(Many thanks for your kind comments Yank and sorry for not replying sooner.) I was just at the count in Westmeath in Moate and while we are doing well in places, sure, I am a bit depressed about a lot of the country. In Westmeath there is a Nationalist alliance - although one member thereof told me it was just an election leaflet! - and most of them are at the bottom of the poll, although its early days yet and who knows what might happen with transfers etc. Peter Burke was there and morale is great among the established parties, maybe with the exception of Sinn Fein.
Basically I think the pattern is, and will continue to be, a good result in working class Dublin but not so good in a lot of rural Ireland. The simple reason for this is that the protests have penetrated the communities in Dublin, in otherwords people are discussing politics, a little bit anyway, by word of mouth among those communities and elsewhere less so. Meaning that in a place like Westmeath there is less of a community now than there is in Dublin, huge emigration of especially young Irish people coupled with the crashing of pub culture, funerals etc - not accidentally helped by Covid restrictions - means that they just get their news not orally but from the mass media, and we all know the story there.
Anyway no doubt there are plenty of reasons but hopefully this Dublin uprising, which is I think a little evident in the results and probably will put a stop to the rise of Sinn Fein, will permeate somehow across the country, but gosh we are up against it now. Rumours have it that the contractors are all ready to go into Clonmel on Monday, and that those developers have been told to move onto that site now or they will lose all their govt contracts, etc etc. The pressure is on now...
