I didn’t catch the first RTE EU election debate live last night, but in the name of faithfully covering events in the election campaign I watched it back this morning. What follows is a ranking of the candidates, from worst to best, in terms of how they may have helped or hurt their campaigns last night:
- Chris McManus, Sinn Fein
The most telling moment of McManus’s debate for me was when he was asked about Sinn Fein’s position on border checks, relating to immigration, and started taking credit on behalf of Sinn Fein for the Good Friday Agreement. If you wanted to learn anything new about Sinn Fein policy or positions, then McManus didn’t deliver that for you. His positioning on stage, farthest right for the viewer, probably didn’t help him – it’s much easier to dominate these proceedings from a central position. This was a muted and largely peripheral performance which underlines McManus’s biggest weakness: That he’s more just a generic Sinn Feiner on the ballot paper than he is a personality in his own right. There should be a seat there for either himself or Michelle Gildernew, but that will be because of the voters who would vote for a donkey if it had a Sinn Fein label on it. It certainly won’t be because of this debate.
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