[ÉA] General Update

Day 2,078, 17:25 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Ian E CoIeman
Est. 2010
July 29, 2013

Hello eIreland,

It's been a while since I last touched base with the nation on what ÉA has been up to. Those who are familiar with me will know I'm a bit long winded, but I'm going to try and keep things short and sweet.

Country President Elections
ÉA certainly has significant election power. There's been some discussion within the party about the candidates available for this month's CP elections. At this point we aren't planning to present a candidate from within ÉA's ranks, and I don't predict that this will change.

For those wondering if ÉA will be putting their official support behind any of the candidates - it has been our practice not to support any candidate since all of our members vote for whoever they want anyway - this best prevents misrepresenting any of our members.

The way to get ÉA's support is just to write articles that convince them to vote for you. We have discussions and sometimes generally agree on things, but not official support.

Our Forum and Activity
Éire Aonair has a rich and fairly active forum that we use to hatch ideas and discussions, "eireaonair.userboard.net". Here are some statistics on our forum:


I'd say we're a contender for eIreland's most active and enduring forum, which is great for the organization and community of the party.

I'll get into why I'm bringing up our forum in a bit, but for one thing I'd like to invite all of our members to visit the forum, here, and dip their toes into the action. The more the merrier!

Creating Guides to Party Practices
In addition to the responsibilities around elections that come with being a major political entity in eIreland, a goal that ÉA is going to be working on is the development of new documents outlining the practices that we as a party want to use.

A good example of this is the previously mentioned practice of abstaining from supporting CP candidates (other than to run our own). In order to be consistent in our practices I think it's a good idea to set the ideas and reasoning to ink. This also gives us an opportunity to be proactive about solutions to different scenarios, such as what to do if a candidate is accidentally selected, in which case EA would no longer be able to stay neutral.

Some other practices that we may want to look into include how congress priorities are chosen, our stance toward in-game justice, our stance on immigration procedures for our congress representatives and nation, our stance on ingame/offgame communications and the accessibility of information, discussions, and leadership.

Status Of Our First Guide
Our newly returned member Achab Collins has hit the ground running with the idea of new party policies. He has drafted a new stance on external party candidates and allowing members of non-top-five parties to run with ÉA while representing another political group.

The idea of making our democracy more accessible in this way is not new, and in fact before ÉA was in the top five we regularly benefitted from this kind of good will. Of course in the new party driven system of congress elections, there's a lot more issues with this practice than back when individual candidates were voted for. This is why we need to set out some rules in order to be fair to regular ÉA members and also the meritocratic model that we strive for.

If you're on our forum you can join this discussion here. If you aren't a member of ÉA but are interested in the development of this new policy, then stay tuned for more news in the near future.

Dáil Elections
I want to take a moment to acknowledge ÉA's performance in the most recent Dáil Elections. With 32.06% of the vote we were the most supported of any party, and I was very pleasantly surprised with how many of our candidates got in.

Special thanks to Rafaia for sharing the good news in his article here.

I know that practically all of eIreland's parties have their own great members, leaders, and talents, but I really am impressed each month with the number of solid candidates that we get to boast on our ballot, and I'm always wishing that I could get just one or two more of you a Dáil seat.

Congratulations to all newly elected Dáil representatives, veterans and rookies alike, and thank you to the citizens of eIreland.

Cheers,
Ian E Coleman