In the past I would have given a preference to FF if their local candidate was a good one.
Now it is time to break from this tendency.
Fianna Fáil have been in power for 20 of the last 22 years (1987 to 2009) and the country is quickly going down the toilet.
This is not healthy by any standards. Staleness, arrogance, cronyism, obfuscation are bound to set in after 20 years; and they have.
I don't particularly like some of the other candidates on offer, but there are some good ones there too, and they need a chance.
NAMA should not go through without an election, and the Green Party should pull out of government before it does. It is too big a decision to be left to conversations in corners.
I'm happy to be abff. But who can we trust to be abff when the next Dail meets? I think Labour and Sinn Fein should rule out voting for any Fianna Fail nominee for Taoiseach.
Where do I get the bumper sticker?
By and large, FF supporters are decent people, who placed a lot of loyalty and trust in a party that their relations supported down through the generations. They are just as sickened by the way things have turned out in recent years with the party (at leadership level) effectively whoring itself to big business and property developers and speculators.
I'd like to see an ABBFF billboard campaign around the country, demanding that the electorate take responsibility for providing us with this government.
"If you voted FF or didn't vote in the last election, you helped create this mess. If you're not related to a FF politician or benefiting from political favours from one, do the right thing by your country the next time and vote for someone else."
The political system is itself sick, a choice between groups arguing over which side of the egg to open. We need to end the pretence, that a centre-right party opposing a centre-right party with barely a fag-paper of difference between them is a sensible way to run a country. Dump FF out altogether, by all means, but a system where FF is opposing a FG govt is hardly the revolution we need.
Wake up! - corruption and incompetence are not recent arrivals to FF culture.
wysi - the whole concept of 'FF people' is the root of the problem. So long as a large section of our electorate thinks it belongs to a tribe, we are going to repeat this situation over and over again.
wysiwyg is right about the response to this abff stuff. Some of the more wavery FF supporters I know who were likely to vote Labour or Greens instead of FF in the next elections are hardening their support for FF.
This is not about decency, loyalty, (there are lots of decent people whose politics I abhor) or indeed revolution.
It is about the fairly anodyne principle that being in power for over 90% of the past 22 years tends to staleness, croynism, arrogance, and, dare I say it... corruption. It ain't healthy.
I agree with ToxicAvenger that FG ain't no barrel of beauties (Richard Bruton at least knows what he is talking about) but ABFF doesn't automatically mean vote for FG. Nor does it mean the system is a good one.
It is just that like we helped remove Ahern, we need to remove FF. Maybe then we will be able to perceive our problems and opportunities more clearly, and be in a position to act more decisively.
The political system is itself sick, a choice between groups arguing over which side of the egg to open.
Pandering to them by encouraging them to 'loan' their vote out isn't the answer. The type that will vote for Labour or, bizarrely, the Greens are the very ones that will spend the next Dáil complaining about how FG/Labour/Greens/SF/whoever have made things worse, irrespective of the facts, simply to row in behind FF at the next available opportunity.
You're right, I'm right and TA is right. Just a case of differing views on whether we need to take baby steps, middle size steps or giant steps. Longterm the whole system needs to be overhauled so we get a different type of politician. But it requires a different type of politician to invoke those sort of changes. To get there I think we need to hold people responsible for their voting/absenteeism.
but a system where FF is opposing a FG govt is hardly the revolution we need.
It's not good to have one single party dominate politics in any country. It leads to stagnation of ideas, it leads to crony capitalism, it leads to corruption, isolation from realities on the ground and arrogance. It also leads to a holding onto power at all costs.
We have seen all that in FF and that is why we need a change, even FFers are coming around to that opinion.
However, the unfortunate thing is, voting FF has been a bad habit in Ireland and a habit which may prove difficult to break.
While people may hate the national leadership, you can be sure there are councillors going to the doors saying they disagree with the national leadership.
People may hate the leaders at the top yet may still vote for the local councillor or TD. Upon councillors and TDs is the whole FF structure built, they are the base.
Until the base suffers bigtime, those at the top will still carry on as before.
We need accountability. We need a proper CAB, if the FF criminals were punished properly then we would not see the level of messing from them. Removing FF is a good thing, they will remain in opposition for a long time. Hopefully the country turns its back on corruption and incompetence.
You need to ask...? There needs to be significant change in this country, from the structure and method of funding of the health service to the criminal justice system (it is really so hard to get murderers to be kept away for life? Or to overhaul the Gardai and throw out the corrupt and the inept?), to the entire structure of governance (including the Oireachtas and the civil service). There are minimal differences between FF and FG in reality, they agree on 98% of stuff, just make a lot of noise about the rest. There is no impetus for real change in such a system. It's a recipe for inertia.
TA, FF have had the ball for a long time. They've done NONE of the above. We need change, the more radical the better. If Enda can bring his party from a few stragglers and no-hopers back from the dead, he may be what we need. And I am no blueshirt! We certainly don't need Cowen and his asleep-at-the-wheel Cabinet, the ones who brought us here.
Can I vote for you?
You sound like a well-adjusted individual with a positive contribution to make to the body politic.
I accept the broader point about clientism being a disease that effects all parties. And it's not restricted to this country either. It's something that plagues all democracies. The question is how can you mitigate this as much as you can. So how fo you do this?
Well firstly you have to look at an electoral system that creates parties to behave like this like we have. You cannot be a successful party in this system without constantly putting the national interest in danger in order to get yourself elected. It can't be done. That has to change.
But within the system that we have what can be done?