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SENATOR AVERIL POWER has announced she is leaving Fianna Fáil.
She made the announcement this afternoon at Leinster House.
Power was elected to the Seanad in 2011, where she was the party’s spokesperson on education and skills.
She will serve out the remainder of her term as an independent Senator and said he has “no intention” of joining another political party.
The news will come as a blow to Fianna Fáil, who had received a boost over the weekend with Bobby Aylward winning the Carlow-Kilkenny by-election.
Power was one of the favourites to be chosen as Fianna Fáil’s general election candidate in Dublin Bay North, where she would have faced competition from former minister Seán Haughey, and councillors Deirdre Heney and Tom Brabazon.
She unsuccessfully contested the 2011 general election in the Dublin North–East constituency.
The senator has clashed with party leader Micheál Martin in the past over the lack of female representation in Fianna Fáil.
In her announcement, Power said the party ”lacks vision, courage and leadership”, describing Martin as “a leader without any followers”.
Power was extremely critical of the party, saying it “doesn’t know what it stands for and lacks credible policies on most major issues” and “is afraid of taking clear positions in key debates for fear of losing support”.
She said Martin’s frontbench “are all pulling in different directions and prioritising their personal political success over the needs of the party and the country”.
Power said the party is “simply not fit for government”.
The senator was particularly active in campaigning for a Yes vote in the same-sex marriage referendum.
She said the Fianna Fáil’s approach to the referendum was cowardly and cynical, and symbolises “everything that is wrong with the party”.
Power told reporters:
I know I would have a strong chance of being elected for Fianna Fáil in the next election. But I have come to the conclusion that I don’t want to be a Fianna Fáil TD. I want to be true to myself and have the courage to walk away from the party.
I am therefore resigning from Fianna Fáil, effective immediately.
I am doing so with a heavy heart as I have many good friends in the party. I am also immensely grateful to everybody who has supported me over the last few years.
It was not an easy decision to make but I am convinced it is the right thing to do.
Having lost my faith in Fianna Fáil, I cannot in good conscience knock on doors in Dublin Bay North and ask people to vote for the party. In my view, they are simply not fit for government.
https://vine.co/v/eqEgzalq9Xt
During her time in the Seanad, Power has co-sponsored a bill that proposes giving adoptees greater identity rights, such as access to their birth cert, and proposed a motion to recognise the State of Palestine.
Power has removed all references to Fianna Fáil from her Twitter bio, and her website is down. She is married to Irish Independent editor Fionnan Sheahan.
Fianna Fáil Castlebar councillor Lisa Chambers said the timing of Power’s announcement is “opportunistic and is clearly the start of her [general election] campaign”.
Chambers said Power’s decision to not tell other people in the party beforehand was “a poor way to treat your colleagues”.
However, she said she was “upset to see her go” as “she was a great advocate for women in the party”.
- with reporting from Hugh O’Connell
Originally published: 12pm
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Heard them on the radio yesterday complaining that they haven’t got a pay rise in 8 years. Well guess what most people haven’t. If I was given an 8% pay rise over the next 2 years I’d take hand and all
You should join a union then mickmc. Solidarity with bus drivers, the Luas drivers, the Tesco and Cadbury workers, the 999 operators, the nurses, the teachers and all workers struggling to obtain a greater share of the wealth which we create. As the data clearly shows, the trend over the past few decades has been overwhelmingly in the opposite direction with greater and greater wealth accumulating to capital owners and less and less to the workers. This has disastrous consequences for society and it’s long past time we reversed the rotten system which sees 62 individuals now holding the same wealth as the poorest half of the globes population, 3500 million people.
I was in a union once. Paid my sub’s for 6 years. When there was a meeting with management Siptu sent out the most useless sods god ever invented. Management wiped the floor with him. Our shop Stewart did all the dealing after that with him sitting in the background like a little school boy.
Maybe they are right then to move it in order to get that pay rise instead of moaning about no pay rise on the Journal…
@paul Please speak for yourself,
you should have picked a better shop steward
Ah Wally, You cant beat a bit of copy and paste first thing at the morning :-)
The faster we have self drive public transport the better.
along with a totally private health system, old gabby?
In fairness Mickmc it sounds like you should look at a new job…unless you pulling 6 figures and a raise impossible.
Billy, bus drivers are not creators of wealth. They work in a subsidised loss-making industry. You say to joina union but most people can’t do what transport workers do. If we demand more than our employers can afford or are willing to part with, our employers go out of business and we lose our jobs. If we want more money, we have to provide more value. There’s a limit to how well somebody can drive a bus, and thus, necessarily, a (quite low) limit to how much one can earn from doing so in a free market.
So your shop steward did a good job then mickmc? Most workers benefit from the battles won by earlier unions. 40 hour week, minimum wage, workplace health and safety etc etc etc. The cause of the majority working class is only ever advanced significantly and sustainably through collective action, solidarity and struggle against the capitalist system. The lives of the majority are only bearable because of the many battles fought and won by the earlier socialists and unions. None of these concessions to the working class were willingly gifted by capital but we’re fought and won over centuries of socialist struggle.
Derek,
The public transport system is a form of real wealth as the 400k commuters who use Dublin Bus daily will understand. And it’s not mean to be a profit making enterprise, it’s a public service which is a collectively held resource.
And the fact that a public transport system is loss making in monetary terms should not matter in the slightest because at a macro government/central bank level money is instantly available to those entities issue the currency. They don’t need the public transport system to generate money.
It’s important to differentiate between money and real wealth/ resources. Money is how we measure wealth and also a claim on society’s resources. Our fiat currency money is created (and deleted) at will on the computer keyboards of the world’s commercial and central banks. At a macro level there can never be a shortage of a fiat floating currency like the Euro, sterling dollar etc.
In contrast to the instant availability of money, the real wealth of goods and services that we all depend on (including the transport network) is created by the labour and skill of the working class from the raw material of the planet. Everything from the food in our bellies to the clothes on our backs right up to the most sophisticated technology is made by the workers.
Money is a claim on that real wealth produced by the working class and this is where money derives it’s power. The capitalist system peddles the illusion that there is a shortage of money (balance the books, reduce the deficit, live within your means etc) in order to oppress and control the working class who are the real creators of wealth.
@prouesse – no not at all.. what is the correlation between driverless public transport and private healthcare?
Every boss in this country says the same thing. My company is running at a loss and we can’t afford to raise wages. Then they drive their new BMWs home to their mansions and relax with a nice Cuban and a glass of champers. Of course they are telling the truth. They are pillars of the community and have great respect for their workers. Sure they do.
Billy, thanks for the warmed-up Marxism 101.
I’m not denying that public transport is a valuable service, or even that it should be subsidised. What I object to is the idea that those of us who actually have to produce more value to get more money should pay for those who do not. This is surely something you can get on board with.
I, as a skilled labourer, a real creator of wealth, can earn in proportion to the level of my skills and the quantity of my labour. If I want to earn more, I will have to learn more or do more. I will have to create more value. I can’t keep creating the same amount of value and expect to earn ever more money.
Bus drivers see things differently. They want to do the same job to the same level but be paid ever more for it. As much as you think this can be done by printing more money, the reality is that it comes from bus users and from taxpayers.
If all Dublin Bus drivers were suddenly wiped out, do you think there would be a shortage of applicants for their jobs? Do you think people with all the necessary skills to drive and press buttons would stick their noses up at the paltry conditions Dublin Bus is offering? Or do you think there would be hundreds of applications for each available job?
Dublin Bus drivers can demand such high salaries not because they are irreplacable creators of wealth but because they have formed a powerful cartel that is able to hold the city to ransom.
@Billy. The shop steward did. I wasn’t paying him my sub’s every week. We were paying Siptu who were happy to take our money but didn’t want to do anything in return. They’re only interested in the big companies where they can keep themselves in the headlines.
@Tuot Tuot. Thanks for your concern but I’m happy enough where I am. I’m on reasonable good money. Probably a bit above the industrial norm for my profession but that not down to any unions, that down to hard work and a proven track record over many years.
Derek,
What you’re advocating is that all workers stay isolated and disorganized so that capital can exploit them to the maximum possible degree. Worker’s organizations (unions) are the antidote to that exploitation.
And you’re not paying for the Dublin bus drivers. Money is never a constraint at a macro level as explained. It’s just a tool to measure and allocate the real resources that society has created.
What you’re really paying for is your boss’s profits, through your labour. Capitalist enterprise will not create a single job or produce a single product or service without the expectation of that profit. Therefore capital only ever employs labour in order to exploit it to a greater or lesser degree. The sole objective of capitalist enterprise is the accumulation of profit and that profit is generated by the workers in the excess value they create over and above their wages. That is the essence of capitalism and it’s inherently exploitative. That profit is maximized by paying labour as little as possible and working people as hard as possible. This is the class divide and why the interests of the classes are always opposing.
So labour never receives the full value of the wealth it has created and over time this inevitably leads to the vast inequality with the majority labour class working to enrich an obscenely wealthy oligarchy. In addition, capital rents out its accumulated assets (e.g. property) back to the working class garnering further profit for itself while producing nothing.
We can see the logical result of this system as in the earlier example where the 62 richest individuals on the planet now hold the same wealth as 3500 million people, the poorest half of the globe’s population many of whom starve to death or survive in abject poverty. None of this in inevitable. It’s the inevitable result of the dominant socio economic model which will ultimately have to be replaced by a system which gears economic activity to meeting peoples’ needs if we want to improve the conditions for the vast majority of humanity.
@old gabby
Your point of view is the correlation.
Billy, I’m not suggesting that workers shouldn’t organise, merely that the only reason this particular group of workers is in a position to make demands is because they are part of a powerful cartel who can hold the city to ransom.
They are not up against a fat cat businessman who must make the choice between a smaller profit margin and going out of business. They are fighting the average worker who, to earn the paltry share of the wealth they create, must at the very least turn up for work. For some, the cost of a taxi will wipe out anything they can earn that day. (Incidentally, are taxi drivers scabs, capitalist profit-mongers or organised wealth creators?)
I accept that your goal is the complete collapse of society and that this is the reason you support the bus drivers but for those of us who would like civilisation to continue (if, ideally, somewhat modified) the demands of these drivers are absurd.
What wealth? We’re still borrowing money to pay for current expenditure. Yes, it’s wrong that so few control so much wealth, but the bus drivers aren’t going to get their pay rise from those 62 people, it’s the taxpayer that’ll be left with the bill, or else we’ll have to increase government borrowing even more, saddling our children with a huge debt to be repaid
You write a lot of words without knowing what they really mean. How can money measure wealth if it is limitless? If the central banks create a tonne of money they just cause inflation and asset bubbles because funds get misallocated when market effiiciencies are interfered with. The fact that Dublin Bus is loss making means that it is inefficient and the govt is subsidising those inefficiencies with real wealth ectracted from elsewhere in the economy.
I had to explain why we can’t just print more money to my 11 year old niece recently, at least she has an excuse for being simple minded , she is a child , what is your excuse Billy ?
What about the guards ?
You support them too
It’s not Dublin bus that are putting unnecessary inconvenience on us. Stop trying to shift the blame SIPTU.
How is it unnecessary? The fact DB will let the strike go ahead shows how little they think of their staff and the general public. I’m fully behind the drivers, got myself a nice push bike on done deal for the strike.
Yeah, this is rich all right. The unions think it’s okay to have THREE 48-hour stoppages affecting all commuters who use the buses for work, school, etc. Now they’re crying ‘unfair’ because of a three hour break in service from 9 pm onwards, when it’ll mostly only affect socialising. What a shower of hypocrites and muppets.
Only effect socialising? ?,, so shift workers and late workers don’t count . DB are playing the propaganda game again and where is Mr Late Late shane Ross in all of this ? Silent as usual only willing to mouthpiece on portfolios not his
I said MOSTLY. Of course some shift workers and others in things like the service industry will be affected. But in nowhere near the same numbers as the regular working hours people and students will be over the following 48 hours. Stop being so blinkered, open your eyes, and read what was actually written.
Alan I totally agree with you, jumparoo is obviously home as snug as a bug after his/ her half five finish to realise that half the city actually work past nine !!!!!
so there’ll be a few days without buses, stop crying like a little baby
“Half the city work past nine”. Where is that statistic from?
This union is a joke BLAME BLAME BLAME EVERYONE ELSE BUT US Your union is going on strike they want busses back in their garages safely and now the company at fault JOKE
HI HOW ARE YOU
I knew since the luas strike it would come to this. Thanks Luas drivers. You share of f~~k who started this. Now me with hundreds of commuters are going to be down wages. I wonder will Wally has something to say about this. he’s been on every comment section about the Luas strike.
so the bus drivers showed be cowed by the managers and give up their right to agitate so you won’t have to make alternative travel arrangements? stop navel gazing.
@gunnarsahn, while the drivers absolutely have the right to go on strike, they’re not entitled to sympathy from the public that is being inconvenienced by their action, and let’s face it, the public transport on the whole is an absolute shambles, not only in Dublin, but Ireland wide, which is not the driver’s fault, but the fault of shortsighted politicians and management, but the drivers will have to bear the anger of the public.
And frankly, i don’t understand someone who turns down an offered pay rise only to go on strike for twice as much as has been offered, because they feel like it.
Privatize Dublin Bus now……
So dublin bus workers are complaining because luas drivers got a raise and want the same… hummmmmm wonder what would happen if I told my boss the restaurant down the road had given their staff a rose n I wanted the same, short answer is I’d be told to drop my cv down to them as I wasn’t getting it off them !!!
He might think you’re hitting on him.
Try look at the facts before trying to compare apples and oranges. DB staff had been approved a 6% rise in 2007/8 but DB pulled this. DB staff have contributed 4 different major productivity deals which included earnings reductions and increased workloads WITHOUT increase in earnings to bring the company back into profit, which we succeeded only for the government to reduce subvention again and again and the NTA taking more than 2 million from the profits of DB. Staff are not Luas they are DB and are only seeking what is fair and due from all the productivity deals already given.
Paul you need to stand up for yourself in your workplace a bit more. stop letting your boss walk on you like a doormat.
In which week did DB make a profit?
2013/14/15
Rickshaw workers out next !
Could the journal do it’s research, drivers, clerical, maintenance and inspectors are taking industrial action, so kindly don’t blame the drivers, but when did doing research ever stop the journal, twitter posts are all that count on this site
its actually page-views and ad revenue
Drivers are taking industrial action so don’t blame the drivers. Okay.
If you want more money, put the effort in and get an education. You get paid for doing what the rest of us do getting to work….drive. With a tax payer funded guaranteed pension, you’re already overpaid.
Plenty of staff in Dublin Bus have an education I’m sure, no???
I am a tax payer and my pension ,shit as it will be is funded by me not the government purse. Also I have an education 3rd level, I have also given service to this country as a member of the DF before I joined DB. While you sit in your judgemental B licence vehicle as I presume single occupant car look to your left and watch the vehicles carrying up to 90 passengers at a go negotiating the road systems. You do not do what public /private transport providers do you just drive.
Lets be honest here, everyone is talking about Dublin Bus and the Unions but everybody appears to be ignoring the huge elephant in the room – the disgraceful level of subvention by The State in our Public Transport system. This subvention has been been regularly cut back since 2008! Ireland in fact has one of the lowest if not THE LOWEST subsidy in the EU for public transport! If we look to countries in Europe who we are always pointing out have “best practice” for this that and the other we can see that their subventions are 10 to 20 times higher than that of Ireland’s! Public Transport is supposed to be for the Citizens of the whole State not just for Citizens in selected areas of it! The profitable sections of Public Transport along with State subvention are supposed to subsidize the non profitable areas while maintaining a coordinated practical Public Transport across the whole country! Motorists in this country are also been crucified for cars that are not a luxury but a necessity due to the lack of proper Public Transport. Not a great little country for Public Transport!
@warthog, this report seems to indicate state subvention has actually increased, but the biggest contributor to cost both at Dublin Bus and Bus Eireann are the wages
Larissa…Here you are from the Irish Times this morning:
Two sources
Dublin Bus in essence receives its money from two sources; passenger fares and exchequer funding. Unions say that in most European countries this ratio is about 50:50, but in Dublin Bus 75 per cent of revenue comes from fares.
The level of State funding has fallen from €64 million in 2013 to €57.7 million last year. However, the company has benefitted from a growing economy and falling fuel costs. It recorded profits of over €11million in 2014 and €10.3 million last year.
Thank you, that clears things up
Good fight for the wages you are owed the days of companies bullying employees with unfair wages and conditions need to be halted. The luas drivers were owed that pay simple as, privatise Dublin Bus really maybe get Apple to take it over…..
There is 13 billion Rotten Apple money that is unneeded according to government. I think the DB pay rise can be afforded.
Dumbest comment so far
Bunch of greedy ignorant w@nkers. There was not a person in this country that couldn’t see this coming when the Luas drivers got their undeserved raise. Now the public transportation will be held hostage yet again…
In 2011 they earned 39,900 after ten years service. 4th highest anong 75 cities including berlin, london etc.i think that is more than enough considering they require no actial qualifications
Really Karen, iv to renew my license every 5 years with full medical, must complete a CPC course each year and I’m continually updating my driving skills through in house training syllabus. Compare cost of living to each country and then see how the figures stack up.
Compare the cost of living in those other 75 cities. Dublin is very expensive – do you expect people to live on fresh air pet?
Perfect timing with the beginning of operation transformation. Everyone walk or run to work. It will add years to your life.
Innocent kids are been slaughtered in Syria.
Negating everything else?
I’ve to drive into Dublin myself on Friday. I imagine there’ll be more cars than usual on the road, because of the strike. What’s the story with driving in bus lanes on a day when there’s not actually any buses?
We’re a city with 24 hour bus lanes although buses dont run 24 hours, so I cant imagine them opening the bus lanes over the strike period, even though they probably should
The bus lanes won’t be open to private cars according to this piece
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-driver-action-35028288.html
Bus lanes should be open to vehicles with three or more occupants….
Just drive in the bus lanes. Dint be looking for permission.
If you’re stopped, just sing “Nee Naw” so people know you’re driving an ambulance, be grand.
Bus Lanes are used by more than just Dublin Bus, hence they won’t be open. Air Coach, Bus Eireann, Mortons, Cyclists etc.
“If you’re stopped, just sing “Nee Naw” so people know you’re driving an ambulance, be grand.”
God, you’re an idiot!
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