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

Ah Finian McGrath not content with just making an ass of himself singing on TV. Now seemingly he is a fan of Fidel Castro and wants him to come to Ireland on a state visit.

Enda is in trouble. Already in the job for about 4 years and the poll results show little or no improvement from the disastrous 2002 election performance. The media has been unflinching in their condemnation of the health service and crime the opposition could not ask for more help from the media. Yet Fine Gael [...]

The Sunday Business Post has published another of its monthly tracking polls. It shows a five per cent surge in support for Fianna Fáil, up to 38%, and a corresponding drop of 2% and 3% for Fine Gael and Sinn Féin respectively. The numbers confirm the trend that FF does better when the [...]

At what point should the Labour party begin to get worried over the holding pattern they have been in since the last election? With a year to run almost every party has momentum of some sort (bad-FF, iffy-PD, inconsistent-FG, good-SF, good-Green). Labour are not going anywhere.

The other day I argued against the neutrality “triple lock” requiring a United Nations resolution for the defence forces to act. Fine Gael agree. Irish ‘Triple-Lock’ is a potential massive embarrassment - Allen

Just added a new Section to Irish Elections. Called Opinion Polls. You should see it beside Irish Election Info on the top right. It is basically going to try to keep track of all the opinion polls coming up to the election. If anyone knows of any polls to include please let us know. Local [...]

Taoiseach’s ‘hypocrisy’ on heritage - Meath Chronicle
This is an excellent letter in the Meath Chronicle. It is word reading the whole thing (it’s free but you have to register). Despite the Taoiseach’s words the realities are far different and many of the social problems that the government is trying to fix are created by their [...]

Stephen Collins’ column in Saturday’s Irish Times (subs. req’d) raises another potential problem with the electoral register (some existing problems discussed by us here and Sarah Carey here) — that since the census results will be available by the next election, there is scope for a legal challenge on the grounds that a constituency has fallen [...]

No post about Willie O’Dea can not be complete without the picture. Willie O’Dea was talking today about EU battle groups in Limerick. He gave his speech at the Institute of European Affairs Conference on “EU Battlegroups –Perspectives from Neutral and Non-aligned states”. From Wikipedia “The European Union battle groups is a project [...]

By way of a heads up, IE.com is looking to have an interview posted in the coming weeks with Cllr and Dail candidate for Dublin South Central, Labour’s Eric Byrne. The interview is ongoing so if there are any specific questions you want included leave them in the comments.
Our first FF respondent looks likely to [...]

Round up of the News from the Local papers. Not all the the unison Papers are online at the minute so I may have missed some inportant news. As always if there is a piece you have seen in your local paper. Tell us in the comments.
The Kingdom
Queen in terror plot:
In an alarming statement issued [...]

The turnover continues.  Padraic McCormack FG has announced that he won’t run again in Galway West.  He’s 63 and approaching 20 years in the Oireachtas, the first two of which in the Senate.  Galway West is typical of FG’s national problems, with only one seat out of five.  They had to be thinking about getting [...]

Fine Gael have jumped on the celebrity candidacy bandwagon by approaching outgoing GAA President Sean Kelly to stand in South Kerry next year. It follows the recent trend of high-profile individuals being offered places on party tickets. Only this week, Colm O’Gorman of One-in-Four announced that he will contest the next general election with the [...]

You can put any word into the above phrase. “I am not a racist but…,” ” I am not a biggot but…” and then it will be followed by some derogetory statment belying the words which immediately preceded it. It is a typically Irish thing.
Councillor Noreen Ryan did this this week in an interview with [...]

Last night I was flicking through the TV channels and I came across the Insomniacs favourite Oireachtas Report. It was a debate about Health. Dr Liam Twomey of FG was responding to Mary Harney and then the Camera came back on Mary. She was txting on her phone. Is this the level of respect politicians [...]

Who speaks for the people of Cork. Not ‘De Paper’ and certainly not Minister Micheal Martin.