The gathering for US President Joe Biden at St. Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland, April 14, 2023 (RTE)

Trump Is Back. So Saddle Up, Folks. It’s Time to Save a Country.

I joined a panel on RTE Radio 1’s Brendan O’Connor Show on Sunday for a 50-minute review of two elections: last Tuesday’s in the US and the vote on November 29 in Ireland.

The other panellists are farmer and solicitor Aisling Meehan; Elaine Loughlin, Political Editor at the Irish Examiner; and Dan O’Brien of the Institute of International and European Affairs.

We begin with Ireland, where the country’s two oldest parties — Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil — are hoping to maintain their coalition while competing against each other for the largest number of seats in the Dáil. Sinn Fein will be hoping to break through for a share of power for the first time.

With Ireland in a strong economic position compared with the UK and other European countries, leading issues include housing, transport, health care, rural communities, and immigration.

In the UK, we have seen a breakdown in consensus politics to find a way forward, and we have seen the rise of the hard right.

So far, with the significant exception of immigration and the toxicity that some bring to the topic, there is a fairly healthy discussion here on the issues that matter to Irish voters on a day-to-day basis.

Then we deal with the fallout from the US, as I cut through the damage of hand-wringing and invective about Tuesday’s outcome.

This was not a surge for Trump. With his preying on anger, resentment, and fear, this was not a positive affirmation.

The Democrats failed to get out their own people on “What do you think we can do for you over the next four years?”

I examine why the Democrats, having put out proposals on key social and economic issues — some of them similar to those in Ireland — could not get them across in the US media environment.

The Democrats did not try hard enough to say to folks, “This is what you need to be voting on because it will be worse under Donald Trump. You will not have this prospect of a turnaround in the economy.”

And I knock back damaging hot takes — some from Democratic supporters — with fact-free invocations of “woke” and “cancel culture” that risk an abandonment of campaigns for civil rights.