I sometimes wonder if Fine Gael and Labour really grasp the magnitude of the task they face if they are to win power next year. In the Examiner today Harry McGee reminds us that Fine Gael needs to almost double its seats and that "politicians (and the media) sometimes forget that politics is about ideas and the ordering of society, not personalities or image". As of right now the headline on RTEs news page is "Fine Gael discuss policies at Ard Fheis". Well if that doesn't get the pulse racing! Now I'm all for policies but it would be good to see them linked to some ideas, in terms of a clear vision of what direction the party wants to take us.
The same goes for Labour. Last week Cian made some very good points in a post on the Irish Election site:
[T]he Labour party has failed to find anything resembling momentum in the past years, the tenure of Rabbitte has steadied the ship at around 11%-13%. For a party like Labour this is not good enough. The evidence from the Greens suggests that when the issues of the day are your bread and butter there is support for a party that can be strong on their message. The Labour party need to generate their own message and get it out. They need to grab the national debate by the scruff of the neck and bring themselves kicking and screaming past 15% and on toward 20%.
Not much more I can add to that. If the opposition fail to generate message and momentum based on some coherent ideas that they claim as their own, the voters will probably, by default, reward Fianna Fáil with another term in office. In 2002 the voters took out their frustration by recasting the opposition. The Fine Gael - Labour pact only makes sense if people are convinced they provide an alternative. Clarity of choice is only one half of a potentially winning strategy. Do they think that they're going to sleepwalk their way into power? Please let us have some ideas. Incidentally, try and Google "Irish political ideas" and look at the paucity of hits. The most interesting thing there is a book on political thought in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.
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