I think that's why we're comparatively so lucky. Irish politics is ****, but there's no huge ideological chasm between the parties. They all stand, more or less, for the same thing, they just have slightly different ways of achieving those aims. It's rightly said of the four main Irish parties that they're all the same: they really are somewhat interchangeable, and none of them has ever enacted a particularly large or important piece of legislation that the others wouldn't also have done had they been in power. All parties, for instance, would have supported the right to gay marriage, all parties would have supported divorce and so on. No Irish party would have supported the Iraq invasion, or not spoken out against Trump (inasmuch as it was expedient to do so while he was in power). All want to help the homeless, fix the health system, provide jobs - though they'll all, to a man and woman, line their own pockets first.
In other words, they're ****headed bastards, but they're ALL ****headed bastards, so apart from voting along historical family lines, there's no party anyone wouldn't be prepared to vote for in the way that those in America vote for red or blue and they would never dream of changing that. Essentially, Irish politics is ineffective no matter who is at the helm, so it kind of doesn't matter.
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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018
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