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

This  Government would probably gleefully order the ritual sacrifice of half a dozen of its junior Ministers at the foot of the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park if it thought such slaughter might avoid having to hold a referendum on the new intergovernmental Treaty.  

Right now there is a different ritual underway. The same civil servants from the Attorney General’s office who, according to Europe Minister Lucinda Creighton, were part of Ireland’s  negotiating team in Brussels on the Treaty, will be putting in their tuppence worth of advice to the Attorney General, to whom the Cabinet has now referred the question as to whether or not a referendum is required. The AG will be under ‘no pressure’ in coming to her decision, according to the Taosieach. It’s also a fact that the most the AG can do is advise the government of the day. It is ultimately their decision as to what happens, in light of any advice that is offered.

Then again, on the face of it, the Government has done as much as it can to ensure that the wording of the Treaty will not trigger a legal requirement for a referendum. Continue reading ‘The Government’s EU Problem: No Referendum = Credibility loss, possibly fatal’ »

It’s hard to gauge how strong and stable this government is. A Red C poll for Paddy Power last week suggests the public haven’t been too perturbed by the political and media shenanigans surrounding December’s hair shirt budget. As Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein each lost a point in their ratings,  Fine Gael went up a point. So did Labour. Both government parties are now just three points short, respectively, of where they were in last year’s General Election.

The Government enjoys a rock solid parliamentary majority, which looks likely to hold through thick and thin.  And the best prognosis for 2012 is that whilst things may not get any worse, they’re unlikely to get any better. So in good news terms ,‘thin’ is most likely to be the political diet . Continue reading ‘The place for Ministers to influence government policy is within the Cabinet, not the pages of the Sunday Independent’ »

Clearly picking up from the political ether that the Mahon Tribunal report is coming out next week, Micheál Martin wants it to be known (via the Irish Times) that at least after the fact, there’s a new sheriff in town:

In August 2007, then Minister for Finance Brian Cowen gave an address to the Humbert Summer School.  It’s worth reading it all (scroll down to comments) to see the hubris that characterised this vintage of Fianna Fail – at a time when the banking system was already fatally compromised.

Continue reading ‘He wasn’t expecting that’ »

In the early months of 2011 it sometimes felt like 1989 all over again, the year when people power across Central and Eastern Europe brought about the final collapse of communism.  This year it was the turn of people who had endured decades of oppression and dictatorship in the Middle East and North Africa to take to the streets to reassert control over their own lives and demand regime change.

But as people in one area of the world placed their hopes in the establishment of democratic values, the flaws of democracy were being dramatically exposed in places where it is held to be most firmly entrenched.  In the US, the failure of a Democratic President and a Republican Congress to broker an agreement on a new debt ceiling almost brought the most powerful nation on the planet to the brink of sovereign default. In Europe, two democratically elected governments were effectively deposed and replaced by technocrats more suited to a Franco-German alliance that has shifted the delicate balance of the EU’s institutional democracy in favour of the preservation of their own interests.

In our own little neck of the woods, 2011 began as a year of great hopes. Continue reading ‘Farewell to 2011 – the year of great hopes and dashed expectations’ »

A country is not a company and government is not a learning institution in which the top class are required to write assignments on a flawed module (the PfG)  for assessment by the head teacher who will then present them with ‘action points’ on how to do better in future.  Nobody appears to have told Enda Kenny that though.

According to this morning’s Irish Times:

“Taoiseach Enda Kenny said yesterday that he will meet Ministers individually in January to itemise their responsibilities in terms of “actionable points” in the programme, and will be demanding a progress report from each of them at the end of the Government’s first year in office.

In an interview with political correspondents, the Taoiseach said that he had established an office in his own department to translate the programme into “actionable points” so that the performance of Ministers can be assessed. Continue reading ‘Boneheaded schoolmaster’s approach by Taoiseach to performance assessment of Ministers’ »

The President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, is quoted in yesterday’s Der Spiegel:
“We really ought to engineer a revolution against Merkel and Sarkozy,” he said, “but each of us needs the two of them for something.”
No doubt David Cameron would agree, with the first of these sentiments anyway. The diehard home counties Tory view is that the UK doesn’t need the EU and would be better off out of it entirely. Hence the rapturous welcome Cameron received from his Conservative backbenchers on return from staging his rebellion at the EU summit last weekend, where he had vetoed the proposed new fiscal regime for the EU and was then effectively shown the door. He was their hero, and the spirit of ‘Bulldog Britishness’ ruled the airwaves for a time.

Continue reading ‘Ireland and the EU – Should we engineer a Revolution?’ »

Big things are happening in a big week for Irish and European politics and, let’s be honest, most of us don’t really understand what’s happening, or why. The budget to be unveiled today and tomorrow will need to cut spending and increase taxes because of the banks, or something. The European summit being held on Friday will save or discard the euro, and radically reshape the EU, because of the bond markets, or something. The deliberative processes underlying both projects are far removed from the lives and concerns of ordinary citizens; fatalistically awaiting the pronouncements of the actual decision-makers seems to be our lot.

Continue reading ‘The Irish Times, the eurozone and the plebs’ »

Far from a ‘state of the nation address’ that showed any respect for our collective intelligence, what we were treated to last night was a long-winded, patronising, poorly constructed, badly drafted pre-Budget party political broadcast on behalf of the government. Granted, it was well delivered by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, but then that’s part of his job description.

Where substance was warranted , we got spin. Lots of it; particularly about jobs and this government’s record on job creation. Indeed the Taoiseach seemed a bit at cross purposes over the government’s exact role on the jobs front. At the top of the speech, he talked about creating the environment for job creation. By the middle, he was boasting that last summer’s damp squib ‘jobs initiative’ had created “ over 20,000 new jobs and training places.” Continue reading ‘Taoiseach’s ‘State of the Nation’ Address – “Difficult choices are never easy”’ »

From Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report.  Illustrated here is that when it comes to deleveraging — banks dumping loans to shrink their balance sheets — NAMA is up there with the biggest of the European banks.  Indeed, for this purpose, NAMA is best seen as being like a massively overextended large European bank, banks that are also trying to sell loans into the same market as NAMA.  Part of the argument for NAMA when it was being set up was that it could take all the devalued assets of actual Irish banks and be patient in developing or selling them.  But from a European perspective, we weren’t the only ones with that idea.  So now NAMA is just adding to the contraction coming from the EU banking sector as a whole.  Maybe that’s another way we could plead for concessions from our troika friends: the more we get squeezed, the more NAMA has to dump loans, which is not good for anybody.

The ECB has announced it is participating in a joint initiative with the Central Banks of UK, Japan, Canada, US and Switzerland to provide liquidity support, i.e. cash, to banks to avoid a new major credit crunch across the western world. The mechanism to provide dollar loans to banks will be in place by the end of next week

I have no idea how any of this banking stuff works or what, if any, implications this action has on the Irish front. But it seems that stock markets in London, New York and the major European capitals soared on this breaking news.

It would be nice to believe it’s all going to mean something positive, especially in the wake of the ESRI’s gloomy predictions for our economy next year and today’s worsening Live Register figures signalling the obvious failure of last summer’s so-called ‘Jobs Initiative’ and further slow downs in the real economy. Now, it’s back to the EU politicians and what decisions they’re going to make to further head off the collapse of the euro and the catastrophe that would unleash….far worse than anything that’s planned in next week’s Budget.

The full text of the ECB release is below the fold. Continue reading ‘Central Banks act to prevent credit crunch – glimmer of hope at last?’ »

Kite-flying of draconian budget measures and individual posturing by members of the Cabinet, either to protect their own departmental turf or demonstrate their pugnacity in defence of their own interests to party backbenchers and supporters, has provided a further episode, and an unedifying, cringmakingly awful one at that, in the political pantomime that’s been this season’s Budget process. The stars turns of the latest episode have been Minister for Health, James Reilly, and the Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton.

Dr. Reilly’s ‘grandstanding’  was castigated in last Saturday’s Irish Independent, specifically his threat of an annual 50 euro charge on medical cards and an increase of five cents in prescription charges for medical card holders.

“Health Minister James Reilly’s campaign to put the fear of God into Fine Gael and Labour backbench TDs ahead of next Tuesday week’s Budget raises serious questions, both about his political methods and his ability to deliver meaningful reforms to the €15.5bn health service, “ the Independent editorial said. Continue reading ‘The Budget – Time to end the Cabinet ‘silly games’ season and reform the budget process’ »

It’s just one rum thing after another… A week ago, the Irish government was internationally humiliated when it emerged that a Committee of the German Bundestag was examining Michael Noonan’s Budget 2012 proposals for a 2% VAT increase which the rest of Ireland, including its parliament, had no prior inkling was in the works. Yesterday, further humiliation was heaped on Irish heads when the Budget Committee of the European Parliament gave the thumbs down, by 12 votes to 11, of the proposed appointment of the Secretary-General of the Department of Finance to the European Court of Auditors next March. Two Irish substitute MEPS to yesterday’s Committee Meeting, Pat the Cope Gallagher and Marian Harkin, had voted in Mr. Cardiff’s favour. The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, is said to have lobbied the EPP group leadership in the Parliament to ensure EPP members of the Committee did the right thing and voted to approve Mr. Cardiff’s nomination.

Clearly, those pesky MEPs have no respect for the Fine Gael whip and prefer to make their own judgement, since all EPP members at the Committee meeting rejected Mr. Cardiff’s nomination. Continue reading ‘Time for a rethink on Cardiff appointment to European Court of Auditors?’ »

Remember that ‘magic beans economics ‘ moment before the 2011 General Election? Michael Noonan and Joan Burton having a very public row on RTE radio about…yes, you have it! … cuts to Child Benefit. Joan in the studio, Michael, as she put it, ‘shouting from Limerick’ as the now Minister for Social Protection lambasted Fine Gael for planning to cut the children’s allowance?

Burton: “Michael, there’s a lot of big houses all around the country where, inside those houses, there’s actually very little money because people are at the pin of their collar paying their mortgages and the child benefit is a critical income support to put food on the table. I’m just asking you, Michael, to think about this..” Continue reading ‘Burton: ‘Child Benefit is a critical income support to put food on the table’ – Labour faces difficult Welfare Budget Choices.’ »

Is the Labour Party beginning to buckle under the strains of being in government? Willie Penrose has today resigned from his post as the Super–Junior Minister and from the parliamentary LabourParty over the closure of Mullingar Army Barracks. Leinster MEP, Nessa Childers, told national radio this afternoon how she was threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party by a senior party politician for criticising the government’s nomination of Kevin Cardiff, Secretary General of the Department of Finance, to the European Court of Auditors . Meanwhile, the Sunday Business Post reported that a number of backbench Labour TDs met informally last week to discuss their concerns about the direction of education policy, specifically any possibility of the reintroduction of student fees, on which thousands of students are expected to take to the streets later in the week.

In light of the threatened implosion of the eurozone, and the economic and social catastrophe that would immediately follow, such issues seem more like surreal distractions than anything much to get excited about. Continue reading ‘Taoiseach get his priorities right? BIC wins out over Sarkozy’ »

On Monday last, Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, appears to have suffered a rush of blood to the head, of the kind that used to afflict Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the final days of the latter’s ill-fated regime, and now looks likely to hasten his own political demise.

Noon today and the Greek government appeared on the point of collapse, some forty eight hours after Prime Minister Papandreou made his ‘shock’ announcement to call a referendum to give the Greek people a say in whether or not to accept the bail-out package painstakingly carved out by the EU a few days earlier and on which the ink was barely dry.

Continue reading ‘The fate of Greece raises serious questions for all’ »

First, it was Enda Kenny who said it; then Michael Noonan repeated it on the News at One on RTE; followed by Leo Varadkar on Tonight with Vincent Brown on 26th October last: The payment of 700m euro of Irish taxpayers money to unsecured, unguaranteed senior bondholders of the former Anglo Irish Bank will not, in fact, cost the taxpayer a brass penny.

Anglo has the cash, courtesy of the sale of its US assets, they assured us, to meet the bond payment courtesy of its own resources.

Continue reading ‘Anglo Bond – ‘No taxpayers’ money’ Government spin in tatters’ »