The General Election in Ireland, the Working-Class, and the Palestinians

I am a little late doing this, but here are links to two articles about the recent election in the South of Ireland (the Republic).

1. An article about how Sinn Fein is a working-class party. About 15 years ago in another election there about 1/3 of SF candidates had some connection to the trade-union movement.

2. A post by Juan Cole about how Ireland is overwhelmingly in support of the Palestinians and a Sinn Fein government might turn that into policy.

Because of some things in the first article and the fact that in the PAST Cole has attacked the IRA, I want to link to a post on my blog where I explain that the IRA were not terrorists.

Also, it looks certain that there will be another election there, the numbers just don't add up to a 80 without so many different parties and independents that I doubt it will be a stable government. And, since SF didn't run many candidates, if there is another election, they might get a large plurality- hopefully seats taken from FF and not the left, but in any case it might make it more likely SF can form a government.

Also, SF is very much against anti-semitism, although it's a bit complicated. There's some stuff about that here, here, and something a little more critical here. UPDATE Another critical piece is here.



Something I wrote elsewhere:

In a recent post on his blog Juan Cole talks about SF and the Palestinians and says that unlike Germany with it's Nazi history, Ireland will be able to support the Palestinians without that kind of baggage. But That is not entirely true since Ireland was neutral and the IRA accepted aid from Nazi Germany. Unless SF has admitted recently that the IRA was wrong to do that, they are vulnerable to attacks. I go into more detail about that here. But multiple things indicate that SF IS VERY much against anti-Semitism (although it's not all favorable and some of it is ancient history much of this post is about SF and anti-semitism) and I wanted to make that even clearer to people who will criticize them over supporting the Palestinians. (I just did a google search for news about SF's current stance on the IRA and Nazi Germany, and subscribed to the Irish Times and searched that site and found nothing about SF changing it's stance on this (I found something from 2004 indicating that SF was still defending what the IRA did (using Google Advanced Search, I searched SF's web-site and found nothing, although several possibly relevant documents seemed to have been moved or removed (they probably can't archive everything (I also used the search function on SF's web-site and didn't find anything)))))

**********

UPDATE 2/22/20 First, there is an article here you read. Between this, and the WWII stuff, if Juan Cole is right, SF will be destroyed by Trump and AIPAC and much of the Left in America will look the other way because of the IRA/Nazi Germany thing.  A moderate Dem will be more merciful, but even a progressive supporter of the Palestinians like  Sanders will be pressured to criticize  SF. And AIPAC can use Congress to hurt SF. SF really needs to say that the IRA was wrong. As I said in a recent email to the TD mentioned in that article (I am typing a post about her tweets), what if the Israeli government in the 1970s offered the Provisional IRA money? Also SF needs to understand how much Americans like what we did in WWII.