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

Hi. We have recently passed the 2000 post count (at 2011) now. So we would just like to say thank you to everyone who posts. And indeed thanks to everyone who contributed to the 7,906 comments. Thanks for everything and hopefully you will all be still here when it hits 10,000 posts. Also [...]

Who ever thinks corporations are all about the Shareholders is wrong. According to Ryanair they own 25% of the company the government 25% and the unions and workers about 20%. So that means 70% of the shareholders are against this move. So obviously this is not all about the shareholders. Ryanair have promised more flights [...]

So, I bought this month’s village magazine (pictured) because the front page promised me an in-depth intelligent look at Eoghan Harris and his nomination to the Seanad.
There are indeed four articles in Village in which Harris features. All written by Vincent Browne.

A dog that hadn’t barked up to now — Aer Lingus staff — is barking. Tonight brings news of a 48 hour strike by pilots next week, not in protest against the Shannon withdrawal per se, but the fact that new Belfast base is hiring pilots outside the collective bargaining contract. This arises from the [...]

Guido notes the similarity between Berties parade around the ring at Ballybrit and the new initiative undertaken by Dave Cameron’s Conservatives to raise funds from the gee gees.
We all know the money donating and networking that gets done over at Galway races so we shouldn’t be too surprised to see it copied elsewhere
“So it is [...]

So Willie comes out and says how terrible this whole Shannon thing is. Why did it take him 8 days to come out with that. Something tells me he was hoping it would blow over. Afraid not Willie the ball was dropped on this. Richard Delevan has an excellent piece in the tribune about it [...]

I see today that the Berkeley Court and Jury’s Ballsbridge have closed for renovations. When I mean renovations, I mean they are going to be completely knocked down and a large complex of apartments are going to be built there.
The original plans were pretty massive and were vetoed by the council. I was [...]

Hey it is great to see the hypocritical crap still spewing from Sinn Fein. Today we had a press release from Sinn Fein’s Arthur Morgan saying
“Sinn Fein remains committed to the Trade Union movements’ demand that government exercise its strength as a key share-holder in Aer Lingus by [...]

An absolutely atrocious job by the RTE Radio News at One today. Dermot Ahern, in the course of an interview about Irish prisoners overseas, was asked (at about the 3:30 mark in his interview) about the Shannon-Heathrow route removal. In his response he (1) referred to the Irish Aid decentralisation to Shannon as [...]

As predicted a couple of days ago, the first significant government statement on the Shannon-Heathrow controversy is a classic of distractions and selective or irrelevant claims. A debunking of the Department of Transport’s response which accompanied Noel “Father Ted” Dempsey’s statement below.

It finally happened, the talk, focus and genuine uproar in more than three counties drew the government minister in charge to comment after four days. Yeah, it took Noel ‘Dialup’ Dempsey four days to figure out that people in Limerick, Clare, Tipp, Galway and other areas surrounding the West would be pissed off at losing [...]

There has been much talk recently that a major fall-off in jobs in the construction industry was on the cards. So the CSO Index of Employment in Construction, June 2007 (Provisional) May 2007 (Final).  Makes interesting reading. Employment in June is down 1.1% on June 2006 but still ahead of June 2005. So overall not [...]

After the debacle of Eircom you would think that the government would have realized the problem with privatization. Much of the flack over the privatisation of Eircom center on the fact that it failed. This was attributed to the fact that it was privatised not to the actually factors that made it fail. The reason [...]

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that we have added some new material to the site this afternoon. From today we will be hosting the weekly podcast show “Inside Out” which airs on Dublin City Anna Livia. The show covers international affairs, Irish politics and other eclectic topics, we began the podcasting with today’s [...]

Ongoing attempts to quantify the damage done by the Aer Lingus pullout suggest that 10,000 jobs may be at risk. Its primarily an issue of infrastructure and access to the region, which has become heavily populated with FDI and multinational companies thanks to Shannon Development. Fianna Fail is doing the usual trick of providing its [...]

Moving the Heathrow slots from Shannon (a 4 hour drive from Dublin and airport of choice for those in Limerick, Clare, Tipperary, much of Connacht and the North West) to Belfast (now a two hour leisurely drive from Dublin Airport thanks to the M1 looks like it has had its first victim.
The Dromoland Castle development [...]