If there is an Irish government minister more disliked by Seán and Síle Citizen than Joan Burton you’d be hard put to find him or her. Even Burton’s own Labour Party members visibly wince when discussing “the Voice” and her regular on-air car crashes. It’s not that she is a particularly inept politician or media-performer. It’s rather that when it comes to the ideology of inflicting economic austerity on the populace at large she is a true believer and with a matronly condescension that simply grates on even the most sympathetic of listeners. She has become an almost Swiftian stereotype of all that is rotten about Ireland’s out-of-touch elites. For the last four years the preferred solution by the Fine Oibre coalition to the nation’s economic woes has involved the Vietnamization of Irish society: burning the village to save the village. So picking Joan Burton to front the Labour Party when it enters the next general election is like posing Colonel Kilgore against the background of burning huts and expecting the villagers to flock to his side. I love the smell of napalm in the morning…
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Ugghh, sorry! That sounds aweful. I do hope there is a change.
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Good change, anyway 😉
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Maybe the Labour Party should be rechristened “the Forced Labour Party”. It’s about time that those tribally wedded to the Left stopped deluding themselves that any of these parties have the interests of working people or the poor at heart. Even the Clare Dalys and Boyd Barrets have failed to challenge the premise of the Banker imposed austerity and instead simply blather vaguely about “taxing the rich instead”, thus tacitly accepting the mainstream corporate media fiction that there is indeed a financial crisis that needs to be tackled, instead of proclaiming loudly that the whole crisis has been orchestrated IN ORDER to impose austerity on working people. Clare Daly urged people not to sign up for the property tax, but when the crunch came and the government imposed extra charges on those who initially refused to pay, neither she nor the rest of the comrades had any plan B in terms of national strikes, boycotts, etc, in order to defeat this ruthless show of muscle by the government. Thus far from stymieing the government and the bankers, the socialists actually ended up aiding them forcibly collect much more revenue from Irish citizens than they would otherwise have managed to. Controlled opposition at its most brazenly cynical. This is a recurring pattern – look at all the erstwhile Workers Party hacks in the soft-porn Masonic rag, the Sunday Indo, not to mention the Murdoch press, who now propagandise on behalf of Banker imposed persecution of the poor and the unemployed.
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Was initially sceptical of Clare Daly but I have to say I would regard her highly now. I’ve seen her work at first-hand. I wouldn’t say that alternatives haven’t been offered, they just haven’t been taken up.
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