Thanks, Eamon. While bookies odds, of course, have their provisos, they do indicate something, seeing that there is some congruity with opinion polls. So, into our seventh calendar year of economic crisis and austerity, with 400,000 plus on the dole for five years now; nett emigration running at 40-50,000 per year; local economies collapsing across the country; a health service under severe pressure and looking like it will also collapse; hundreds of thousands unable to make ends meet; 140,000 in mortgage arrears and counting, to take just a few factors, the most Left wing city in the country is going to elect as MEPs: 1) perhaps the most rabid Thatcherite Irish politician of the past twenty years, an ideologically committed proponent of austerity; 2) a member of the political party whose gross and catastrophic mismanagement of the Irish economy landed us with a decades long crisis which will crush large sections of our society, and equally committed to long term austerity; and, 3) a member of a party who makes much of its ‘anti-austerity’ rhetoric in the Republic while passing austerity legislation in the North (the recent Stormont legislation on public sector pensions). While the three candidates, Paul Murphy above all, who have stood clearly against austerity, trail in last. The boys and girls in Brussels, possibly fretting about how to politically manage the fallout from when the terms of the Fiscal Treaty are implemented, will take great heart from that result.
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