A quick post to highlight some recent political analyses. The first comes from World by Storm examining the alleged reduction in support for Sinn Féin in the north-east of the country as evidenced in the last series of local elections. While various reasons can be offered up for this, including growing disillusionment at the glacial movement on the process of reunification and the political stagnation that besets the northern regional government, the more likely explanation is simple apathy amongst voters in general. Given the outside possibility that the next Stormont elections will deliver up a First Minister from the Nationalist community and the likelihood of British Unionist leaders appealing to the atavistic in their community for that very reason a re-galvanised SF vote is quite possible. Certainly some assume that this is Sinn Féin’s game plan and what we are witnessing at the moment is a party simply treading water in government while preparing for the upcoming contest. As always with SF it is the long war not the immediate battle that matters.
And where will that leave a seemingly rudderless SDLP?
For a while some observers believed (or hoped) that éirígí was destined to become a significant if minor political party, attractive enough to siphon off the left-wing and more committed Republican vote traditionally held by Sinn Féin, especially in Belfast and Dublin. However in recent years that early promise has yielded relatively little and the party is now more notable as a Republican bogeyman wheeled out every so often by a complicit southern media to frighten the Neo-Ascendancy classes. This report by Joseph Magee describes an organisation more obsessed with navel-gazing and issues outside of Ireland than appealing to voters at home (wherever there is a protest over the Israeli Occupation of Palestine you will find very loud and very visible eirígí activists which is all well and good but in the world of fíorpholaitíocht how does that put votes in ballot boxes in Irish constituencies? Answer, it doesn’t).
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
“obsessed with navel-gazing and issues outside of Ireland than appealing to voters at home (wherever there is a protest over the Israeli Occupation of Palestine you will find very loud and very visible eirígí activists)”
Why not just come out and admit that you have a Jewish grandparent, James? This is getting beyond the joke. Why on earth is a man who is part Norman, part Jewish, attempting to masquerade as a Gael? I thought you would be fond of the more objectionable aspects of Éirígí anyway: the anti-Catholicism (and general secularlism), the open borders immigration advocacy under the banner of “anti-Irish” (ie – flooding New Planters into land which belongs to the Gaelic people) and the general social liberalism in regards to abortion, homosexuality and homosexual-“marriage”, all of which is the antithesis of Gaelic culture, while polishing it off with a paradoxical and tokenist flurry of Irish language usage?
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Since I oppose the Israeli Occupation in what should be the free nation-state of Palestine I’m not sure I fall into the category of extreme Jewish nationalist or conspirator that you seem to believe. Even a hyphenated Irish one. However a regard for the rights for the Palestinian people does not require a rejection of the state of Israel or an admiration for what it stands for (or perhaps formerly stood for?).
I’m a Gaelic Republican which by definition is centre-left, social-democratic, progressive, liberal and secularist.
Our ancestors approved of polygamy during both Celtic and Christian times right up to the relatively late Mediaeval period. If you were a “true Gael” would you not advocate its return? Along with concubinage and many others things. What about capital punishment or fines/compensation for murder and rape?
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*Sorry that should be under the banner of “anti-racism” rather than “anti-Irish”, though in practice both mean the same thing in Ronit Lentinese.
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