National Alliance.

Now, this is interesting. In recent times, we have seen various attempts to set up new parties which get to mysterious website stage, and then peter out. What’s interesting about this are the people involved, John McGuirk, Marc Coleman, and David Quinn, all significant figures in the public eye to various degrees.

What’s also interesting is the party platform: Economically clearly centre-right, political reformist, ethically-orientated, and socially, if not conservative, certainly Christian orientated, but not in an overtly John Charles McQuaid sort of way. It also would seem to have a clear anti-partitionist tone (although firmly democratic in its pursuit) and, maybe it’s me, but do I detect a teaspoon of euroscepticism? Given the protagonists, that’s hardly surprising. I have to say, it’s a very attractive package, and I could see it getting some traction.

There will be some who latch onto the David Quinn involvement and start waving around a “far-right Catholic” label, which I think would be unfair. Even social liberals like me should accept that what we are trying to build here is a society where devout religious conservatives and gay secular liberals (for example) can co-exist peacefully, and that there is no current serious party that openly stands up for the rights of the religious.

One other interesting point is the group’s specific rejection of members with racist or anti-semitic views. Could a pro-Israeli policy emerge later? Indeed, would it be such a bad thing for Irish voters to have that option?

This is a very interesting development.

The EU hairshirt may well be the best thing that ever happened to us.

And suddenly, The EU team arrived.

And suddenly, The EU team arrived.

The giant brain that is The Irish Times’s Dan O’Brien outlines here the sort of things that the EU may require of us. What’s interesting is that a lot of the things listed are things that a self-respecting reformist government should be doing anyway, crisis or no crisis, for the long term interest of the country. The fact that there is not a single party in the country that will have a manifesto even vaguely close to the radicalism of the EU reforms is telling about the state of us as a people. We’ll be forced to do this stuff, we’ll bitch and complain, and five years from now we’ll be handed back a country in a better state than the one we handed them. Or put it another way: What’s the bets that we’ll reverse hardly any of the reforms we will have been forced to accept?