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MEP NESSA CHILDERS has said that she would have resigned from the Labour parliamentary party over the Budget last December had she been in the Dáil.
The MEP for Ireland East levelled strongly-worded criticism at the party and its actions in government in a statement announcing her resignation yesterday and she told TheJournal.ie that her resignation is partly about trying to save the party and the people it represents.
“This is about the people we have potentially abandoned, the Irish people that are vulnerable, the people we should be representing,” she said.
“So my intention is to partly try and save the Labour Party which may or may not be possible, but it’s also to save the people that we’re representing and we may be the only hope that they have.”
Childers said there is a disconnect between ministers in government and the ordinary rank-and-file members of the party and said that talk of communication between both groups was not the issue.
She said: “There is all this talk about communications not being right but what I think about that is very simple, you can’t get communications right when it is the wrong thing you are communicating.”
Childers joins one senator and five TDs including party chairman Colm Keaveney in having left the parliamentary party since it went into government two years ago but she said she did not believe she is a dissident.
“The idea that somebody is a dissident has to be examined,” Childers said. “I may be what you would call a dissident in terms of the raw political power inside the Dáil and the parliamentary party but in terms of the beliefs, I don’t believe I am a dissident.”
A number of Childers’ colleagues in the parliamentary party yesterday expressed disappointment with her decision to resign although many were not surprised. One Labour TD described Childers as a “fair-weather friend” of the party.
Having resigned Childers will today address a meeting of the Campaign for Labour Policies (CLP) group in the Gresham Hotel in Dublin.
CLP was set up last year in response to a belief among some Labour members that the leadership was ignoring its core values and policies in the coalition with Fine Gael.
“We very much feel we are reflective of a huge swathe of Labour voters… You can see that in Meath East by-election,” CLP member Paul Dillon told TheJournal.ie this week.
He said there needed to be “serious intervention to promote policies that are Labour particularly around taxation and job creation and protecting services”.
Hundreds of Labour party members are expected to attend the event although it is not clear if any of the parliamentary party will attend. Patrick Nulty, who lost the Labour whip after the 2011 Budget, will be in attendance.
Dublin Mid-West TD Joanna Tuffy said she could not attend because of other commitments but said that she welcomed the establishment of the group as Labour “is a broad church”.
Haven’t bought a newspaper in 6 months. Why ? News freely available online at any time night or day.
Without agendas. Good day for democracy when print media is gone.
The problem with the web is that it does facilitate an insular viewpoint. In the States, Democrats read the left leaning Huff Post & Republicans read the right orientated Drudge report. People aren’t exposed to opposing viewpoints like they would be in a national newspaper so they think everyone agrees with their worldview and become more extremist. If the Journal was your only source of news you could be excused for thinking Ireland is a quasi-communist left wing nirvana, for example. Full of hippies with long hair.
Free news won’t be around for ever though.
Sure. What’s the point in buying a hard copy. Electronic copies are user and environmental friendly!
Sunday Independent numbers rising???
That explains the Fianna Fáil poll rise so.
It’s an awful rag. Who buys it? Will anyone here admit to it?
I buy it on rare occasion but its a shadow of its former self.
I blame thejournal.ie
Haven’t bought a paper for years. The amount of web-based info is truly staggering. I
Nor have I but I actually nearly bought the local rag (Wicklow People) today.
The Journal is my daily paper these days
It’s genuinely depressing to see the tabloidisation of what was once a great national institution, the Sunday Independent yielding a dividend for INM.
I stopped buying the Sunday Independent due to Denis O Brien s ownership. I rarely listen to Newstalk or Today FM for same reason. The control of public opinion by banking / Bilderberg interests is sickening. Not everyone has access to alternative news sources like the Journal – where the commentary is more informative than the article on many occasions.
Sir anto o’reilly was just as annoying.
I should add that it’s equally depressing to see an Ireland hating paper like middle England’s Mail On Sunday getting nearly 100,000 readers. Shame on you all.
Indeed a great ‘national institution’ ….great centenary coming up this year….How W.Martin Murphy and his organ helped, in a very significant way to defeat Jim Larkin in the lockout of 1913 and put us back in our place. Look forward to the celebrations!!
The Irish Times must be particularly disappointed with their -8% decrease, especially when you considered all the money they spent (The story of why!) on marketing and the redesign of the newspaper.
It probably means that more people are reading newspapers online. It’s been quite a while since i bought a newspaper , most information can easily be accessed on line through iPhone or laptop.
newspapers are ink on dead trees….
Turning forests into lies.
Newspapers will not last much longer.
They remind me of that blow up doll I got when I was sixteen, full of glamour and promise but in reality fake, grubby and ultimately disappointing.
:(
We need to start a fund to help out the struggling Denis O Brian.
“The man ( or woman ) who reads no newspapers at all is better educated than the man who does” – Thomas Jefferson. Can apply that to the tv media as well. Good riddance.
The papers are €1.80 per day & €2.80 at the weekends… At least the IRISH TIMES is… I just can’t afford it anymore… I loved the feeling of sitting down with a coffee/tea and physically reading the paper..but @ €14.60 p/w? I can think of other things to do with that now…. BILLS!!!
Good, the sooner the INM shower with their FF mouthpiece the sindo are gone the better.
It’s gas. For years the Indo was viewed as a FG paper.
Majority of Irish Papers are just pr spin for business lobby and government propaganda like an Irish Pravda
Not surprising that figures are falling.
I always thought newspapers were good value but the standard of writing and editorialship has declined a great deal. I am turned off when I read articles by journalists like Niam Horan in Sindo or reading the latest about some model and her relationships. Totally boring stuff.
The Examiner is good quality the odd time I have read it but the size of it is a big turn off.
Like many I find it easier to use my phone now in a cafe or around the house.
With free wifi now available across Dublin city centre and free wifi being rolled out on the buses, these falling figures are no surprise. Like the music industry, the newspaper industry is being very slow to adjust to the new methods of accessing news.
The problem is that there is still a lot of money in selling paper or music on plastic. A newspaper can put all of it’s output on the web but the ad revenue is only a fraction what the daily paper will make. So really the old world is, at the moment at least, subsidising the new media world. I think we’ll be seeing more pay walls.
I agree with you to some extent but it is also true in saying that currently the newspapers are working in an unsustainable way. Most of the papers in the state have mountains of debt in their name.
All the good papers are gone, The Irish Press, Ireland on Sunday, Sunday Tribune..
A lot of folk haven taken to doing a Sunday shop in Dunnes buying the paper whilst there . Noticed only the Sindo available there on Sunday. Are other supermarkets contractually obligated in the same way or is there more choice elsewhere? Not that I’d read that rag. Used to enjoy the Times on a Sunday like a poster above but the €2.80 can be better spent now when every cent matters.
I had a Playboy subscription for that very reason ;)
Dunnes Threw out most of the papers because they wanted better ‘terms’. That’s a euphemism for ‘lube up’ – we what more money!
They didn’t throw any of the Indo titles in the skip, funny that. But not so as well, when you cant get a selection of papers on Sunday
Bump….
“The man ( or woman ) who reads no newspapers at all is better educated than the man who does” – Thomas Jefferson. Can apply that to the tv media as well. Good riddance.
Martin – are you and Derek the same person? Lol! Exact same post!
Never bought newspapers have always used the Web since I got on the net in the mid 90s.
Gave up buying magazines as I found I’d also get the info sooner, an example is focus magazine… By the time you read something in it it’s 2-3s weeks old
I get my news on Google News. It has a wide variety of viewpoints. I then make my decision.
Gave up Sunday Newspapers over 10 years ago, when reading another article about CJH I inadvertently found myself checking the date to see if I had bought the previous weeks edition by mistake, I hadn’t! Gave up the IT on Xmas eve when the price went up to 2euro. The increase only applied to the ROI with no increase for their UK customers? Imagine in a dwindling market and the worse recession in generations they increase the price? Like the publicans they seem to think that the Law of Diminishing Returns did not apply to them. Get all my news word wide on line via laptop and tablet.
Where are you going with the Sunday Indo figures?
Dennis, Is that you…..!!!
They are down 5% and heading south with the rest of the gang
http://www.ilevel.ie/media-blog/print/102468-sunday-newspapers-abc-july-dec-2012
C
It’s all the fault of thejournal.ie
meh. The Sunday Sport was great for the articles too :)
How’s the farmers journal doing ?
I buy the paper on the odd occasion however today for instance got a link on face book to an article and continued reading so I agree totally there is a lot of web based news only issue is what’s correct and what’s not
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