Irish Election - Coverage of Irish Politics, News and Current Affairs

Gordon Brown statement to House of Commons on Hillsborough Agreement –

None of this could have been achieved without working closely with the Irish government – and I pay tribute to Brian Cowen, the Irish Foreign Minister, Micheal Martin and to the Taoiseach’s predecessors Bertie Ahern and Albert Reynolds.

Who’s missing from that list of predecessor Taoisigh?

So Boy George has bit the bullet. Fallen on his own sword, hoist by his own petard, crashed and burned, came a cropper.

At 1pm today former RTE economist and more recently celebrity by-election candidate, George Lee, announced he is resiging his Dáil seat and his membership of the Fine Gael party.

It wasn’t happening fast enough for him. He wasn’t a Minister yet. So he flew the coop. Barely a TD six months – could it have been the shortest career in Irish politics?

The harder they come…

Last years ‘Obama’ moment is this years….well have a listen over at Maman Poulet and make of it what you can.

Finally reality and honesty are replacing delusion and denial in the debate about the Irish language. The most noticeable and welcome change is that the theories of linguistics, particularly those relating to endangered languages, or indeed the death of languages, are being used to give the debate a more scientific and realistic grounding. It was maddening the way census stats on Irish were pressed into service to show that the language was holding its own. The status of the language in the Gaeltacht is now as clear as it is stark. According to the recent “Linguistic Study of the Gaeltacht” :

“The bare conclusion of the survey of young [speakers of Irish in the Gaeltacht] is that Irish will remain a community language in the strongest parts of the Gaeltacht for no more than 15 or 20 years”.

Continue reading ‘Irish is Dead?’ »

The Department of Finance has published the January exchequer returns.  The main focus of course is on the revenue side.  It’s not easy to figure out where the January returns are relative to expectations since they don’t tell us “the profile” for January.   On the face of it, what’s worrying is the big percentage declines in revenue components compared to January 2009 — when the economy was already in recession.  Income tax is down 10% and VAT 18%.   And the weather was likely a factor in both falling, especially VAT.  Corporation tax and stamps are down even more but there’s a change in timing on the former and the latter is so tiny anyway that it’s not having much effect on the overall numbers (which of course tells a story given how important stamp duty was at one time).   But the overall picture from January revenue is that the country really has just 2 revenue sources, income tax and VAT, with a little top up from excise.  That’s a very thin tax base.

UPDATE:  Although the returns are an interesting story, the big one from the department today seems to be outsourcing of all its NAMA-related functions to the NTMA.

Red C poll capturing post-budget reaction for Sunday Business Post with previous poll (22nd Nov) in parentheses: FF 27% (23%), FG 34%(36%), Lab 17%(17%), SF 8%(10%), Green 5% (5%), Ind. 9% (9%).

These results are not easy to interpret.

In a move that suggests a news dump (Friday afternoon, anyone with an eye on news waiting for events in Stormont), the Minister for Finance has named the expert who will write one of the pre-reports into the banking system inquiry.  He is Klaus Regling and his track record seems to feature the kind of experience one would want for a job like this — long stints at IMF, German Ministry of Finance, and European Commission before his current consulting gig (the German angle should make for some interesting questions).  If there’s any reason for concern, it might simply be that someone from inside the mainstream bureaucratic apparatus for so long would be inclined to pull punches, but there’s no way of knowing that and as the UK Iraq War inquiry is showing, it’s precisely such people with a procedural focus who can help illuminate how decisions were actually made.  The bigger problem is that Herr Regling doesn’t think he can do the inquiry on his own, at least within the agreed time frame, and has asked for a 2nd expert assistant, who has yet to be named.  It looks like this inquiry will still be running in 2011.  Could that be the plan?

Water charges for domestic users were abolished with effect from 1 January 1997, six months before a general election that swept the Rainbow Coalition aside and ushered in the Bertie era of boom and bust. Now, they’re back on the political agenda, courtesy of the Greens, the renewed Programme for Government, and a variety of others, state agencies and economists, that support their introduction.

Last October’s  Commission on Taxation Report recommended the introduction of water charges for domestic users and for a while there was media speculation that the Minister for Finance would take up their advice in the December Budget. The Department of Finance strongly favours the move and suggested a flat charge of €175 per household in documents prepared for Mc Carthy’s Bord Snip II.

But the issue is about something more fundamental than a new form of raising tax or the promotion of conservation of a precious and expensive resource: water infrastructure was neglected even throughout the Celtic Tiger era when local authorities appeared flush with cash from developers’ levies. Indeed the pace of that development exacerbated problems in an already defective and creaking system. Now, impecunious authorities, locally and nationally, no longer have the resources to maintain or improve it, without turning to the citizens who don’t already have to pay for their water supplies, for financial support. The recent cold snap, and the water shortages that followed in its wake, has simply brought the issue to a head. Continue reading ‘Will water charges take a bath?’ »

I’ve had cause to do a lot of reading recently.  For reasons that are partially related to work, and partially related to some ideas I’ve been tossing around with friends, I’ve spent some time reading about progressive movements in the UK.  The possibility of a hung parliament seems to have created an atmosphere in which people are much more comfortable talking about alliances and coalitions than normal.  While think-tanks (of which we really need more in Ireland) such as Demos and the Fabian Society have been putting considerable effort into bringing in progressive voices from Labour and Lib Dems, and even including ‘progressive Tories’.  The think-tanks have helped strengthen a conversation around progressive stances through their respective blogs – Demos blog and Next Left.  Left Foot Forward have also played a significant role in this conversation.

The conversation has been different in Ireland, but there have been attempts by group blogs such as Irish Left Review and Cedar Lounge Revolution to examine co-operation and sharing of ideas between people of the left.  But both blogs have been plagued at times by comments from readers insisting that one political party is more left than another, or that the Government should simply be branded as evil and stupid while we crouch behind our party identities. Continue reading ‘Building a progressive majority’ »

The Irish Times has an interesting two part series on the predicament of the Irish unions.  Today’s installment provides a good insight into the minds of the union leadership and in so doing illustrates the challenge of relevance.  David Begg and Jack O’Connor now say that after 20 years of Social Partnership™, all they ever really wanted was the “Nordic Model” which is clearly the key buzz phrase sitting in the ICTU talking points. Now leave aside that it’s a tad odd to decide after such a long time with a seat at the table to claim that your preferred direction is different and let’s focus on specifics. What is the Nordic model? A recent book by Nordic economists offers a definition –

Continue reading ‘The hammer of the (union) gods’ »

The headline:

“Buying imported food a traitorous act, guide claims”

to which the story doesn’t really add anything.

This is just a representative manifestation of the Buy Irish, shop local, self-sufficiency good, imports bad sort of protectionist nonsense – like the outcry over Christmas shopping in Newry – that sends my blood pressure through the roof.

Continue reading ‘Shop local, stay poor’ »

Via @neilward
Ff22+2. Fg32+1. Lab24-1. Gr3-1. Sf8-1

Cowen26+3. Kenny31-1. Gilm46+1. Gorm24+2. Adms31+3.

The only statistically significant move:
Gov app.19+5

Everything else is very very stable.

Get ready for the 1st word above to spring from Brian Cowen’s mouth in the Dail any day now. Or perhaps not.  Anyway, the context is that Ireland’s “light touch” regulation during the boom years resulted in a free-for-all not just for our friendly local banks but also for Dublin-based operations of foreign banks who were running some large balance sheet operations from here. 

Continue reading ‘Abwicklungsanstalt: Germany cleans up an Irish mess’ »

After establishing himself as the one minister making actual decisions during the recent cold spell, Batt O’Keeffe has struck again today with an abrupt decision to abolish the National University of Ireland.  As anyone with a degree from UCD, UCG, UCC, and Maynooth knows, NUI is the body that actually awards the degree, and also set the basic matriculation requirements.  Apparently An Bord Snip had questioned the usefulness of this confederal structure and the Minister now agrees; each university will now take its over its own standard setting and degree awarding functions.  Is this a good idea? 

Continue reading ‘Batt O’Keeffe: Man of Action’ »

A multi-phase inquiry into the cause of our financial crisis has been outlined to the Dail by the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, on behalf of the Government.

The first phase will comprise an investigation by the Governor of the Central Bank, Patrick Honohan, into the role of the Central Bank and the regulatory system and a separate report by a ‘wise person’ into the reasons why the banking system failed. Continue reading ‘Banks’ Inquiry announced’ »

You will (or should be) aware of the ongoing