Finally, Irish Politics enters the 21st Century

I’m thrilled.  Delighted, and thrilled.  Labour have decided to really take a radical step forward in the political use of the interweb in an Irish context.  Obviously, there has been some online campaigning going on in Ireland for years, with resources such as Politics.ie allowing debate, Elections Ireland providing all the stats and figures you’ll ever want, IrishElection.com and Slugger O’Toole providing opinion, and of course a list of bloggers such as Twenty and Mulley occasionally throwing their oars in on political topics.

But recently, the pace has risen somewhat.  The last few years have seen Labour begin to take the lead somewhat, with Eric Byrne, Liz McManus, Aodhán Ó’Riordán and Joanna Tuffy all starting to blog, and soon enough Ciarán Cuffe and Roderic O’Gorman of the Greens had followed suit.  Bebo was big during the election, though I’m inclined to think it was more of a desperate attempt by some FG politicians (in particular) to make themselves seem ‘down with the kids’.  And of course, we saw videos broadcast on the websites of all the major parties in the run-up to the election.

Since the election, the Greens have been slagged off by the Examiner for not updating their website, Lucinda Creighton had her blog hack by someone posting about Native American fables (great story, courtesy of the Sunday Tribune last week!), while Labour have gone from strength to strength.

We now regularly post videos from Dáil debates onto the frontpage of the website, and I’m delighted to see that the public comments have been enabled on most news stories posted to the site.  Our internal discussion board is now well up and running, with hundreds of members active in just a few months.  My only little remaining gripe has been that Labour Equality remain without a page of their own (unlike Labour Youth and Labour Women).

But what has happened this week has really been outstanding.  Labour Party Conference takes place in Wexford this weekend, with all debates streamed live on our own Ustream channel.  The same stream will also include Q&A sessions with party spokespeople, based on questions posted to the comments section of this page.  Key speeches will be uploaded to our YouTube site, while our Twitter, Flickr and blog will all be updated during the weekend, while the Labour site will see results of elections (ahem, such as the NEC!) posted, as well as virtual votes on some of the motions!

I’ve long been a fan of online campaigning, and I’m really thrilled we’ve finally started to completely embrace these new forms of media available to us.