Votail Fianna Fail to smash Sinn Féin?

If the rumours (spread by rutherford ;)) are true, Fianna Fail candidate, Averil Power, last night dispensed a last gasp election leaflet in the Dublin North East constituency stressing that "only Averil can stop Sinn Féin in this area".  Now you'll not find me arguing with the premise that Shinners should be kept out, or that the party is an aberration in any healthy polity, but there is a certain delicious irony to this type of campaigning.

First of all, is it just me, or is "the republican party" coming rather close to DUP tactics?  In the Upper Bann constituency the unionist party distributed an eve of poll leaflet with an unerringly similar message, during the UK general election campaign.

Secondly, to gild the cliche, surely this is a rather sauceless goose compared to the version served in Northern Ireland?  The southern parties are horrified by Sinn Féin in the Republic, but they were quick enough to demand their inclusion in government up north.  It's a point Jason Walsh touches upon in this pre-election broadside.  We wouldn't have them in our government, but they'll do to keep those barbaric unionists on their toes!

Comments

rutherford said…
I want attribution for that!
25 February 2011 at 14:54
Owen Polley said…
No sooner said ... ;)
25 February 2011 at 14:56
Seymour Major said…
Chekov,

The DUP did not invent that tactic. It has been going on in ROI politics since the civil war. It is similar to "vote for me to keep the other side out". It is just that the names of the parties they want to "smash" are changing.

This is all part and parcel of tribal politics. Politics might look different in ROI because tribalism there is not related to sectarianism.
26 February 2011 at 08:24
Phil Larkin said…
I do believe that the results from the general election in the Irish Republic contain disquieting overtones, and not just for the reasons which Chekov sets out in this article.

I'll be writing on this theme later.
28 February 2011 at 14:22
andrewg said…
Seymour has hit the nail on the head. In the Republic voting habits are passed down the generations just like unionism and nationalism in the North. One political old hand I know muttered recently: "I hate them. I hate the way they treat us, the lies they tell about us." People complain about Civil War politics, but today's divisions in the Republic are no more about the Civil War than Northern political parties are all about the Penal Laws. But at least there is hope here for a long-awaited realignment. It still took 90 years for Civil War politics to die, which doesn't fill me with great hope for the future of NI.
28 February 2011 at 16:47
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more