What do we know about Ireland after the election? We know that there will be a new capitalist alliance in government. The most likely outcome is an  alliance led by Fine Gael, but even if by some miracle a "left" alliance was voted in all the parties have  campaigned in a fiscal space defined by the Troika.
 
The promises of jobs, services and prosperity will evaporate like snow off a ditch. The    fiscal space in which prosperity was to grow was a fiction between the government and Troika which was inflated yet again with a bit of hocus-pocus by Noonan. The European and global slump glaring from the screens of the world's stock exchanges is ignored. Buried in the   paperwork is the only strategy pursued by Irish  capital - a 6% corporation tax - a further subsidy to the 1% paid for in jobs wages and services for the majority.
 
Irish workers will have their revenge on Labour. With their fall goes the last pretence of being a working class party. They will become a right wing appendage of Fine Gael.
 
Sinn Fein will make significant gains. Are they a new workers party? The suggestion is laughable. The tale of capitulation and corruption in the North has led the Irish Times to appoint them a "safe pair of hands" for coalition government. Sinn Fein agree, saying that the banking debt will have the force of law with them.
 
What about Right2Change? It has fought an election campaign without setting up a party, without any sort of democratic debate and without a mention of a    socialist alternative. The union bureaucracy argue either for an austerity involving the return of Labour or one involving Sinn Fein. Workers need to repudiate  austerity altogether.
 
The socialist groups have hardly mentioned the Troika and have signed up the the Right2Change programme  designed by the left of the union bureaucracy to replace Labour with Sinn Fein. Their pretence at having formed a united party is laughable—they don't even have vote transfer instructions as they stand against each other
 
New struggles are emerging. Stories of immense suffering, cruelty and greed are emerging from the housing crisis.  The fight against water privatization can be swung back to build a mass movement representing the independent voice of the workers. The workers need a party and it can only come through struggle and through those involved in that struggle coming together in democratic debate to utterly repudiate the demands of capital and assert the primacy of the human needs of the workers.