Letters to the Editor: General election candidates must offer voters a credible plan
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Following the decision of the US electorate to re-elect Donald Trump, I’m startled by how shocked many of us are.
It’s very clear a huge proportion of the electorate there feel pressure financially. Trump had the benefit of not being around to mop up after covid, deal with energy supply shortages, food shortages, etc, so the perception that people did better under him — whether valid or not — is pervasive.
I detest him by the way, and many of those around him. What I can try to understand, however, is that for somebody trying to put food on their kitchen table, or someone close to retirement age weary from having to take on a second job to pay their health insurance, the frustration with a system where they felt unheard, ignored, and possibly a sense of it can’t be any worse.
We now have our own upcoming general election and I hope that both our politicians and electorate are willing to listen to each other. We are not as far removed from the US as we might like to think. Many of us are also disgusted with the waste of our hard earned tax; struggling to conflate RTÉ bailouts with record child homelessness; millions spent on mobile phone pouches while children in those very classrooms are in need of an SNA, or children needing an actual place in a school.
Office of Public Works staff not being held to account for ridiculous overspends, and despite the billions of euro thrown at it, the state of our health service, the unsafe scenes at University Hospital Limerick, and waiting lists continue to rise; one child in pain awaiting surgery is one too many.
Many of us here are as frustrated with the lack of an alternative approach. So I would hope that all politicians and canvassers listen carefully to the people they engage with over the next few weeks; and not arrive at our doors with their biographies; they should bring a plan — a credible one.
The US pollsters got it wrong, as did the political correspondents and aging Hollywood film stars who were queuing up with the glossy magazine pop stars to endorse Kamala Harris.
With our own general election on the horizon, Simon, Micheál, and Mary Lou had best make sure they are not endorsed by some old country and Irish showband singers or aging actors from Glenroe or The Riordans (ask your granny). It would surely spell disaster.
Incredulity masks ignorance.
Those of us who tried to convince ourselves that surely Trump couldn’t (or hopefully wouldn’t) win must and humbly and collectively declare our blatant blindness to the patently ineffectual, unprepared, and amateur effort of Kamala Harris on the hustings. That is, apart from the self-destruct tardiness of the Democrats to replace Joe Biden much earlier on the election trail. It was as if a curiously dismissive malice aforethought hovered in their electoral ether, presuming pompously that the charlatanic mirage of Trumposity would simply burn itself out by election day. But, sure, hadn’t he already won a prior election and come within a whisker of the previous one?
Despite his tsunami of faux pas, avalanche of misquotes, and a myriad of gibberish, the Donald had the brutish bravado, the primal polemic, and the vacuous vituperation to win the shallow approbation of a less than discerning electorate. Lucre lords will always ride the white horse of promise, irrespective of truth, honesty, or decency. The American public would seem to have a regular penchant of hoisting their own petard in appointing and anointing the wrong president. One doesn’t have to go too far back to uncover George Dubya, Ronnie the B-actor, or Tricky Dicky, the king of subterfuge. Not to say that most others were worthy and honourable. Seems like the honeypot of power often attracts unwelcome marauders dedicated to self-service, rather than serving the nation with selfless integrity. Narcissism is an oh so common intruder.
Groucho Marx captured the essence of what we’re typically dealing with: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
While Oscar Wilde might well opine: “Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.”
No doubt Simon Harris has been ruminating on these while reading his
tea leaves.
Donald Trump was somehow able to paint this picture of the US economy being in crisis under president Joe Biden, even though the data didn’t quite back that up.
Inflation in the US today is around 2% down from this time a year ago. It’s interesting to note that job figures have exceeded expectations and consumer spending seems to be strong. It seems that Trump was never really challenged on this.
We all lived through a pandemic that sparked inflation not only in the US but all around the globe too, ergo things are more expensive today in the US than they were when Trump was president.
I believe that there is this notion amongst many Americans of feeling worse off today than they were four years ago.
This feeling seems to be reflected in the presidential election results.
There’s no doubt that many Americans feel very strongly about the things that Donald Trump feels strongly about. Like Trump, they want a secure border, they want a better economy, and a clampdown on crime.
At times, Trump may have come across as being off the wall, but somehow his message resonated with people.
I heard one American saying that democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay your bills. It seems that many Americans were saying that what Trump was espousing on his campaign trail was not that crazy and that he had his finger on the pulse of what mattered most to people.
I believe that now is a timely reminder for the Democratic Party to start working on returning back to the centre. They must strive to do this if they want to be competitive again.
I was never an advocate of Donald Trump but one has to hand it to him on pulling off this amazing achievement.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
And so Trump returns.
I am a concerned retired citizen who is fed up of our ministers wasting, and allowing civil servants to waste, taxpayers’ money in an an alarming manner.
In relation to the mobile pouches, my daughter is employed in a public secondary school in New York.
When we were speaking last week about the issue in Ireland and the cost, she showed me the pouches in her classroom at a cost of $50 on Amazon.
Why do we have to spend taxpayers money to buy votes?
In 2022 Teagasc hosted a summit in Dublin at a cost of €45,000 to the taxpayer. ‘The Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock’ was signed by 1,200 scientists from the meat industry and used to influence EU policy on animal agriculture.
These scientists, not surprisingly, had vested interests in countering narratives about the negative environmental and health impacts of meat production. The findings of the Dublin Declaration have all been refuted in a significant evidence-based analysis recently published.
There are many parallels between the meat industry in 2024 and the tobacco industry of the 1950s, both employing ‘scientific’ support to defend their industries despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Both are driven by profit above all else.
The effects of climate change were painfully evident in Spain last week. Our state advisory body Teagasc has displayed serious conflict of interest in both hosting this summit and concurring with the bias of the report. One must conclude that profit for the meat lobby groups is more important than human health, the environment, animals, and ultimately our future. Shameful.
The RTÉ documentary Leathered about corporal punishment brought me back to 1958. I got a few hammerings in that era and I remember a different punishment. I was aged 12, still in short trousers, and the schoolmaster made me kneel on the floor inside the door. I don’t remember what my misdemeanor was. Decades later, when I learned I had been given the same punishment that was inflicted in the Magdalene laundries, I asked myself what, if any, connection my old teacher had with those horrific institutions.