The Blueshirts, as Fine Gael were known, in reference to the uniforms worn by an army association linked to them, were the party of the self-regarding cohort in Irish society who believed in their inalienable right to govern, the party of big farmers, the merchant class, fat-cat barristers and others in the professional middle class.
The Rocky Road, Eamon Dunphy
The Blueshirts have many admirable qualities. They are mostly honest, polite, prudent and reliable. They also have a degree of condescension, a sense of a divine right to rule that would embarrass the House of Windsor. They are joined at the hip to Ireland’s middle classes and large farmers. Compared with Fianna Fáil, they can be incredibly boring”.
In Bed with the Blueshirts, Shane Ross
“Friends, Wex-lownians, countrymen, lend me your hearing aids! Vote for anybody but Fine Gael and Fianna Fail!” That should be the bugle call from any boxroom-40 or under-year-old currently suffering from 14 years of brutal Fine Gael-led austerity and disastrous housing policy. In the inaugural ballot of the newly formed ‘Wexlow’ constituency, it won’t be the utterly shafted Millenial and Gen Z generations that will be foaming at the mouth to return their coalition captors, but instead, likely, their cohabiting and comfortable home-owning parents.
The respective campaigns of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael so far have attempted to muddy the waters of their catastrophic failures with everything from; COVID-19, the Ukraine War and resulting inflation, the madness of Trump and of course the tried and trusted old reliable of mass immigration as to why the Republic of Ireland has become so inhospitable for anybody who failed to get on the housing in ladder before the crash of 2008. The elephant in the room, which has unsurprisingly been thus far ignored by the ruling parties though, is the eye-watering generational wealth gap that exists between the aforementioned younger generations and the so-called ‘Boomers'(often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964 during their mid-20th century baby boom)of holy Catholic Ireland. As they witness their property and rent values entering the stratosphere, these same silver voters(the majority traditionally conservative and generational Fianna Fail and Fine Gael supporters)simultaneously and paradoxically watch their children struggle to get ahead in what Leo Varadkar once coined “The Republic of Opportunity.”
The late great George Carlin once described the U.S ‘Boomer’ generation as “whiny, narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: Gimme it, its mine!” When Carlin first made these utterances in the late ’90s, would even he have been shocked by their proceeding levels of property hoarding and parasitic exploitation of ‘Generation Rent’ as mere ‘income streams’ for their pension funds not only Stateside but also Ireland?
Rory Hearne, in his seminal work Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House, and What We Can Do About It, at least expresses some optimism that parents cant be convinced to vote for change to this scenario:
There are around 300,000 households, at least 400,000 adults, in the private rental sector. There are 450,000 adults living at home with their parents. That’s at least 850,000 potential voters. That’s more than all the people who voted for Fianna Fáil in the last election. It’s more than all who voted for Fine Gael. It’s actually about the same number as the total number of votes both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined got in the last election.[…]Your parents are more likely to be Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael voters, and if those parties feel in danger of losing votes, that will put them under serious pressure. If you are a parent of a child who is part of Generation Locked-out, isn’t it time to make a stand for your children, for your grandchildren?
Fine Gael and Fianna Fail know they have already lost the disaffected youths’ votes through alternative candidates, apathy and unfortunately the mass emigration which has left once thriving Irish towns and pubs looking like a Cambodian-style Year Zero of missing generations that Pol Pot himself would have been proud of. The only way the once unthinkable Faustian pact of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael can be dissolved is if the older, and often asset-owning, voter can be convinced to vote alternatively in the best interests of their younger nearest and dearest. This will require a near leap of faith for many who would perceive a Left-wing/alternative vote as, not only against their own, arguably, selfish best interests but even a Stalinist Armageddon in which we all perish in the gulags of Nuns Beach! A return of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to power would be the equivalent of victims of a far less sadistic couple, Fred and Rose West, finally escaping their clutches but only to return to give their abusers another chance because they promised they wouldn’t do it again.
People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes[…]The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari
Banana Republic
Banana Republic, The Boomtown Rats
Septic Isle
Screaming in the Suffering sea
It sounds like crying
Everywhere I go
Everywhere I see
