Campaign Gist: Death, Taxes, SF’s woes

Day 4. Your Campaign Gister has come down with a fever. Some of the below may, therefore, be be the product of an overheated mind.

Death
It is proving an unfortunate theme of this campaign that each day is accompanied with news of a terrible crime. First a 17 year old was dismembered, then a car was shot at. Electorally, this seems like an awkward issue to address. None of the main parties is going to the electorate offering more violent crime. But, again, none of the parties consider themselves “the party of law and order” like the incumbents, on whose watch all these things have happened.

The Taoiseach therefore went to Drogheda and released a video where he promised that he was ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’.

Unlike Blair, whose slogan this originally was, this appeared not to refer to poverty, despair and education, but on increasing the after-the-fact responses of the police. It is possible that FG’s perception of the causes of crime may be somewhat singular.

Taxes
Every FG budget has been quietly agreed with FF over the last 5 years. Unsurprisingly, both parties are claiming they will carry on as before, but better. Specifically, FG are offering to cut taxes and FF are offering to levy less tax.

Other parties- the Social Democrats, Labour, Sinn Fein etc, are suggesting that we pool all the suggested extra givers and spend that money on making our society better. However, due to a systemic failure in our media system this option is being treated as a fringe proposal. This is strange in an age where the FF-FG vote share barely accounts for half, but not strange in an age of collapsing traditional media audiences.

SF’s woes
While two largest parties bounced harmlessly off each other like students wearing inflatable zorb-style sumo outfits, SF suffered a second day of their councillor’s podcasts being listened to, with unflattering effect. Having accepted yesterday’s non-apology for racism and anti-gay jabber, they found he had also expressed his thoughts on the question of statutory rape, to no great credit to anyone.
Local election poll-topper or not, SF realised this was going to be their daily lot as journalists just kept listening to his back-catalog and pulled the plug, suspending him from the party.
No apology needed, this time.m