Lab members.. Do you agree with the pre-election pact?

[jonna]

How many Labour members on P.ie voted against the pre-election pact with FG?
How many Lab members who voted for the pact can call themselves Socialists when they voted to go into coalition with a party which is opposed to the ideals of Labour?

jonna

[Sidewinder]

Ummm, jonna.....you seem to make new threads about the FG/Lab pact every few nights....everyone knows you are opposed to it. But as FakeViking says on the other thread, we have to get rid of FF/PD before they destroy our economy for a generation (and it may well already be too late). The only possible partner for Labour and the Greens at this time is the bloody Blueshirts - because SF just won't have the seats alongside Lab & Green this time. Look, I don't like it any more than you do, but there's no viable alternative. This government has got to go before they destroy us all.

In 2012, maybe a strong left alliance led by popular and effective Ministers in the Rainbow could do things differently and make a strong pitch for the hearts and minds of the people, maybe win defections from FF and FG, maybe be in with a shout of a majority for the first time since 1922. But right now, we're a few months away from a critical general election, and as much as I despise Blueshirts - Ahern's gruesome crew of liars, chancers and thieves are worse. And much more dangerous.

[owenfeehan]

I echo Sidewinder's sentiments.

Electoral pragmatism must be considered, not just ideology.

If Labour is not seen as standing clearly against the status-quo (FF + PDs) while offering a viable alternative, then FF will just get re-elected by default.

Whatever your ideology in terms of left or right, this would not be in our country's interests - Ireland has had more than enough cronyism, corruption, populism and gombeenism, and we pay the price as a country for it.

This government has had a small fortune available to them in tax revenue over the past 9 years. They had potential like no other government before them to transform Ireland as a society - to solve our problems, to tackle social ills, to fix our infrastructure problems, to basically build a society that works very well and offers Irish citizens a very high quality of life.

This is not a pipe dream. I am in Munich at the moment, a city around about the same size as Dublin. The contrast couldn't be greater. It's safe, very safe. Crime is low. Traffic congestion is nowhere near as bad. The public transport is fantastic. The health system is good and available to one and all. The quality of life is just so much higher.

The city is serving its citizens, not the money making interests of developers who just want to make quick bucks without proper planning or infrastructure.

Sometimes it's big things like housing and health which can make the all important difference in people's quality of lives. Sometimes it can be things as small as just being able to walk down the street without needing to dodge eye contact with various malcontents looking for trouble.

But the reason government exists is to SOLVE these problems. It can be done. But FF have done sfa in way of solving them.

Instead in Ireland our FF/PD government has spent the past 9 years squandering the huge resources at their disposal by electorally bribing the various interest groups that prop up the party with tax schemes on property etc., and then trying to bring other sectors on board with cheap bribes such as "benchmarking" and SSIAs.

None of these have solved our problems. Crime, horrendous traffic and lack of effective public transport, social exclusion etc. etc. all continue to exist pretty much untackled.

The increased wealth of our country can be seen on paper in peoples' pay packets and the amount they pay for items, but it is not translating into the better quality of life that a rich society like Ireland should and can afford.

I only wish the Irish people quite fully appreciated JUST how much extra cash was available to this government compared to others before them. I truly believe that they would be shocked if they saw what little return the Irish people are getting from the money available.

I mean it's been 9 years of a booming economy that is the envy of Europe. What serious accomplishment can this government claim to have made, other than sat down on the boom as it happened and opened the champage bottles? The health situation is worse. The transport situation is worse. The education system has never been more divided between the extremes.

Property prices are nuts, and the strain placed on young people to aspire to be home owners is crazy, while at the same time the rental sector is so developer-oriented that renting long term is not an attractive option for a family.

It has to be a considered an absolutely massive failure of government when basically the 2nd-richest country in the EU (in terms of per capita GDP) and one of the richest in the world, cannot do the following:
- Ensure good quality health care to every citizen
- Provide high quality education for every citizen whether the children of the well-off or children of the poor.
- Ensure decent affordable housing for those on low to medium incomes with some sort of realistic ambition towards home ownership.
- Enable citizens to get to and from work without spending 2-3 hours in suburban traffic jams along the way.
- Create an environment where citizens can walk around their neighbourhoods and the city centre in the evenings and during the day, without feeling constantly under the threat of violence and hostage to criminality.

These are the normal responsibilities of government. The excuse in Ireland was traditionally that we were too poor to do all these things. We have been RICH for a long time now. And FF/PDs have done almost nothing to solve these problems.

I really get angry when I think about it.

[President Bartlet]

FG need to improve a hell of alot if the pact is to succeed.

But what are your thoughts on Rabbitte doing a Spring and going into govt with FF :
I know he has ruled it out but then so did Spring.

The way it stacks at the minute - two clear choices

FF / PD

FF/ Lab

FG/Lab/Green - simply not strong enough yet and looking more unlikely they will be :!:

[doheochai]

Labour members will be in favour of any pact that will get them into government AFTER the next election. Its amazing the influence of mercs and perks.

[Sidewinder]

The way it stacks at the minute - two clear choices

FF / PD

FF/ Lab

FG/Lab/Green - simply not strong enough yet and looking more unlikely they will be :!:

Problem with FF/Lab though is that it means another 5 years of the Ditherer In Chief, Roche, Cullen, Martin and all the other incompetent nonentities in the pockets of vested interests....

FF need an Albert-style night of the long knives and a period out of power to reconsider their unhealthy relationship with certain lobby groups before they can be trusted with power again.

I wonder, if SF do the business on policing and Stormont by some miracle gets up and running by the time of the election, would FG swallow hard and accept them in? There is precedent after all in 1948...

[cllr]

[quote="President Bartlet"]FG need to improve a hell of alot if the pact is to succeed.

But what are your thoughts on Rabbitte doing a Spring and going into govt with FF :
I know he has ruled it out but then so did Spring.

Just to comment on one aspect of the above posting. Despite the rewriting of history there was in fact no instance of Dick Spring saying that Labour would not go into Coalition with FF. I amswered many of the queries from Labour Head Office at that time and was quite clear about the position we took.

[President Bartlet]

The way it stacks at the minute - two clear choices

FF / PD

FF/ Lab

FG/Lab/Green - simply not strong enough yet and looking more unlikely they will be :!:

Problem with FF/Lab though is that it means another 5 years of the Ditherer In Chief, Roche, Cullen, Martin and all the other incompetent nonentities in the pockets of vested interests....

FF need an Albert-style night of the long knives and a period out of power to reconsider their unhealthy relationship with certain lobby groups before they can be trusted with power again.

I have advocated such a strategy in other threads - problem is Ahern doesn't have the bottle or the b***s to do it like Albert did.

[pjb07]

No! it is a suicide pact

[Sidewinder]

I have advocated such a strategy in other threads - problem is Ahern doesn't have the bottle or the b***s to do it like Albert did.

Well of course Ahern doesn't have the bottle. We've seen Ahern's, ummmm, decision making abilities for the last 10 years. Does anyone else in the party have what it takes? The entire FF parliamentary party just look tired, cynical, jaded, wearily complacent. For a party which still commands huge levels of popular support, their TDs are awful.

Not that the rest of the Dáil are exactly setting the world alight, but you'd kindof expect a party with designs on perpetual power to at least have a strong younger generation already making a name for themselves. FF are offering nothing but more of the same cynical gombeen hacks in perpetuity.