Image nicked from Everybody lies
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Thirteen Things about today
- Today being election day you see.
- Polling station close at 10.30 this evening, so you’ve no excuses for not voting.
- If you haven’t made up your mind yet, check out Mycandidate.ie and find a person you like.
- Because I haven’t changed my address I’ll have to travel up to Sligo to vote. This means I’m taking tomorrow off work, cause I wouldn’t get back in time. So yay! long weekend.
- I think I’ll be voting for Fine Gael, Labour, or Green. I’ve yet to fully decide.
- De mudder says that Fine Gael want us to vote for Imelda Henry as our first preference. Tactical voting and all that. We’ll see.
- De mudder also says that the brothers are undecided, and have asked de sister to decide who they should vote for. Her being 10 and all, this shows their political interest. Unfortunately de mudder also says that she, de sister, is a Bertie fan. Hopefully this doesn’t mean she’ll tell them to vote FF.
- In case you don’t know, we use PR:STV or, Proportional Representation through Single Transferable Vote. Doesn’t that sound exciting?
- Basically, instead of an X we put in numbers, we rank the wannabe TDs in order of preference. Then there is a quota and elimination counts, and then the transfer of a vote from the 1st ranked to the 2nd ranked.
- That probably isn’t a very clear explanation, but you can read about in on wikipedia if you want.
- This means that we have a lot of coalition govts. At the moment FF and the PDs[1] are in power.
- And the polls suggest that things are very tight. I’m hoping that the FG/Lab/Green coalition wins. The latest poll put Bertie and friends slightly ahead. I think.
- Course in reality, all the parties are essentially the same. For years now they’ve been moving to the centre. Okay, Labour might be slightly on the left, but only slightly. The only difference is the scale in corruption. The only party I could never, ever, see myself voting for is Sinn Féin, I have voted FF in the past, even though I don’t like them, but SF? Nah. Don’t trust them. Even ignoring the whole IRA thing I don’t trust them.
Links to other Thursday Thirteens!
- SciFiChick
- Colloquium
- On the Horizon
- While Sleeping
- Too Many Ideas
- Amy Ruttan
- The hidden side of a leaf
- (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!)
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Your polls close at 10:30! Wow. Must be nice.
I hope you'll get government easier than we here.
We had elections 21st January and government as of Tuesday, last week!!! They just couldn't make any agreement 4 months and Tuesday was the last day according to constitution. After that new elections would be the only option.
Now when I'm looking this government I think new elections would be just perfect :(
I'm just curious. Are all the parties really the same or has a need to appear to be the same in order to be elected resulted in them presenting themselves as being the same? While mainstream parties are tending to move towards the centre I'm often surprised how far apart they really are when you start writing down their policies.
Its like the accusation leveled at Labour over here in the UK of bringing spin into government since 1997. The Tories were using spin right through the Thatcher years but Labour have ended up tagged as the ones to bring it in. They had to start using it because otherwise they would probably never have been elected again.
In Canada ours are open late till about 8p.m., and it was cool when I was having my second election day was around my due date and I didn't want to have to travel and stand in line to vote so they let me vote by mail given my circumstances.
I also got to vote early. The day my son was born was election night, the next morning we had a new prime minister. So her was born in between two.
Happy TT and thanks for dropping by mine.
Must be nice to have more than two parties! And even if they're all the same, at least they're all centrist rather than all extreme right wing. Like our two.
SciFiChick, it would have been nice if they'd told us earlier. Was very hard to find out what time the polls closed at. usually it says it on your polling card, but there seemed to have been a fair amount of hassle with them. And of course, mine was in Sligo :)
Milan, it'll be a coalition. Fianna Fáil and somebody else, who the else is has yet to be decided.
Mark, the two main parties in Ireland have their roots in the old Sinn Féin, one was pro-Treaty, the other anti. Until they lost the civil war and became not in favour but not totally anti. Most of their policies are the same, although I would see Fine Gael as being slightly less corrupt, and not quite so cozy with big business than Fianna Fáil. The others do have different policies, but most voters are looking for centre parties, or so it seems.
Hi Amy, I've no idea if pregnant women got to vote by post here, sounds like a good idea though.
Dew, it is. Although in reality the choice is between FF or FG, with a different selection of coalition parties.