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Post by maolsheachlann on May 5, 2014 19:03:01 GMT
Wikipedia now lists the Christian Solidarity Party as having been dissolved.
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Post by Young Ireland on May 5, 2014 19:19:46 GMT
Not to worry Maolscheachlann, the CSP have not dissolved, though they are only running one candidate, Cathal Loftus in Ashbourne. I think the editor saw that the CSP was no longer a registered political party, and concluded that it had disbanded.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 5, 2014 21:16:21 GMT
Oh, it's a pity they're not running in Dublin North West. I suppose I'll just vote for some independent on the ground that they're non-party.
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 10, 2015 15:45:20 GMT
Apparently, judging from an ad from the CSP in this month's Alive! , Paul O' Loughlin is the new president of the CSP. I don't know much about him, but nevertheless I wish him well.
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Post by Ranger on Feb 10, 2015 16:56:26 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2015 18:24:18 GMT
The CSP has been publishing recruitment ads in the CATHOLIC VOICE recently, giving Paul O'Loughlin's name. He is a fairly longstanding member and was party leader before Cathal Loftus. I agree the PP broadcast is not impressive - it seems to have been recorded off the screen by hostile viewers who have posted it to Youtube as a laugh.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Feb 10, 2015 19:02:10 GMT
I remember we had a mock general election in school in 1992, where we "voted" for the actual candidates running in the constituency. One of my classmates bragged about voting for the Christian Solidarity Party, solely because he saw them as fundamentalist nutters, and as a laugh. This was the first time I had ever heard of them.
Labour won by a landslide in the mock election, in case anyone is wondering. That was the year of the "Spring" tide and I remember being very enthusiastic about it myself.
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Post by Young Ireland on Feb 10, 2015 19:23:38 GMT
I remember we had a mock general election in school in 1992, where we "voted" for the actual candidates running in the constituency. One of my classmates bragged about voting for the Christian Solidarity Party, solely because he saw them as fundamentalist nutters, and as a laugh. This was the first time I had ever heard of them. Labour won by a landslide in the mock election, in case anyone is wondering. That was the year of the "Spring" tide and I remember being very enthusiastic about it myself. It is a pity that the CSP are seen as little more than a laughing stock. Even in Britian, I recall that the Christian People's Alliance won three seats at a borough council election about 10 years ago. Given that Britain is much more irreligious than Ireland (even at present), there is potential there for a Christian/socially conservative/family values minor party, with a bit of work. "Reboot Ireland" seems mildly promising, but seems to be very similar to the PD's, only not as socially liberal and also the fact that few of the FG rebels seem to have joined is another pity. Ganley's proposed return to the political arena appears unlikely now to come to pass. The CSP have the oppurtunity to sieze the initiative, the question now is: Can/Will they take it?
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 11, 2015 20:28:19 GMT
The Christian People's Alliance in Britain unfortunately had a split some years back - after the original leadership (which included some Catholics) started working with Muslims and ran a Muslim candidate somewhere (I think in one of the Euro-constituencies) a faction of Evangelical Protestants staged a takeover and wrote into the party constitution that only Christians could be candidates. Quite a lot of the original members left over this. I have been told of similar rows within attempts to create Catholic/Christian parties in Ireland over whether or not the party should try to recruit Protestants and other non-Catholics. In this context, I must say the appearance in the last Euro elections of a candidate for a revived version of Nora Bennis's National Party with the added subtitle "Catholic Democrats" struck me as problematic for this reason. (The problem with having a specifically Catholic party is not only that the support is really not there, but that once you start calling it Catholic it gives the bishops a chance to butt in.)
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Post by pugio on Feb 12, 2015 11:50:10 GMT
Most Irish people find politicians who wear their faith on their sleeve slightly distasteful.
A political party that brandishes religious credentials will attract scant support, and the support that it will attract may not be helpful to the cause. A religious party that centres its platform on 'family values' will reinforce the widespread and unfortunate notion that Christianity is a sort of ritualised preoccupation with sexual propriety, a perception that is particularly disastrous for efforts at evangelisation, given the ubiquity of human frailty in this area.
The representatives of such a party will also be inviting exceptional scrutiny of their private lives. If - or rather when - one of them is found to have cheated on his wife or slept with another man or gone to a strip joint in Ibiza, the press will be merciless and so shall the public. On the other hand, those who are paragons of virtue will be regarded as unctuous and irritate people no less.
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Post by Ranger on Feb 12, 2015 14:33:26 GMT
I think that the demise of the 'Catholic candidate' so to speak is a pretty telling sign of where we're at. The fact that we had them in the first place in the 90s was a sign that being a devout Catholic was no longer a mainstream thing in politics (politicians going to Mass to get the Catholic vote aside). If we look at the last few European elections, well, Dana got in once in 1999 with 51,000 first preferences out of a 550,000 person electorate in the North-Western constituency (the name and boundaries have varied over the last few elections), but when the boundaries changed she lost in the next election there with 56,000 out of 700,000ish eligible voters. Likewise in 2014 Ronan Mullen, in an even bigger constituency, got only 36,000 first preferences out of an electorate of 1.2 million. In the Southern constituency, likewise Kathy Sinnott got a seat in 2004 with 89,000 first preferences out of about 800,000 voters; in 2009 she dropped sharply down to just under 60,000 first preferences in a constituency that was only marginally bigger. Theresa Heaney of the Catholic Democrats polled only 13,500 first preferences last year out of 1.2 million voters.
There are other factors, of course; I've been told that Independents have a habit of not surviving a second election regardless of their political stripe and the quality of candidates varies a lot I heard from some Catholics that Heaney did not come across well on television; Dana of course had a name for herself already and had polled respectably in a presidential election. That said, the fact that Ronan Mullen, who is already elected to the Seanad (on the first count in the NUI universities) and already had a large network, polled so poorly, is I think an indicator of things to come.
There has always been a constituency, so to speak, of people who will vote loyally for the 'Catholic candidate,' but that is shrinking, perhaps as an older generation dies off and a middle generation perhaps cools (although this is just speculation on my part).
The CSP, I think, does not even have the calibre of the least successful of the politicians listed above, from what I've seen of them, and I mean no disrespect to the individuals involved as I'm sure they have the best of intentions, but they are not the way forward.
Personally, I think that politics in general is not the way forward, given how far society has come and how much politics reflects society, but we still have a duty to try and put the brakes on the negative developments that are taking place by voting for the least bad candidate and campaigning against referenda such as the one we're facing.
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Post by Ranger on Feb 12, 2015 14:36:38 GMT
I'd agree with you Pugio; Catholics too often come across as being one-issue politicians (granted, the right to life is what weighs most heavily in my books, but I'm a voter not a candidate) and those that attempt an economic policy often come across as not knowing what they're talking about.
The problem is that there is no vision or forethought in Catholic politics here in Ireland and no grand strategy, just 'try and try again and sure God will get us the votes if it's His will.' Obviously Providence plays His part but we need to put the means in place, to be 'as cunning as serpents' as Jesus said.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 13, 2015 21:36:16 GMT
There were "independent Catholic" candidates here and there as early as the 1970s; Sean Dublin Bay Loftus used to call himself a Christian Democrat and I remember hearing of a Christian Social Party in the early 80s, though I know nothing of its members or policies. It was said in some quarters at the time that FF and FG's signing up to the Pro-Life Amendment was influenced by a relatively strong showing by a pro-life candidate in Cork North Central in the 1981 general election. (That's one rationale for having "Catholic" or pro-life candidates; to make the main parties bend their policies to look for transfers. It doesn't work much these days because (a) such candidates don't do very well (b)they usually don't make a concerted effort to get all their voters to give their Number 2s to a particular candidate (c)the main parties think they have more to gain by appealling to, or at least not antagonising, the large and growing number of voters who are actively secularist and libertine.)
One reason why attempts at a lasting Catholic/pro-life presence have not done very well is that the people involved in it are often well-meaning but naive. (It's easy to overlook how the 1980s referenda, and even the 1995 divorce referenda, were strengthened by the assistance we got from FF activists at local level). The second is that many people don't WANT to learn or to take politics seriously, because this involves hard choices. I've seen it said of American pro-lifers that they are beset by two beliefs - that victory is just around the corner if (a) we get the right leader who can get the message across and sweep the country OR (b) the people are basically on our side, so one more big push, one more repetition of the message, will finally rouse the country to the truth. This in turn can develop into a cultic dynamic - the thing about cults is that the followers WANT to believe the leader is a demigod who is right about eveything and will do all their thinking for them; in the same way there is a section of pro-lifers/"conservative" Catholics who are vulnerable to fantasists and charlatans who will promise victory in return for hero-worship, and this sort of cult-like behaviour leads its exponents not merely to avoid the process of slow learning and gaining experience which is necessary to achieve anything, but to actively resist it and treat people who try to develop it as outright enemies.
The point about being seen as single-issue pietists is well taken. In the context of listing rare electoral successes, it should be remembered that Kathy Sinnott was already known as a campaigner for the disabled before she stood for election; she wasn't a "pro-life and nothing but pro-life" candidate.
Apropos of Paul O'Loughlin, I remember a few years back when he was standing in an election (I think the 2011 general) a curious journalist interviewed him and published his descriptions of having to canvass on his own in his spare time from working as a shop assistant. That's real dedication and commitment, and you have to admire it.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 3, 2015 19:31:30 GMT
The thread below from Politics.ie is relevant to this topic. Two points worth noting is that it appears not to contain a single reference to the CSP or other similar groups, and that two of the posters claim to attend the TLM/EF. One of these voted for Clare Daly on foreign policy, and the other deliberately abstained in the recent referendum! www.politics.ie/forum/elections/239259-what-party-do-religious-right-vote-now.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 28, 2015 19:38:05 GMT
The current issue of the CATHOLIC VOICE has an advertisement for a Special Ard Fheis of the CSP, to be held in Wynne's Hotel in Abbey Street, Dublin on the afternoon of 30 August, at which a decision will be taken on whether to continue with the CSP or formally dissolve it.
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