back in 2006, 40 Afghani's occupied St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin demanding answers for their asylum claims. Michael D. Higgins showed up and spent hours with the occupiers and offered to represent them personally. I was there and saw him get a lot of stick for it.
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Oh Robinson was also a strong campaigner against the 8th amendment, which prohibited abortion and was recently appealed. She was against it *at the time*. This was not broadly popular.
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Big take-away: 30 years of Irish Presidents have been progressive in significant ways, supporters of the little guy, compassionate, and extremely popular in office.
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A not insignificant factor is how Irish elections work. We use a ranked system. This prevents "wasting" votes, discourages divisive two-partyism, and promotes broader sort of compromise position taking.
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Not one of those presidents was elected with a simple majority of first preference votes. Mary Robinson, widely regarded as our best president ever, didn't even a plurality of first preference votes!
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Instead they were elected based on "transfers": 2nd and 3rd preference votes from voters whose 1st and then 2nd choices were eliminated.
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We've had divisive candidates, Dana Scalon comes to mind, a former star (she sang for Ireland at the Eurovision) who ran on a platform of strong support for "traditional values". She got 2.9% of the vote.
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End of conversation
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