New Year thoughts

I was in party headquarters the other week, looking over bits and pieces. There are fascinating reminders of the Christian Solidarity Party's history lying around there. Old copies of the glossy newsletters with colour photographs that the party sent out in 1996 and 1997. Piled up copies of the manifesto, in both English and Irish and bearing Dr. Casey's picture, that were brought out at about the same time. The text of the National Secretary's address at the 1997 Ard Fheis, in which he states that the party has been going from strength to strength, that newspapers and radio stations are always looking for opinions and interviews, that the Irish political landscape has been shaken by the CSP's rise. "They know we mean business" he told the assembled members, that day in 1997.

How far away that all seems now. Today, most people in Ireland hardly know what the CSP is. The phone in the office stays eerily silent. Even one of its senior members described the party as "largely moribund" in a newspaper article in September. No one gives us the ghost of a chance at election time.

Nevertheless, Party Soldier is optimistic, and that's not just because of the no longer quite full bottle of Montepulciano sitting at his elbow. There is no doubt that the majority of Irish people are fed up with European bureaucracy, of the soft treatment of criminals, of the dictatorship of political correctness, the increasing threat to Irish neutrality, and of the erosion of the traditional family. And it is equally obvious that the mainstream parties can offer them no relief from these things, so thoroughly have they sold out to the liberal agenda. The two parties in the Dáil commonly called "conservative" are not remotely conservative. The Labour party does not even pretend to have different policies from either of them. The only party in the Dáil that is genuinely, idealistically patriotic, Sinn Féin, is dominated on family issues by a liberal, feminist agenda that must alienate most Irish voters. There is a yawning gap on the Irish political spectrum that is crying out to be filled. We need a conservative, patriotic and social party. The Christian Solidarity is that party. It only needs people in order to succeed.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". It's been many years since I first heard those words by Franklin Roosevelt, and I always considered them a bit vague and woolly. (In the "Change you can believe in" league of wooliness, in fact.) But I realised recently that that's exactly what we in the CSP have most to fear: fear itself. Fear that people won't take us seriously. Fear that the might of Fianna Fáil can't be shaken. Fear that we'd be wasting our time. Fear that people will take our leaflets, crumple them up, drop them in the mud and vote for the other parties. This is an irrational fear, because we know that the people are on our side on so many things. We only have to reach them.

Yes, my friends, if we pull together 2009 will go down in history as the year of the breakthrough, the year the CSP burst on to the Irish political stage and got candidates elected. We will get Paul O'Loughlin elected to Dublin City Council in May. We will get pro-life, patriotic candidates elected to the European Parliament in that same month. Ireland will sit up and take notice. I sit here, sipping my wine and looking into the fire in the hearth, and I see things burning there. Not coal. Tired old liberal Ireland. Copies of the Irish Times, EU directives, the Lisbon Treaty, Fianna Fáil brochures. It's all going up! Join me, join us and help bring about the Christian Solidarity Party's breakthrough in 2009!

Happy New Year!