"The winner of Election 2016 is social democracy"

Last Friday the 26th there was a general election for the parliament in the South of Ireland. Below are the election results:

Fine Gael   50 seats. FG is economically moderate or conservative and socially moderate or liberal. They're descended from the pro-Teaty side of the Irish Civil War (which took place in the early 1920s).

Labour 7 seats. Centre-Left

Fianna Fail 44 seats. FF is economically moderate or conservative and socially moderate or conservative. They're descended from the anti-Treaty side of the Civil War (what you might call the side that wanted to continue fighting the Britsh).

Sinn Fein 23 seats

Anti-Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit 6 seats. Hard left.

Social Democrats 3 seats

Green Party 2 seats

Independent Alliance 6 seats. Progressives.

Independents 17 seats. I imagine mostly progressives.

The article I link to below says something I think I need to respond to now:  SF is not a right-wing party at all, although I have heard before that some of their voters in the south might vote right-wing if SF wasn't around (in America, where they visit, SF is less left-wing than they are in Ireland where they live and work, etc.). I explain why it's not accurate to call them right-wing here.

I used to be a member of the Irish Labour Party's American sister organization, the Democratic Socialists of America and my understanding of socialism and how to achieve it has not changed. My thoughts on the ILP and the meltdown of the ILP's vote (in the previous election they got 37 seats):

1) I have felt comfortable calling myself a supporter of both SF and the ILP because almost every election on that island involves Proportional Representation and/or the ability of voters to transfer their votes from one candidate to another (so IF I lived there I could more or less vote for both of them). 

2) I support SF a bit more  because they have a huge mandate from the nationalist community in the North. I would love to see the ILP running candidates in the North, where they have been organizing for around 10 years now.

3) It sucks that this happened to the ILP, but as far as I can tell, the gov't they were a part of pursued an agenda of austerity. I believe that is not what the ILP wanted to do (I am not real familiar with them but I have never heard anyone say they're Third Way (the politics of Tony Blair in seemingly socialist organizations)  and I heard something making me think they're as anti-Third Way as DSA is), but for decades now they have been kind of stuck with going into gov't with FG, and FG is, unfortunately, overall no better economically in my opinion than FF and even after their best elections, the ILP was not able to lead a gov't (something I blame on the fact that the conflict around the North hasn't been resolved yet). 

4) There have been some instances of SF and the ILP getting along, but not many. One example would be that in the 2007 elections to the Irish Senate, they had a voting pact.
5) UPDATE 3/6/16 An Irish leftist friend of mine who seems non-hostile to the Socialist International, painted a far less rosy picture of Irish Labour for me. It also made me attach greater value to what the Irish Times opinion piece said about the governing coalition Labour was a part of. On the other hand, he did say that in opposition, Labour is good. I still think that if Labour were LEADING a coalition gov't and/or had a partner closer to them ideologically than FG is, they would probably act more like social-dems.

There's an opinion piece in the Irish Times (Ireland's largest paper) that I wanted to mention. To whatever degree it's head-line is accurate, and I think it largely is, that's great. I don't follow Southern politics as much as I follow stuff in the North, and RECENTLY I've only been reading an average of about 50 articles a week about that. But this article seems pretty accurate and I thought it was an important one to highlight. The article is written by the IT's literary editor.

Tom