Look up “Official Sinn Féin”, “Official IRA” and “The Worker’s Party” for the history. I could suggest some other words too, but I don’t want to give Damien a heart-attack over threats of libel.

If you have access to the online Phoenix archives, you can easily find plenty about these intrepid Stalinists…

You’re right, I did rather miss the point, entirely.

Kevin a-t-il dit:

“I don’t think the internet can work as a major political tool in Ireland. I look at my parents as average people, and as such, average voters. They wouldn’t, I don’t think, be influenced by something poltical they stumbled upon online.”

…which I think rather misses the entire point of the process. It’s about enthusing and organising people, not converting them. A party can have as many people as it wants posting Mary Harney jokes on a bulletin board – it doesn’t get any of the posters outside canvassing, registering voters, or doing GOTVs on election day and driving pensioners to the polling stations. (In fact it can serve to drain effort away from those things.)

Zack knows this but still found himself in London last year reduced to sending spam on what’s billed as a successful re-election campaign, but is in fact better described as the campaign where Labour lost 47 seats, all attributable to people starting to get seriously irked by the Dear Leader’s smirking gob.

Of course there are other ex-Dean-era companies available to put things together for a party which can actually bear listening to (rather than barking at) the voters. One of them even has a full-time employee in Cork. </plug>