Amongst the many skin crawlingly sycophantic moments in George Soros’s propaganda film ‘The 8th’, the most cringe was the image of Micheal Martin at the end, as the Tenochtitlan celebration of sacrificing babies unfurled around him. Martin desperately attempts to get on camera to thank a major pro abortion campaigner for her role, telling her ‘congratulations’ in a degrading ploy for airtime and approval totally unbefitting a major party leader.
Prior to the Referendum on the 8th Amendment in 2018, Fianna Fail had been a safe haven for prolife voters.
In a bombshell delivered only months before the vote, Martin came out as staunchly for removing the right to life of unborn children in Ireland. This decision has led to deaths of 13,000 children since and the collapse of Ireland’s birth rate by 25%.
His betrayal was not to be the last from the party, when the Dail vote was taken later that year, many ‘prolife’ Fianna Fail TDs chose to either abstain or to actually vote to make sure that babies born alive during abortion were left to die on tables, that sex selective abortions could take place and so that disabled children could be aborted.
Since then, the party have managed to take power, but only by completely humiliating themselves in the process. They now have the office of Taoiseach, but have been repeatedly humiliated by their supposed coalition partners Fine Gael, who seem to be the tail wagging the dog. It seems increasingly unlikely that the party will have any meaningful future, having alienated its core base as well as any potential new or young voters.
According to the Irish Independent today, their solution to this is to double down on their support for aborting Irish babies.
This is a particularly bizarre solution given the fact that Fianna Fail ran an overtly pro abortion candidate in Dublin Bay South, the most pro abortion area in Ireland, and came out with a dismal 4.6 percent of the vote. By contrast, prolife candidate Mairead Toibin of Aontu managed 2.8% in the same vote, without a pro abortion electorate to work with and without the same level of media exposure as the pro abortion Fianna Fail candidate.
In fact, Fianna Fail’s most ardent supporters of Repealing the 8th Amendment were all uniformly rejected by voters post Referendum. This included Lisa Chambers, who infamously chided abortion regret as a ‘makey up thing’ that ‘does not exist’.
Chambers also strangely referred to herself as ‘prolife’ despite campaigning to remove the only legal safeguard to the rights of human beings to be born in Ireland.
Rather than listening to voters who rejected her, Fianna Fail decided to instead stick with Chambers and handed her a seat in the Seanad.
The party decided to rebuke voters by doing the same with Fiona O’Loughlin, another individual who supported Repeal but who had voters desert her for doing so.
Fianna Fail could have taken stock after the last election and realised that the only energy of note in the party was from the prolife wing, even from those were only nominally so. Instead, they have chosen to focus on supporting abortion even more and attacking Catholic countries like Poland and Hungary in crazed diatribes against their pro family policies.
Their decision to pursue the anti baby vote even further is evidence of how tired and obsolete of a party they have become. If people want pro abortion candidates, they will vote for genuine ones, not those seeking it for the sake of votes and being unashamed in doing so. The experience in the recent Dublin Bay South election should be a warning sign to them, they are not part of the pro abortion lobby and they will never be accepted as such. A number of their TDs would have gotten over the line and kept their seats at the last election were it not for the many that had been alienated by their pursuit of the pro abortion vote instead.
Many Catholics still vote for Fianna Fail for reasons of family, locality and even because they perceive the party as friendly towards the faith. Some of its members, including Social Democrats founder Stephen Donnelly, who has gone on record as saying that the church ‘has a lot to answer for’.
Many members of Fianna Fail were particularly crass towards the church during the lockdown crisis when Mass was viciously singled out, with law enforcement arriving at the doors of churches during Easter, Gardai being used to question priests about single digits of extra mourners at funerals and shrines closed off during holy days. Donnelly was heavily criticised for a document which criminalised Mass, leading to Fr. PJ Hughes in Cavan having his town surrounded by state forces under the direction of Fianna Fail in a bid to stop the celebration of the Eucharist from taking place with a number of peoples present.
At the moment, the relationship between many Catholics and Fianna Fail is one of unrequited love, many people of faith (especially rural ones) think that Fianna Fail are their guys in the Dail, while Fianna Fail are mortified to be associated with them and prefer instead to court the ever elusive cosmopolitan vote.
Those few young people who are still left in Fianna Fail must ask themselves if the humiliation of their Dublin Bay South campaign is what they want to repeat at the next election but on a bigger scale. Sadly, the answer is probably a yes and those Catholics who continue to blindly allow Fianna Fail to take their voters for granted should consider the fact that loyalty works both ways.
Frank Duff discusses the life of Saint Columbanus.