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

This morning the pensions green paper was announced, with its own fancy dandy website. At the moment I am working through the executive summary. Its interesting that they went with a green paper on this one, this government has not been the best at consultation and has a very low record of consultation on policy. [...]

There’s little to add to the discussion of Susie Long, RIP, dead from a late diagnosed case of bowel cancer after a 7 month wait for a colonoscopy as a public patient. Here’s a link to her letter to Joe Duffy (which is as revealing about hospital-acquired infections as her own case), and then [...]

At a conference in the USA last night and again on The Last Word today, Minister for Integration Conor Lenihan suggested that the government was discussing giving immigrants political rights as a means to better integrate them into Irish life. This chestnut has been doing the rounds in the literature for a long time now [...]

Damien’s second post in the series on rigging an election online is up. Yesterday he went through how the web can organise cells, as it were, of supporters that are actively canvassing throughout the year-convincing, reporting and polling so as to delivery at election day.
The E.A.B. system’s Reach module allows the creation of cells of [...]

It seems a happy coincidence that last week John Gormley announced national capacity for waste incineration in 2016 would be 400,000 tonnes and only two plants and today An Bord Pleanala give Indaver permission to increase the capacity of the Meath project and bring the capacity of their two plants in Cork and Meath up [...]

Mary Harney was quoted in the Independent today on her future as party leader and when she would like to have the job handed over to her successor;
“Obviously I will continue to assist the party in any way I can. But hopefully the party can now put a mechanism to have a leader in place [...]

Harry McGee reports in today’s Examiner (also reported in the Irish Times) that Fine Gael have succesfully negotiated for double the number of Committee seats.
In addition to the two committees it already chairs — the public accounts committee and European affairs — FG TDs will also chair the potentially important committee on energy, security [...]

It is funny how Parties like to put stats across. From Fine Gael “4,100 fall in US trips to Ireland should sound alarm bells - Mitchell”.
Now this figure is actually true there has been a fall of 4,100 to Ireland from the US. The strength of the Euro vs the Dollar being a factor is [...]

It happens in many countries and it’s happened in Ireland before: the hopping between careers in political reporting and political spin. Poacher turned gamekeeper and all that. But surely an eyebrow to be raised at the news that the Political Editor of the Irish Independent, Gene McKenna, is to become Fianna Fail’s Director [...]

The Irish Times breaking news suggests that we are probably looking at an EU referendum in May or June of next year. The happy bunnies in Luxembourg reckon that they can get an agreement on the new EU reform Treaty in meetings and a summit this week. The report quotes also from an interesting speech [...]

When asked about stopping crime Fine Gael seem to be one of the main advocates of harsher measures. They want to be the ones tough on crime and the stunt and lets be honest it was a stunt of putting the Army on the street is the ace in tough crime measures. People imagine that [...]

USI is reeling from a massive internal coup this afternoon as both plotter and president have fallen on their swords. A letter from earlier this week addressed to the President and listing a litany of failures, sparked some furious debate on politics.ie which has been followed up by confirmation from David Cochrane, editor of P.ie [...]

He didn’t do it on the Late Late so can he really do it now?
(If the Mail bothered putting Oirish Irish stories up on their website, I would have posted this sooner)
Edit: The Irish Times cover it and to be honest as heresay goes its fairly weak stuff and there was little more in the [...]

Fine Gael are out today with a comparison of the INOs trolley figures which Dr James Reilly suggests show an increase in the number of patients on trolleys since last year. This is potentially going to grow as a topic with the HSE freeze to last until January and reported closures of facilities(like Navan’s Orthopedic Unit) and lack [...]

The new inside out is available for download, sorry for missing last week. This week the voice you hear is my own (go easy please). We are looking at Climate Change so hop over an have a look.

Today I read with increasing incredulity, the attempt being made by Prof. William Reville, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at one of our state-funded universities, UCC, to say that science and religion were not so different after all.
This is one of many attempts on this island to soften up the teaching of Science [...]