1967
Voting takes place this Friday, 29th November
Elections are not referendums where there are simply two choices.
Why winning the popular vote really does matter, actually.
What the American right has done has been to create over 40 or 50 years the infrastructure to build towards victory. There are no shortcuts to doing the same here in this little country of ours.
The structure of the electorate is a problem for parties of the right across Europe and the West.
The anti-immigration party is on course to secure its best-ever result
We got a Government and a society that is both institutionally incompetent on the big problems, and institutionally tyrannical on the small stuff.
Our céad míle fáilte is not some uniquely Irish thing that foreigners wouldn’t understand: It’s just the Irish word for Wilkommenskultur. That didn’t help the Germans, and it won’t help us, either.
One of the problems Ireland and Irish leaders have is that if our problems could be solved by a few speeches at Beal na Bláth and some flowery rhetoric about our glorious republican dead, then this would be the wealthiest nation on earth.
“This is what Government should be doing but is too afraid to do” may well prove a better message than simply “Watergrasshill has said no”.
Because trust has been lost, simple promises to “fix” the immigration system will not work.