I’m a 24 year old male from Donegal, who voted in the last election for a Fine Gael candidate after reading his party’s policies and listening and believing the commitments he gave.
At that time we needed new politics and I believed like most of the county that Fine Gael would enter into a coalition government with Labour. At that time Eamon Gilmore and Enda Kenny were saying everything I wanted to hear: Social Payments would be protected and a vast number of jobs would be created, this really struck a cord with me as I was out of work for the past six months.
Skip forward almost two years and I’ve my ticket bought for Canada after working in a local shop for the past 12 months.
Yesterday I listened to the FG/LAB government being lambasted for the unequal cuts to almost everything they said they would protect when they were in opposition.
I listened closely to Sinn Fein T.D Pearse Doherty attacking Eamon Gilmore and promising a better way, the Sinn Fein way. He made the same kind of clichéd statements that the Tanaiste made while in opposition only two years earlier.
I voted for Fine Gael as I thought they were going to be better, because they offered hope, quickly I realised they were only playing politics to get into power. Now my destiny is in Canada for the foreseeable future, and I know that if I were not as naïve as to have believed the promises made that I’d have been well settled there by now.
Therefore I see something very cynical in what Sinn Fein and Pearse Doherty are doing at the moment by repeating the mistakes of Fine Gael + Labour and opposing everything and promising everything will be better.
These thoughts have been compounded by seeing Pearse Doherty erecting signs one day after the budget stating ‘there is a choice’ and that Sinn Fein is different.
They’ve even gone as far as to hold public meeting to discuss these alternatives i.e try and capture support from the disgruntled, angry and the hopeful. I believe it is sick and disingenuous of Pearse and Sinn Fein to state Sinn Fein has the alternatives.
After a small bit of searching I found that their budget was not costed and had money collected from last year’s household charge which they opposed in their budget projections for 2013. And having viewed the frontline show a tax expert discredited their wealth tax only a number of weeks ago before budget 2013.
It’s time for a new politics in Ireland one of genuine realness and truthfulness. Opposition politicians must begin to see that we the electorate are sick to our teeth of opportunist press releases that offer us everything but delivers nothing.
Hopefully I will return to Ireland and real change in the political arena occurs until it does many other genuine citizens will buy into the same cheap opposition politics that I believed in.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh.
JOHN
