the typical "progressive" criticism that progressivism is on the right side of history always (wow, please advert your eyes from progressive support of prohibition. . .and Stalin), but it's unique and thinking.

January 23, 2020

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And the results were SF, 24.5%, FF, 22% and FG 21%.

That's regarded as a big victory for Sinn Finn, but nobody has sufficient seats in the Dail to form a government.  Prior to the election, the other two Irish parties that are well represented in the Dail had stated that they'd not form a coalition with Sinn Finn, so nobody is quite certain what will happen now.

February 9, 2020