Give the Shinners half a chance and they’ll ruin us

THE terms and conditions for the next general election are set: it’s Sinn Féin against the rest. And despite the party’s latest stunt in the Dáil, only a fool would bet against the Shinners being the most popular or secondmost popular party when the votes are cast.

Sinn Féin is thinking of when, not if, it will rule the roost – be it after the next election or the one soon after that, when an unstable administration falls.

The current regime has even laid down a template for Government that will make it easy in office for the Shinners to ignore any opposition and implement their disastrous policies.

Sinn Féin’s vision for Ireland depends on creating the same sort of dependency culture in the Republic that it did in Northern Ireland.

Hiking up taxes on the ‘rich’ (and that’s anyone who earns €10,000 more than the average industrial wage) would stifle enterprise, hobble entrepreneurs and induce a flight of talent and capital.

BOOSTING the public sector and increasing public spending would provoke another balance-ofpayments crisis. If the EU, the ECB or the IMF cries ‘halt’, they will portray Ireland as a victim of international capitalism and unite the dependency culture around the Sinn Féin ethos.

Meanwhile, those with private pensions would be queuing up to shift their funds overseas and plans for relocation will be high on the agenda for foreign investors.

I don’t know if Gerry Adams is as articulate in menu Spanish as he is eloquent in Oireachtas Gaeilge but he has always had a soft spot for the late Hugo Chavez’s policies in Venezuela.

Guess what: prices rose by an average of 23% for each of the 11 years Chavez was in power while crime soared and the murder rate nearly doubled. And Brazil, Chile and Colombia were soon looking at oil-rich Venezuela in their economic rear-view mirrors. Sinn Féin’s salsa economics and crony socialism are a scary prospect for a people who fought long and hard for national independence and individual freedom. In the last opinion poll, 26% made Sinn Féin the most popular party, despite a history of murder, kidnap, robbery and even tolerating child abuse. This says a lot about the established political parties’ appeasement in the Peace Process that ignored Sinn Féin-IRA criminality. It is also a grave indictment of the current coalition that lied in an election campaign promising new politics then continued unabashed with crony politics after it was elected.

The shortcomings in the management of the Garda, reported this week, are mirrored in the civil service, the Oireachtas and in every facet of public administration.

Do the voters ignore Sinn Féin’s heinous past because they believe that the established political parties’ casual dishonesty, cronyism and incompetence is too ingrained to be reformed?

And would voters trust Sinn Féin not to stuff their people into every opening to reinforce their salsa economics and crony socialism?