Bertie is in re-election mode ,the "dirty war" begins in earnest

national | politics / elections | opinion/analysis Sunday April 30, 2006 03:58 by John McDermott - Removefiannafail jmcd33 at eircom dot net Gran Canaria.Spain 018680717

They CAN be defeated.

Dick"s new fighting rubbish scourge personnel carrier.!

A MOBILE clean-up squad has been handed €350,000 by Environment Minister Dick Roche,in January 2006, to end the scourge of illegal dumping in his constituency by bin tax dodging,ordinary citizens.

The money is being spent on a special vehicle to remove rubbish illegally fly-tipped and to buy specialist equipment including CCTV with night vision.

The Wicklow Uplands Council will carry out the project in the hilly parts of the county.

Election campaign poster.?

We are told that we get the government we voted for. We are assured by our current Fianna Fail/P.D. Government that we are an educated electorate and that we made the right choice of Government in 2002.

You could be forgiven therefore, for believing that we have a majority Government that is the choice of the people. Strange then to look statistically at the actual reality.

My thanks to the Central Statistics Office for informing us that the total population in 2002 was 3,917,203 persons in the Republic of Ireland.

Of those, over 2.9 million were eligible to vote in the General Election that year. However, only 1,788, 985 actually did so.

We could speculate why the other one point one million voters did not vote at all - we all have our theories.

However, the combined Fianna Fail/P.D. vote of 787,447 votes in that election (to become our present Government), represents only 27% of the will of the eligible voters.

Another way of putting it is that 73% of the electorate did not agree to be governed by the Fianna Fail/P.D. coalition.

It gets even more ridiculous when we consider that the actions taken by this Government today will affect everyone of us in the future. In that light, the coalition reflected the will of only 20% of the total population when it was elected.

Put another way, only one in five people in Ireland agreed.

A Soldier of Destiny on duty in the Wicklow mountains..