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Did Gerry Adams presence in Dublin help the yes vote ? dublin |
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opinion/analysis
 Sunday October 04, 2009 09:10 by John C - None none none
 Local representives should have been to the forefront. When Michael O’Leary joined the yes campaign I thought to myself that this would actually be beneficial for the No side. For most Irish people, O’Leary’s arrogance and clown antics are irritating the best of times. He did not appear to be as knowledgeable as Declan Ganley on the overall text of the Lisbon treaty. O’Leary just kept repeating the same two points over and over again, the Commissioner and taxation. I thought that O’Leary’s support for the Yes side was a blessing in disguise. I believed that his personality alone would drive some people to vote No.
The same can be said about Gerry Adams. For more than a week before the referendum Adams was interviewed on RTE’s Six One News every evening. There’s absolutely no doubt that Adams support for the No side was a put off for some voters. Each evening RTE interviewed the various canvassers for both the Yes and No side. Each evening Adams was interviewed and gave his parties reason for supporting a No vote. On every occasion that he was interviewed Mary Lou McDonnell,or Aengus Ó Snodaigh was seen standing behind the party leader in total silence. I would normally blame RTE for been one-sided or biased, but on this occasion I felt that Adams gave it to them on a plate. Could he not resist being in the forefront ? |
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Comments (11 of 11)
Jump To Comment: 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1He was interviewed on RTE news on Wednesday September 30th and encouraged people to come out and vote "tomorrow" before he corrected himself.
Painful is not the word.
News Reader brings up some very good points about the entire voting system which need to be addressed.
As for the article itself. A c. 20 point swing in any ballot is huge and probably requires complex analysis. Why bother? The treaty is now de facto - done and dusted.
And you might want to try this on for size. The vast majority of people who cast ballots on Friday didn't know where Adams was and didn't care.
As for the rest of the crap. It's just that - crap. Shite one could read in and Indo/Sindo column on a regular basis.
Clearly the time for a change of leadership in Sinn Fein has come. The problem they may face with this is that the control freak nature of the Sinn fein leadership did not allow for alternative leaderships to blossom. I do not mean that there are no capable people there, there are no people with leadership ambition because such ambitions were seriously frowned upon.
As for UKIP the interesting point is this, certainly their intervention was jumped on by the Yes side to play a Brits Out card, (from west brits)
and this may well have impacted on swaying voters but it is undeniably true that every debate that Nigel Farrage engaged in here he won hands down.
Not for me the wonders of live RTE debates or satellite GAA Coverage these days. Not that it mattered much to me, Ireland is the only EU state which doesn't allow postal votes to its non resident citizens just as Ireland is the only EU state which doesn't count its ballot boxes the same night as a referendum or election.
But the impression I got of Adams and the campaign was one photo taken on Henry Street. Whereas on the otherhand I was treated to 16 or more photographs of Michael O'Leary posing as an eejit in the Irish Independent which for a time was on the "most read" list of that rag's articles. Reading foreign press in the aftermath of the referendum, two things are repeated in many languages both within the EU and further beyond. (a) The Irish aren't going to be asked to vote again and get a best out of 3, there is undoubtedly a strange taste left in the mouths of many Europeans of whatever political hue as they now turn their attention to the appointment of our first permanent president of the EU (b) There was extraordinary influence brought to bear by the private and business sector. In fact so much money was pumped into the Yes vote by big business that the Irish Lisbon2 referendum almost seemed like a US presidential election campaign - Except of course that there was no public inquiry or legal framework to establish what was fair or unfair.
The vote is done now, arguing over who won it or who lost it can only be the stuff of amateur pundits who have warmed to the point of stickiness on their barstools or worse those journalists who can't think or are not told to write about anything else.
Meanwhile, the Irish electorate, tiny as it is, extraordinary as it is (in not granting votes to non-resident citizens who are still resident in the EU), exceptional in its consideration as it is (the old-fashioned and dubious custom of leaving ballot boxes uncounted for one night) have done nothing more than rubberstamp the juggernaut of a quasi superstate structure. They will realise what that means when they see their first president define the role .
By the way - to play the game -
In my own honest opinion, it was not Adams who lost the No! campaign nor even Libertas but the space given to the UKIP and the role it played. Ironically Irish voters resented the intrusion of the UKIP so as to offer a chance to Tony Blair to be if not the first president certainly one of the following ones.
I reckon a slightly better game to be played by the left, if it is still interested in playing such games, is not to ask why it lost - but why the Yes side won. Obviously money - but after that - which Yes party can take the credit?
The tittie taoiseach? gummy Gormley? Labour? Fine Gael?
I reckon the best game of all to be played by Irish society would be a reform of ballot box counts, extension of voting rights to Irish citizens resident in the EU, a limit on corporate or private spending on political campaigns & of course wondering why so many people did not, do not & are not going to vote.
It didn't matter. The EU - illegally, mind - used funding to usurp the democratic process of a sovereign country, to whit ourselves, and the media was 'under orders' to ignore this. We have just experienced the equivalent of a bloodless coup engineered by Big Business in Europe and no one seems to wish to comment upon it. Already Brian Cowering is making noises, sickening in their hypocrisy, about 'The Irish people have spoken.' They spoke a year ago, but they were ignored - thus the entire Irish democratic process can be overridden as quickly and as surely as a Supreme Court ruling if you have the need to do it and the means. Those who voted No in 2008 were in effect told that their vote did not count: they were disenfranchised. Shades of George W. Bush and Florida. But we must remember that almost 40% of Irish people this time round said No, and that it a very sizeable proportion of the population. Almost half, in fact. So Brian Cowering and his Cowerites have no room to gloat. Especially since, no matter what, they are finished at the next election. And they are stuck with a Tánaiste who believes that Einstein wrote the Theory of Evolution. Now that is frightening!
It's almost as if they wanted to stick the people the NO voters did not like to be associated with most in our faces all the time. Surely this was just a co-incidence and RTE was trying to be even handed. Yeah right!. The fact is the battles for freedoms are fought in unpleasant places and sometimes with uncomfortable bedfellows and this is forced by the stronger side because they know it confers an advantage to them. For example, in the world of internet freedoms, the battles are fought over paedophilia and porn even though this is not what digital freedom is really about at all in daily life. It's about the government reading and retaining all your emails for 3 years+ etc etc. Similarly the lisbon treaty for most no voters was not about abortion or conscription. However thats what people were made to look like caring about when in reality it was the hijacking of our democracy the dodgy new direction europe was taking and the freedom to amend the treaty any way they liked after it was passed by corporate lobbied faceless unanswerable people that we had a major problem with.
As for gerry adams. If you listened to what he said, he spoke about the rights of people not banks and cronies or corporations and that sounded ok to me. He dealt well with very leading questions from RTE and was gracious in defeat and compared to the scumbags from fianna fail who couldn't give you a straight answer if their crooked little lives depended on it, he looked and sounded pretty good.
The main reason some people in RTE (and michael martin quite blatantly after the announcement ) feel the need to attack sinn fein is because currently despite the way they are portrayed by the media and FF politicians, they are considered a real threat because they are one of the few parties with some principles and ideals and patriotism left that hold the line and take a people centric anti corporate / privatisation stand on issues like europe, nama, banks etc. and in times of economic strife, people start thinking more this way and start to share these views and vote more for such people. That makes them a real threat to the corporate profit driven systematic rape of Ireland and it's citizens by them and their pals.
The fact is, FF behind their bluster, are scared of sinn fein and that is why they really feel the need to attack them all the time.
Gerry Adams is an amazing politician. He has a great presence and a great charm about him. His support to the No side must have only being beneficial to the No side.
Gerry Adams speaks up for the men of no property and of course there are some in Ireland that dont appreciate that. Offer them an Ireland based on equals but equal isn't good enough for some people.
Of all the SF spokesmen Adams is by far the most effective.
In 2007 Adams came down south to marshall the troops so to speak and it was total disaster.
On TV he was talking to a young lad at a school who was showing some of his wood turning skills which prompted Gerry to tell him a wee tale about the fun he had turning wood in Long Kesh.
He appeared on a TV debate with Michael McDowell and Joe Higgins among others.
McDowell knew right well his party faced annihilation but he decided to go down fighting regardless.
When Adams showed he was totally ignorant of the economic situation in the south, McDowell smelt blood and attacked Adams on Sinn Fein's links with FARC.
Adams made things worse by repeating "people have rights" before he made the fatal mistake of claiming his own house was "owned by the bank."
McDowell could not believe the trap Adams had walked into.
"The Northern Bank?"
Adams almost died of a stroke.
At the end he appeared like a broken man.
I told you long ago. There are two states in Ireland. They could be united if they joined the federal republic of Germany. That would bring about some Gleichschaltung among unionists and republicans, FF and FG. And we might have an SPD taoiseach.
The Shinners are their own worst enemies.
“Politics of Fear” won the yes vote. Media is to blame above anything else to investigate a treaty where people are voting against their interests. Now the government can blame more problems on EU superstate , accountability to the people is further eroded.
Blaming Adams is the wrong target. It the editorial agenda of RTE who manufactured consent for the Lisbon treaty (created apathy peopledidn’t vote), last time around it created a Libertas party by ignoring all other NO campaigners.
You would need masters in EU law to understand the treaty, and you also need a good grasp of other treaties it references to.
Restricting information by encoding it in an elite language, and then having the all media, except DIY media to push it, even at that there was still a huge amount of people who did not buy the treaty.
The government exploited people’s fear, and presented simplify argument of “we are stronger in Europe” . Treaty based on the failed economic policies of neo liberalism, so it was impossibly treaty to sell to any well-informed population, hence the need to avert attention a way form the treaty and high-light how EU has/is assisting Ireland not how the lisbon treaty is going to effect Ireland.