Mick Fealty on House of Comments Podcast - Episode 12
The latest "House of Comments" podcast with myself and Stuart Sharpe of the Sharpe's Opinion political blog is now live. The website for the podcasts is here and the twelfth episode which we recorded on Tuesday 2nd Feb is available to download via this page here (raw mp3 file here if you prefer). You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Or you can listen to it right now here:
The format is to invite one or two other political bloggers each week and discuss a few of the stories that are making waves in the blogosphere.
This week we were joined by Mick Fealty, founder and editor of the Slugger O'Toole blog which focuses on Northern Ireland and politics.
We discussed the current political crisis in Northern Ireland and how the various recent events have contributed to it, the problems that David Cameron and his Shadow Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson have experienced, Cameron's recent wobble(s) and just what is Gordon Brown up to with his plans for the Alternative Vote system for Westminster?
If you are a political blogger and would like to participate in the future, please drop me an e-mail here.
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1 comment:
Irish politics is localist because Irish people identify at county level. The political coalitions that Mick Fealty is talking about aren't constituency-based, they're county-based. Cavan voters don't campaign for the Monaghan hospital.
Besides, the empirical evidence doesn't point to Irish policy's being compromised by PR-STV. It's as you said - one can't draw inferences from a single data point. Poor Irish infrastructure is probably due to sustained long-term poverty until the 1990s rather than to the choice of electoral system.
Also, the Senate amendment did not involve a legal or constitutional imperative, though you can argue that it created a moral imperative. It merely allowed the government to extend the mandate; it didn't compel any action.
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