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Post by Deleted on Jul 28, 2015 20:37:42 GMT
I have honestly never heard about the CSP until I came to this forum. In fact, I don't hear anything about this group except for when I'm here.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 30, 2015 19:44:17 GMT
Attended the CSP AGM today as an observer. About 20 voting members present, overall attendance about 35 (some people left during the meeting and others came in). It was decided to continue the party, and they are trying to pursue a recruiting drive. Paul O'Loughlin is president for the next year, Maria Mac Meanmain vice-president. Meeting was mostly devoted to reading out, debating and ratifying a new party constitution.
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Post by Ranger on Aug 30, 2015 23:43:19 GMT
Do you think they'll make anything of themselves or business as usual? Tbh I'm not surprised they decided to continue, I thought the whole advertisement was just for shock value.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 31, 2015 7:53:14 GMT
Well, they are trying-- surely they deserve praise for that?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 1, 2015 9:04:00 GMT
Yes, they do deserve praise for trying. I think that I could make similar observations on the CSP and its predecessors as I could on the vagaries of the traditional movement in the Catholic Church in Ireland, except our politicians were totally starved of success. I could see things which could have happened.
I think part of the problem is that a lot those who join groups like the CSP have no idea what a real political party is like. I remember an All Saints Day sermon in the College Chapel in Maynooth were the preacher tried to say that ordinary people could be saints and when he suggested politicians, there was laughter. I was involved in student politics at the time, as was the friend who was with me at the Mass - and we weren't laughing. I said that to participate in politics meant having the patience of a saint (not that I achieved this myself; I gave up on politics sometime later). My friend agreed.
But let me throw out a few things here.
1. You'll never get a perfect political party. If we took this approach, we might be a bit more forgiving of FF, FG and the SDLP - and through positive engagement we might have got further with them. But as long as we go the route of looking for a specifically Christian Party, we have to have in mind that they will not be perfect either.
2. All politics is local. It's worth remember that many of our left wing friends got votes from people of solid pro-life credentials because of local issues. Anything as trivial as street lighting or road signage. I personally don't believe politicians should spend time chasing up grant applications in civil service office (especially where the applicant clearly doesn't have a case), but that's not what the voters expect. Also, most TDs get into the Dáil after service on the local authorities. I found people in the CSP wanted to skip the local authorities on their way to Leinster House. A huge opportunity was missed as the town councils are now abolished and getting elected to a county or city council is more challenging. The message is learn to run before you can walk.
3. Presentation is often as important than the message on the quest to get elected. I had a number of observations on the traditionalist uniforms elsewhere this morning, including that the appearance wasn't evangelical. In terms of politics, it is repulsive. Remember, the Mick Wallaces and Ming Flanagans of this world are not the rule and I'm not sure they have a lengthy future ahead of him. Tony Gregory may have made a point of not wearing a tie, but otherwise he dressed respectably and essentially, his political career was based on the deal he got for the Inner City in his first term as a TD. After appearance, the message has to get across. Did any of the CSP people do courses in the Bunny Carr Communications or whatever it is called these days? It's not for no reason that politicians pay Terry Prone huge sums of money for her advice. Even after the Kevin Reynolds' debacle on RTE, the IMU went to Terry Prone for advice. Don't knock it. I'm not advising anyone to lie or to hide behind PR tricks, but PR training is an essential. If you go on radio or television, you'll find the researcher nicer than the presenter and you have to be able to make maximum impact with the few minutes, or even seconds, you have available to you. The people you are addressing and looking for votes from are not as easy to convince as a few pious ladies or gentlemen over tea and biscuits after a Solemn High Mass in St Kevin's or even a couple of mates over pints in the pub.
4. Beware caricatures. No matter how bland or how normal you are, if you make any impact, Goldhawk will find ways to lampoon you. Your political opponents will look for your weakest point and go through it with a coach and eight. Politics is no place for thin skin. A brief slip in judgement can destroy a political career. I remember how Madelaine Taylor-Quinn (Clare, FG) put her foot in her mouth about the Scrap Saturday programme. For Christian politicians, the media will be lying in the long grass.
5. This is a long haul commitment. It is necessary to do a lot of preparation long before political success is achieved and it is necessary to work the areas constantly. SF were around a long time, and persona non grata for a long time, before anything was delivered. Again they did plenty of local work, without saying much about their substantive issues. This is something we can learn from.
6. Band wagons are not a good thing. Early success can create a band wagon. Unlikely, but this destroyed the Greens. Plenty of the dedicated Greens bailed out through those successful years while the fairweather ecologists jumped in. This meant that even without a economic crash, the party was going to be pounded in the last election.
7. Glam candidates are not a good idea either. What wrecked the PDs was that they never built a local base, but relied on high profile candidates. They got about twenty years out of this, but it wasn't going to last forever.
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Post by Ranger on Sept 1, 2015 21:48:49 GMT
Alaisdir, I was chatting to a good friend about this recently. He was suggesting (like others before him) trying to work through the mainstream parties. In my admittedly limited experience though the party tends to win out over other priorities and anyway the grassroots are pretty sidelined these days.
Anyway, what I wonder is, although there are a few good Catholic politicians out there fighting the good fight (Ronan Mullen and Fidelma Healy-Eames, Terence Flanagan, Eamon O'Cuiv etc. etc.) and they play an important role, I wonder if it's too late to go this route? I don't want to be defeatist, because that's a dead end, but have we run out of time to effectively gain anything from the political route? Who'd vote for an anti-gay marriage candidate even at a local level now (~720,000 No voters notwithstanding)? And is it worth it? Should we be pouring our limited efforts and resources into the faith-based/cultural initiatives?
Very good analysis though, very helpful.
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Post by Ranger on Sept 1, 2015 22:11:19 GMT
That should read: 'Shouldn't we be pouring our limited efforts and resources into faith-based/cultural initiatives INSTEAD?
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Sept 1, 2015 23:28:40 GMT
Alaisdir, I was chatting to a good friend about this recently. He was suggesting (like others before him) trying to work through the mainstream parties. In my admittedly limited experience though the party tends to win out over other priorities and anyway the grassroots are pretty sidelined these days. Anyway, what I wonder is, although there are a few good Catholic politicians out there fighting the good fight (Ronan Mullen and Fidelma Healy-Eames, Terence Flanagan, Eamon O'Cuiv etc. etc.) and they play an important role, I wonder if it's too late to go this route? I don't want to be defeatist, because that's a dead end, but have we run out of time to effectively gain anything from the political route? Who'd vote for an anti-gay marriage candidate even at a local level now (~720,000 No voters notwithstanding)? And is it worth it? Should we be pouring our limited efforts and resources into the faith-based/cultural initiatives? Very good analysis though, very helpful. Alaisdir, it's rarely enough I agree with you but I think your analysis is entirely correct. A confessional Catholic party will never get anywhere. I have been sniffing around Renua — mainly because I admire Lucinda Creighton — but their amateurism is starting to put me off.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 2, 2015 8:10:56 GMT
Even when the Irish people were solidly Catholic, social issues never seemed to be the focus of political concern. Irish politics seems to have been solidly bread-and-butter from the foundation of the State. Or so it seems to me.
I think single-issue movements are probably the best bet for Catholic political concerns.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 3, 2015 8:21:53 GMT
If I was to take a case study as to how to do politics in a way that an outsider finds itself on the inside, it would be the Workers' Party.
The journey from Official Sinn Féin to Sinn Féin The Workers' Party to The Workers' Party took them from being outsiders in 1970 to having 7 seats in 1989, with a seat in the European Parliament. Granted, the WP had a lot of support in the media and the way they garnered that support isn't anyway I'd approve; they also had illegal fundraising activities and support from Moscow and other such regimes. However, that's only part of the story - other parties have had media support over the years and the Communist Party of Ireland had long standing support from Moscow which got it nowhere.
What got the Workers' Party places was a couple of things. One was internal party discipline. By contrast, the model Christian parties we've had illustrated Brendan Behan's the first thing on the agenda is the split. The WP discipline wasn't just about holding an ever changing party line, it related to the way the party operated as a team; the way their members surrendered a portion of their income to the party; how they attended in-house courses on a regular basis. They got stuck into local organisation and community work long before there were prospects of having seats even on local authorities. They made alliances, short and long term with all sorts of people and organisations.
What destroyed the Workers' Party was the fall of the communist bloc, because it left them badly exposed. The Democratic Left wing walked away from this (and were let away with it); the rump Workers' Party stuck by their guns (no pun intended initially, but let the pun stand). Both faded into oblivion. The reason why is that what made the pre-split WP so it was a union of fiery zealots and professional politicians. This broke up and one couldn't do without the other. The matter of the Official IRA which still exists (they decommissioned in 2010; but they were still around to deny killing Kevin McGuigan in recent weeks) was beside the point, as most people in the south never believed it was there (Vincent Browne was one of the few journalists that kept the story up, but having received death threats from the Officials long after their cease-fire, he would be in a position to know). The post-split WP resembles the Christian parties now because it is the zeal without the professionalism. The professional Democratic Left faded into oblivion, because the fire that kept it alive went out.
Basically, the Christian parties need a successful marriage of fiery zeal and professional light to get anywhere, and it bodes ill if Michael thinks Renua are amateurish. The CSP have to be prepared for a lot of hard work.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 3, 2015 20:46:46 GMT
A few little points: (1) Back in the day, there was a widespread belief that Catholic social doctrine formed the basis for a just social order; the trouble was that any attempt to formulate it or put it into practice beyond a certain point turned out vague and unworkable, and that everyone paid lip service to it and could present their actions (whatever those might be) as fulfilling it.
(2) The CSP meeting seemed to be making some progress in that a couple of those at the top table clearly knew how to run meetings, had community-group experience, had got legal advice etc. It was mentioned during the discussion that they had learned from experience to devise mechanisms to exclude the sort of people who would interrupt a meeting to rant on about a particular devotion, drop whatever they were doing and start praying etc. (Of course it's unfortunate that they had to learn this from experience).
(3) Realistically, I don't think the CSP is likely to achieve very much at this stage, and I will give my principal attention to other ways of promoting the common good, but I think it is worth publicising for anyone who is interested in such matters. I don't think the situation we are in can be cured by politics, but our politicians can and probably will make it much worse, and at the least losing them a few votes may slow them down. I might add that I respect those who are willing to give time and effort in this way.
(4)A counter-example to the WP of how NOT to do things is the IRSP of the 1970s. That aimed at a very similar gap in the market - later filled by WP and SF - and while a major source of its problems (having a military wing) is not comparable, the way in which it fell to bits through over-reliance on charismatic leaders who failed to build an organisation but expected everyone to obey them without question, bitter feuds supposedly based on ideology but really between personalities or geographically-based factions, dominance by jargon-spouting doctrinaires who drove everyone else out, is very similar to the problems that face any ideologically-based faction. (It doesn't matter WHAT ideology - the history of splits in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Scots and IRish Presbyterian churches is remarkably similar to that of splits in twentieth and twenty-first century Trotskyism.)
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Post by wesleym on Mar 13, 2016 12:25:08 GMT
The election results are in and the Catholic Democrats (basically a reconstituted National Party) did terribly. 2,013 first preference votes between three candidates and nothing close to a seat. Predictable of course. I assume that they did poorly for the reasons listed previously in this post - namely, showing up and expecting to win without bothering to put in the leg work necessary to build a base. But was anyone involved in campaigning for them who can shed any more light on this?
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Post by Young Ireland on Mar 13, 2016 14:19:01 GMT
The election results are in and the Catholic Democrats (basically a reconstituted National Party) did terribly. 2,013 first preference votes between three candidates and nothing close to a seat. Predictable of course. I assume that they did poorly for the reasons listed previously in this post - namely, showing up and expecting to win without bothering to put in the leg work necessary to build a base. But was anyone involved in campaigning for them who can shed any more light on this? Hello Wesley, welcome to the board. I agree that the CD's performance was uninspiring, though it could have been a lot worse: they got twice as many votes per candidate as Direct Democracy Ireland, a party with a much greater national profile. I have no involvement in the CD, but my own impression is that too much emphasis was placed on the alleged dangers of the HPV vaccine: there are many other factors apart from the substance itself that could cause such reactions, like nickel allergies or the like. The vaccine shouldn't be compulsory IMHO, but the CDs gave it much more importance than it deserved at the expense of other issues.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 13, 2016 18:04:25 GMT
I didn't see much in the way of the CD campaign, but it is noteworthy that, considering how long Nora Bennis and Theresa Heaney have been around, they lay low until Heaney ran in the Euro election in 2014. The CATHOLIC VOICE had a couple of articles promoting the Christian Jobs Action Party, founded by a former FF activist in the Midlands. The main plank that I remember, apart from pro-life and family values, was reinstating price maintenance to assist small shops in competing with supermarkets. Were any of the INdependent candidates allied with them, I wonder? Haven't made much of an impact anyway.
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Post by Young Ireland on Mar 13, 2016 19:18:49 GMT
I didn't see much in the way of the CD campaign, but it is noteworthy that, considering how long Nora Bennis and Theresa Heaney have been around, they lay low until Heaney ran in the Euro election in 2014. The CATHOLIC VOICE had a couple of articles promoting the Christian Jobs Action Party, founded by a former FF activist in the Midlands. The main plank that I remember, apart from pro-life and family values, was reinstating price maintenance to assist small shops in competing with supermarkets. Were any of the INdependent candidates allied with them, I wonder? Haven't made much of an impact anyway. I'd never heard of that party before this, but here is a link anyway if any of you want to take a look: christianandjobsactionparty.com/The FF activist you mention, Hibernicus seems to be John Malone, who ran in Meath West, getting 439 first-preferences. Know nothing much about him though other than that.
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