Sinn Féin has promised to abolish the TV licence and declare an amnesty for defaulters should they emerge victorious in the next election.
However, if you bother to read the fine print you’ll notice that it comes with a suggestion that RTÉ be paid for through general taxation – meaning you’ll still be paying for it.
Seemingly realising that the political victory they could almost taste is slipping away from them – due in no small part to their flip flopping on immigration – Sinn Féin has devised this little trick perhaps in hopes of fooling the less astute voter.
Not only have Sinn Féin taken aim at the low hanging fruit that is the TV licence at a time when public confidence in our national broadcaster is at an all time low – the move is pretty much just a dirty trick.
It seems to me that the television licence is seen as an establishment noose loosely cast about the necks of the Irish people. You don’t always feel it there but once a year you feel it tighten when you get that bill of €160 which you MUST pay on pain of imprisonment.
This move by Sinn Féin seems a bit like a desperate attempt to win back some of their former anti-establishment ‘street-cred’ by attacking an institution of establishment Ireland.
But how many will fall it?
I remember two summers ago on a trip to Stockholm the husband of the couple I was visiting commented on how Ireland was set to elect a nationalist party in the next general election.
I can clearly remember looking back at him blankly, genuinely having no idea who he was talking about, until I asked what party he was referring to, to which he answered “Sinn Féin”.
The idea of Sinn Féin as a nationalist party is so far from the minds of many voters in Ireland these days that perhaps the me of two years ago can be forgiven for my confusion.
I’m not sure what (until recently) full support of the government’s decision to accept limitless numbers of migrants claiming asylum, limitless numbers of refugees, abortion, and open support for transgender ideology and the grisly medical interventions that go with it has to do with Irish nationalism?
Perhaps it’s easy enough to guess what Pearse, Collins, and O’Connell would have thought of the ideals Sinn Féin has lauded of late.
I recently explained to a British journalist who asked why many with nationalistic tendencies were turning against Sinn Féin that there is a general feeling that their current stance is, ‘Brits out, everyone else in.”
Perhaps that “everyone else in” could also be an “everything else in” given their apparent love for left wing ‘progressivism’.
In many ways it seems as though this party who acts as opposition has taken the blame for the policies of their political big brothers, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but in fairness they haven’t really shown much, you know, opposition to some of FF and FG’s most unpopular policies.
They didn’t oppose the government’s deeply unpopular lockdown strategy, and – as I said above – until about five minutes ago they were fully supportive of the government’s also deeply unpopular immigration policy.
Reporting on the anti-asylum centre protest in Arklow last Saturday my cameraman was surprised at how many people approached him suspiciously asking if he worked for RTÉ.
This guy is a freelancer I call upon in times of great need, and seemingly wasn’t aware of the level of public mistrust – even downright hostility – many bear towards our national broadcaster.
I recently overheard an RTÉ journalist remark on how their reporters tend not to use branded equipment when out in public for just that very reason.
And so it seems as though Sinn Féin chose this tactic believing they might use the growing public hostility towards establishment Ireland to advance themselves.
In the end though, it seems like Sinn Féin in its current iteration is very much part of the establishment it pretends to oppose.
A friend of mine recently remarked that Sinn Féin did a smart thing by electing female representatives like Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill – it seems to have served as a way to distance the party from their previous image of men in balaclavas.
The question remains though, will Sinn Féin be successful in pulling the rhetorical balaclava over voters’ eyes with this latest trick, and if this approach is anything to go by, can they be trusted to represent the people’s views on immigration?