Peoples Movement

[youngdan]

Having a quick gander at this group and it looks like it deserves a closer look.

Has it come to anything. It appears to have some committed people anyway

[Scolaire Bocht]

Well I am proud of all the groups that campaigned against Lisbon, and yes absolutely there are many good people and policies in the People's Movement. But to be honest Dan they are all rather small and its always a danger that they are too small to keep momentum going after the referendum. But in fact I was speaking to the General Secreatry of the Movement a few weeks ago and he was confident it would pull through .e.g. they organised a small protest in Kildare. Also the Soverign Independent newspaper is still going strong, which the truth campaigners bring out and which is quite good really. Then Cóir have a regular newsletter etc but I dont know what else they are doing.

I really hope people will keep going because there is nothing to look forward to among the established parties, even the small ones are all controlled as people discovered with the Green Party. I am attaching a recent newsletter from the Peoples Movement so you can get a flavour of it.

If you want to know the atmosphere on the ground during the campaign among the different groups I would characterise it thus:

Cóir is the largest group and - and I genuinely mean no offence by this - a lot of their membership are ex Fianna Fail. They tend to be very active - even if. like all the groups, they are actually small - gutsy, ignoring all the abuse they get, and are well organised and very effective. However, for me anyway, they are a bit like Fianna Fail in that they act like a secretive group, not particularly open and a bit suspicious of outsiders, sometimes anyway. Obviously they take a critical view of the - blatently - anti-Catholic bias of the Irish media, while the other groups ignore that issue, mostly anyway.

The People's Movement contains a curious mixture to be honest. There are not a few ex, or current, Fine Gael members, many of whem would take a broadly 'ring wing' approach - for the want of a better phrase -, ex Green party members - obviously Patricia McKenna had a lot of support in the Green Party - and 'extreme' left wing activists, again if you will excuse the generalisations. So in a way it could generate more interesting debates than most other parties or groups but in truth it just isn't large or active enough to get a real debate going, yet anyway. But in the meantime with that kind of confusing membership it is much more of an open house easy going group, a more open old style Fine Gael atmosphere I think.

The Truth Coalition Ireland has clearly a large enough membership, considering the many good writers it has for its newspaper and its success in distributing it, but on the ground it is hard to track them down!lol. Maybe to be honest it is difficult to publicly identify with the 'conspiracy theory' atmosphere of their newspaper, I guess they could be shy about those issues even though I happen to think that there is more truth in that view that in any left or right wing approach. I also don't know where their funding comes from etc, and again I am not casting aspersions by that, in fact their newspaper makes a great read.

So thats it anyway, and somehow out of that Irish patriots will have to carve out a genuine national movement!

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