Thurles Information

If election posters win votes, then I can predict accurately the outcome of the upcoming general election, yes the next Taoiseach will be the 35-year-old Labour party’s bright hope Allan Kelly.

On the eve prior to the Dail being ‘dissolved,’ (or considering our recent severe weather, thawed out might be a better description) Pedestrian crossings, Roundabouts, ESB and Telephone poles, Chapels and Churches were decorated with at least two images of the well airbrushed phizog of our Mr Allan Kelly MEP.

However, I noticed this morning that ‘Mother Nature’ had taken revenge over the last few days and with the help of the up-and-coming unemployed vandals in our town, both have contrived to take a particular dislike to images of our Mr Kelly,  blowing him out of the picture you could say. It is amusing how health and safety and litter laws go out the window, for all political party’s, when the old election poster has to be erected.

So why do we need posters I often ask myself, and I have come up with the conclusion that it is to refresh our memories in identifying those whom we may support, because we haven’t seen them for the past 3 years and, God willing, won’t see them again for 5 years more.

On the topic of the erection of posters Mr Kelly has topped the pole, well he has topped the poll before. No I am not referring to European Elections, he topped a Dail league table back in 2008, raking in €35,310 or 23pc of all political donations that year, according to the State Ethics watchdog, who knows about these things.

His many donors included his New York-based PR guru brother, Declan Kelly, as well as the PR firm he originally set up, Financial Dynamics. The then senator Kelly, if we believe the press reports, also returned €5,000 to donors, as their amounts exceeded legal limits. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern merely declared €19,000 that same year. The then Labour spokesperson on finance, Mr Kelly, said that he did not know how many billboard adverts he had taken out, how much the billboards cost and said he did not know how much he had spent on his campaign to date, but said that all of his spending was in line with “normal business and election and spending practices“. His memory is worse than poor Bertie, memory loss is a virus endemic to Dail appointees.

Note all our TDs, Senators and MEPs are not allowed to accept foreign or anonymous donations worth over €127, and they cannot accept donations with a total value over €2,540 from the same person in the same year and just why they have this stupid regulation, I will never fully understand.

The Ireland South MEP was only elected to serve in Brussels in June 2009 and had vowed to serve a full term, but in a widely expected U-turn, it was announced by his Labour leader Eamon Gilmore that Mr Kelly would be seeking a general election nomination and as expected the MEP went unchallenged for the party’s nomination in Tipperary North.

At the time of the European Election, Mr Kelly said it was his “firm intention to serve the full five years as an MEP if elected“. He made that pledge after Fine Gael accused him of using the European Parliament as a “PR exercise” to raise his profile for a future Dail campaign. Mr Kelly however insists his decision to run in the General Election has not been an easy one and the announcement of this election has placed great strain on him to change his mind, and it shows in the facial lines evident on his election posters.

Hundreds of constituents, he says, have been asking him if he planned on running in the imminent election and he denied his U-turn on serving out a full term in Brussels will be anyway damaging to his future prospects. “I don’t think there’s any chance of that. I will be speaking directly to people in Tipperary North in the next couple of days. . . I’m very closely knitted into North Tipperary. I think I’ve a very good relationship with them,” he states.

Still I believe Mr Kelly may have ‘dropped a stitch’ and his best chance of election is possibly by using posters, certainly his use of Twitter in the past will not work to his benefit.  His ‘Tweet,’ (check here,) did not demonstrate to me any great  respect for the ‘working class’ and the ‘less well off in our society’, whom the Labour Party claim to defend and whom Mr Kelly wishes to now publicly represent.

Our readers may not know this but the Labour Party was founded in 1912 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, by James Connolly, James Larkin and William O’Brien. It is the oldest political party in Ireland and the only one which pre-dates independence. It’s founders believed that for ordinary ‘Joe Soaps’ to shape society, they needed a political party that was committed to serving their needs in creating a fair society. James Connolly said “The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave,” forgive me, but where would he have placed the ‘Pikey’ in that great order of things.

I am at pains to point out of course that Mr Kelly did issue an apology stating his “account had been compromised.” How I do not know, as he appears not to Tweet any more, but maybe he has no access to ‘Broadband’. Certainly his constituents over around Timoney, Roscrea, have no proper access to a basic reliable telephone system.