Luke 'Ming' Flanagan talks the EU, water charges & revolution in the Hot Press Annual

Having turned down the chance to join UKIP's EU grouping - "They made me an offer I found remarkably easy to refuse", he tells us - Ming has fallen in with "a left-wing group with a green tinge, GUE/NGL, who look and think a bit like me. There's the leader of Podemos, which was only founded this year but is at 29% in the Spanish polls, and Manolis Glezos, a Greek who was arrested and tortured by the Nazis for pulling down their flag. He had a stamp commissioned by Stalin with his head on it, and got 450,000 votes in the last European election."
On the home front, he reckons that Independents/Others being at 32% in the latest polls means there could be "as many as 40 TDs who don't have to tow the party line in the next Dáil"; goes on to opine that, "Fine Gael and Labour have been doing our work for us with their ridiculous, 'This is like Isis' and 'lawless utopia' comments", and disagrees that Joan Burton was kidnapped by a baying mob.
"No, she wasn't!" he says. "How can a government that's going to celebrate 1916 say we have a dangerous revolutionary fringe because a water bomb was thrown at someone?"
Read the full interview in the Hot Press Annual 2015, in shops now with Hozier on the cover.