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THOSE PESKY DUBLIN constituencies – they sure don’t like making up their minds.
But when they do, it happens in a flurry. Just when it looked like Dublin South Central might drag on for days, if not weeks, suddenly it was over. And the AAA-PBP’s Bríd Smith had triumphed.
The two candidates, after hours of sitting and waiting, at 5pm were suddenly called behind closed doors to view the result of the adjudicator.
When Smith, a trade union official, emerged moments later with fists raised the result was obvious. Cue jubilant pandemonium and a chorus of “the workers, united, we’ll never be defeated”.
“We’re in now, I’ve been elected, and we’re as big as Labour now and they’d better not forget it,” Smith said, all smiles after a situation that must have been tortuous. Her relief is understandable – before this Smith had contested four other elections since 1997 without success.
Fianna Fáil have said that water charges are a red-line issue – well they’d better bloody-well follow through on that.
We’ll be there, me and Richard (Boyd Barrett), we’ll be there to make sure they stick to that.
I promise to do my damnedest to represent you and if I don’t sure you can shoot me.
The situation was this: Smith had finished 35 votes ahead of Fianna Fáil councillor Catherine Ardagh two days ago in the race for the final spot in the four-seater after the 11th count.
Ardagh’s team came up with a block of 170 votes that they saw as being disputable.
The last few days have seen the adjudicator investigate those votes and come to a decision, which was arrived at this morning.
All day today however the South Central returning officer ran through every permutation of those votes to see if any could affect the result of the election. And there were a LOT of permutations.
And so we waited. And waited. And waited.
https://vine.co/v/igv5IZ3EYqY
“I’m just absolutely frazzled with this,” Smith earlier told TheJournal.ie.
I’m tired, emotional, angry, hopeful, optimistic… it changes all the time, this has just gone on so long.
Ardagh was here but was nowhere to be seen until the candidates’ were called behind closed doors. Smith meanwhile sat with her supporters waiting for the interminable process to end. Her stablemate Boyd Barrett was there in support, as was John Lyons, the AAA-PBP’s defeated candidate in Dublin Bay North.
For the longest time we suspected that this could go the legal route.
One source from the Ardagh camp, who were packing a barrister in the RDS, had suggested that they might be able to argue with the contentious votes that the initial quota was incorrectly calculated.
That would have necessitated a recalculation of all the elected candidates’ surpluses. And how long that would have taken to decide would have been impossible to know.
It wasn’t to be. Bríd Smith has finally been elected. She might say it was worth the wait.
It’s all because the pilots were trained using the metric system.
At least that’s what one idiot on fox news thinks.
Fox doesn’t do news it does fiction.
Their opinion poll graphics are the best, they always add up to more than 100%
Boganity.. Polls have a margin of error built in.. Usually up to + or – 5%.. So the total does not always equal 100.
Margin for error means the figures may be slightly understated for one outcome and over stated for another but the totals are never greater than 100%. However we’re talking about Fox News here, and these are their actual published outcomes presented in pie-charts of two recent polls where people where asked their opinions on an issue: agree 59% disagree 35% don’t know 26%, that’s a total of 120% and on voting intentions: 60% for Candidate A, 63% for Candidate B, 70% for Candidate C, that’s a total of 193%. I doubt whether the people who watch Fox would have been able to work out those totals in their heads.
It just shows again, that there are still major improvements to be made to equip planes with emergency technology, flying will never be 100% safe, and you’re statistically still more likely to be killed while travelling to and from the airport, unfortunately the statistics won’t help those poor people on board that plane.
I just hope they will quickly find out what happened and then take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening again.
My deepest sympathies for the families and friends of those lost in the plane.
Dead right, but as AF447 showed there are major issues with pilot training – when the instruments don’t give them reliable data, the pilots had no idea what to do.
Time to make ACARS mandatory for all airlines if their planes are equipped with it
@Alan. When they say that Air Asia ‘didn’t subscribe’ to it, does it mean they wouldn’t pay for the service or that they didn’t believe it offered an advantage to the running of the airline?
Changing altitude or course without permission in Indonesian airspace is quite common as it can take repeated requests to ATC, and up to 30 minutes for them to respond. In that time frame a crew has no choice if it means over shooting their destination or worse, ending up inside a a super cell thunder storm.
Flyin tomorow do not want to hear this
Don’t mean the article obviously just thoughts of what can happen
You’ve got a better chance of winning the top prize in the lottery several weeks in a row
Don’t mean to be blasé, but that doesn’t console the families (or victims) of all-too-common air disasters.
The odds against anyone connected with this disaster reading the comments in Journal.ie are pretty solid too.
a point to consider Malaysia would not sign up to the ttp. now all these events are happening heaping great pressure on them economically and internationally.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/bush-cheney-face-torture-and-war-crimes-charges-mock-trial
they also pushed for bush and others to be charged by the united nations.
have your say