Daniel Sullivan - he’s a little political

An Irish liberal party - what about a progressive caucus instead

// February 22nd, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

In performing a little exercise set for me by Jason O Mahony I was given to thinking about the calls that come every once in a while from some quarters that we should have new Liberal party or similar in the absence of the PDs. I would oppose such an idea for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with right now but I do think there might be an opening not for a new political party as such but rather for the emergence of the American style caucus model in Irish politics.

The point would be to have a broad viewpoint, in this case, one that is liberal/libertarian and then at election time to endorse individual candidates who were amenable to those beliefs. The caucus would literally talk, on-line for the most part, about policies and political principles that it should advocate and seek support for.

I’m not suggesting that we’d get too many takers at the outset from the existing public reps, in particular TDs, but it might be better anyway to start by appealing to members of all parties and none.

So I might, in the next short while, try and drop some worms in the water and see if anyone bites.

No more Green shoots in local government

// June 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

It is probably too early for in depth reflection on the local election results but it is worth considering that the Greens have spent 2 decades building up their party piece by piece, seat by seat and after only 2 years in government with FF they have almost lost it all.

As someone who has known what it is like to put a lot of work into a local election campaign and see it all evaporate before your eyes at the count centre, I can understand that Greens are hurting today, from the leadership down to those who dropped the leaflets, put up the posters and over the days after polling day will have to take them down again. But they need to take a few days and reflect on what people have said to them. In my view people are saying that they didn’t elected them to shore up FF in government and I think they should pay careful heed to that.

But then I suppose some will say I would say that, but that I say it doesn’t make it any less (or more valid). It is just the way things are.