How odd

Where did the Nationaal Alliance gettheir ideas?

Only learning about this now.

Where do the National Alliance get their ideas?

I stumbled across the national alliance last night, as I logged in to twitter to check on the latest online gossip. One of the first items to strike me was their logo. It looked familiar, as you can see above.

That typo isn’t mine by the way, “lastest” really is a word, apparently, according to one of the links on their site.

Behind the national alliance are Marc Coleman (economist and broadcaster), John McGuirk (former Libertas campaigner), Christopher O’Toole (Fianna Fáil acivist), and David Quinn (director of the Iona Institute).

I’ve downloaded a PDF containing their manifesto, and will write at greater length later. An initial scan reveals some worthy goals: electoral reform, more women in politics, an improved senate.

But there are some curious aspirations too. What is one to make of the assertion that “secular intolerance must be as strongly opposed as religious intolerance”?

How should we interpret the statement that “as a pluralist Christian nation, Ireland must allow the decent silent majority of religious voters to be heard.”

Or the call to fight “discrimination against the nuclear family”? What discrimination would that be exactly?

And just what do you make of “employment policies [which] balance Ireland’s eternal welcome to outsiders with a clear duty to Irish citizens”?

It all sounds vaguely familiar, somehow.

More later.

Published
Categorised as 200 Words

By Gerard Cunningham

Gerard Cunningham occupies his time working as a journalist, writer, sub-editor, blogger and podcaster, yet still finds himself underemployed.

3 comments

  1. You spotted the meaningless Iona gibberish.

    But the meat of the fun is in the Economic plan (complete with annexes with Roman Numeral designations). They might as well have been posted with coffee rings and bits of spilled pints still on them.

    Here they are, taking issue with the concept of progressive taxation: (All typos as they appear in the original)

    “This is also necessary to restore sanity to income tax profiles: A tax whereby the top 5 per cent of earners pay 48 per cent of revenues and where someone on 100,000 pays – despite of earning a multiple of four times their income – ten times more income tax than someone on 25,000 has lost touch with reality and must be recalibrated.”

    Again, this terrible maltreatment of the poor downtrodden wealthy citizen eats away at them. They even come up with a radical answer to lock in future govs, preventing them from making them pay into society, no matter what happens to it:

    “Our income belongs to us: We earned it and the state’s ability to tax us must be constitutionally limited and proscribed.”

  2. Like I said, I’ve barely scratched the surface on this. Hoping to get some time to review it later. For now, there’s a discussion over on politics.ie (http://www.politics.ie/culture-community/143415-national-alliance.html) which looks interesting. Marc Coleman (or at least, a poster claiming to be Coleman) has chipped in on the thread.

    This observation seems particularly pertinent: http://www.politics.ie/culture-community/143415-national-alliance-7.html#post3193635

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