- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
As all people with a passing knowledge of Irish politics are aware, Fianna Fail (fuck you, I'm not doing diacritics) are the Party of Government and were consistently the largest party in the Dail until 2011, when they utterly collapsed down to 20 seats after a truly awful few years, dominated by the sudden decline of the Celtic Paper Tiger, cack-handed responses to the banking crisis, the results of the Mahon Tribunal, the whole Lisbon Treaty saga, and that time Brian Cowen did a radio interview while blatantly smashed.
One of the reasons for the poor response to the GFC was the fact that successive Fianna Fail governments had spent literally all of the money on pork barrel spending and fixing roads.
In the 2007 election, polls predicted that Fianna Fail would lose 20 seats, but the campaign was unusually long and the end result was a loss of only four seats, which allowed Bertie Ahern to continue in power with the support of the Greens and Progressive Democrats. But it was close - Fine Gael and Labour together were only 12 seats off a majority.
So what if the campaign had gone a bit worse for FF, and Enda Kenny had come to power in 2007, in coalition with Labour, just before everything went to shit? How would relations with Europe have been affected? Would the GFC have been handled differently? Would the blame for the awfulness now fall on FG-Labour, or would the FF overspending line have stuck, as in OTL? And would FF be any closer to re-taking their traditional position ITTL?
One of the reasons for the poor response to the GFC was the fact that successive Fianna Fail governments had spent literally all of the money on pork barrel spending and fixing roads.
In the 2007 election, polls predicted that Fianna Fail would lose 20 seats, but the campaign was unusually long and the end result was a loss of only four seats, which allowed Bertie Ahern to continue in power with the support of the Greens and Progressive Democrats. But it was close - Fine Gael and Labour together were only 12 seats off a majority.
So what if the campaign had gone a bit worse for FF, and Enda Kenny had come to power in 2007, in coalition with Labour, just before everything went to shit? How would relations with Europe have been affected? Would the GFC have been handled differently? Would the blame for the awfulness now fall on FG-Labour, or would the FF overspending line have stuck, as in OTL? And would FF be any closer to re-taking their traditional position ITTL?