Over at http://votomatic.ie/ you can test your views against those of the Irish political parties and see who you would vote for. Not being up on most of the current economic jargon I could not give clear answers in many cases, but none the less was astonished to find it rating me as a hard-line Green Party supporter (my complete ratings: Green +10, Labour +5, FF +4, SF -1, FG -3). However attractive their policies may be, the Green Party have completely failed the crucial test of their ability to actually implement them in their four years in government, and therefore their former voters will be looking to support parties which may have less satisfactory policies but may also turn out not to be completely spineless and ineffective; the Greens will deservedly be flushed down the toilet of history by the voters next week (and FF are heading for a colossal kicking too).

As I’ve said before, I would be voting Labour if I had a vote, based on their more convincing story on constitutional reform, but I am surprised that the system ranked me as fully 8 points more compatible with them than Fine Gael (my formative years were in Garret v Charlie days, when it was pretty clear who was good and who evil). My biggest difference with FG oddly was on transport, where I gave two answers (pro building Metro North, against bus privatisation, not that I feel very strongly on either) that aligned me strongly against them and with all the other parties. On the two issues I actually care most about, my support for Ireland participating in future EU defence initiatives is cancelled out by my support for Turkey’s EU membership in terms of agreement with FG, and together the two questions leave me positively aligned with only FF and Labour (and that only mildly).

For a laugh I went back and filled out the EU Profiler survey from 2009, which puts me much closer to Labour than to any of the others, which feels like a more accurate representation of my views, even though the questions (and policy positions) are almost two years old. So I must say I end up thinking that votomatic.ie has missed a few things, in particular the possibility of marking some issues as more and other as less important to the voter’s own strength of feeling.