Campaign Gist: FG Party, SF breath-holding, FF?
Day 23 of the Campaign and nobody knows anything. So, let's take a tour through the strangeness together.
Fine Gael Party (like it's 1932)
The Taoiseach decided to give his media interview in front of a 1932 Cumann na nGaedheal poster which (apparently) hangs in Fine Gael HQ. Here it is:
The message was presumably intended to suggest that Fine Gael are the party you could rely on to always spot when there were secret, hidden groups behind their rivals- this time Sinn Féin.
Except, as everyone knows, Dev listened to precisely nobody his entire hermetically sealed life- let alone the IRA- and he spent the next 30 years occupying the corridors of power, while Cumann na nGaedheal went into permanent meltdown and merged with some fascists to form Fine Geal.
FG also warned that Sinn Féin were communist:
and that they were involved with shadowy gunmen:
(Yes, that is a poster warning that Fianna Fáil are communists.)
Paschal Donoghue was at pains to warn that a vote for Fianna Fáil was a vote for Sinn Féin in government and vice versa. The Taoiseach said only a vote for Fine Gael would avoid these terrible coalitions:
Re-running 1932's election campaign isn't exactly the future any of us expected Fine Gael to be looking forward to when they unveiled their election slogan.
Sinn Féin hold breath Everything is raining down on them- the past, the present and criticism of their future.
And there's no way of knowing if any of it is going to have any effect whatsoever. What's clear is that the party had no expectation of taking the lead and doesn't really know what to say or do, in case it makes the magic run away.
Fianna Fáil, Who Dat?
Micheal Martin must have hoped he would collect the votes of the Change hungry electorate. Badly served by the talent puddle on his front bench (he can only dream of a whole pool), he's been the FF face on every lampost. But, whether it's Jack Chambers trying to rut in studio like a Great Irish Whelk or Michael McGrath's auto-amnesiac TV appearances, erasing themselves from the viewer's memory evan as they're happening, we've seen why the FF leader has put himself at the front of their campaign.
The moratorium approachs, not that we'll pay it any attention.
