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

You wouldn’t understand.

Kevin Myres has written another article which has caused a bit of stir. This time on Africa. Myres laments that aid to Africa has only allowed its population of miserables to multiply and propped up several vile regimes in the process. The Indo letters page was bombarded. Then in today’s Irish Times Bryan Mukandi from [...]

At least it is according to Minister Brian Lenihan last week.

The following is my translation of an article in today’s Le Monde about proposals to get another Irish referendum. It is quite interesting in the kind of manoevering it reveals and also there is an interesting little comment at the end about the way the commission is evolving into something less than desireable. The article [...]

I got this email from Georg Pichler of rigardi.org and I thought I would pass it on. As you might have heard the governmenting parties, Social Democrats (SPOE) and Conservatives (OEVP) have decided to end their coalition. After 1 1/2 years of constant quarrel and hardly any progress, the Social Democrats have decided to switch [...]

The news that the ESB is to seek a 20pc price hike will if granted, drive the average annual bill up to a staggering €1,100. It is up to the Commission for Energy Regulation to sanction all such rises. Before it does so, it had better think hard about the hardship they could bring and [...]

A thread on boards.ie has been the source of some impressive citizen activism in the last week and it seems the campaign there is just getting started. As some people already know, Dublin City Council recently signed a deal with advertising group JCDecaux which would see a number of advertising panels erected on the city’s [...]

BBC Radio 4′s Today in Parliament last night did a segment on Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech to the European Parliament in which he outlined the agenda of the French EU Council Presidency.  It begins 19 minutes into the program (Listen again/download).   Included in the post-speech interviews is Kathy Sinnott MEP, who says that she has offered [...]

Not that it’s any use in solving the problem, but has anyone done a cost comparison on the storage costs for the e-voting machines versus the cost of having a backup radar system for Dublin Airport?  In a cinematic note, the existence of a backup radar system was of course a key plot twist in [...]

The Government’s announcement of €500m in cutbacks reminds me of that other €500m that was in the news lately – the overspend on the Ballymun Regeneration Project. What if that €500 million were somehow refound and used to tackle the Government’s current budgetary problems? Problem solved. You would be forgiven for thinking. 

After the Lisbon Treaty debackle Leo Varadker came out and critisesed Enda Kenny in what could be said as the early stages of a coup. So what does Enda do. Blame Leo Varadker for the recent poor form. In an apparent reference to the claims by one Fine Gael councillor that young TDs such as [...]

Me and everyone else here would like to pass on their sympathies to the Brennan family on the death of Seamus Brennan.

The centrepiece of today’s announcement of public spending cuts by Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen is a claim that the motivation is to cut only current spending while preserving capital spending.  This may make for pleasing-sounding spin and apparent commitment to the NDP but it ignores one simple thing: capital projects don’t exist in isolation.  They [...]

I was looking for the Reeling the Years clip about 1980s immigration and found this. Hindsight ehh.

There has been some talk about how the Irish Referendum vote stops further EU integration. So it is interesting to see that French plans to have a referendum when a country with five per cent of the EU population as a whole (i.e. Turkey) wants to join has failed in the French Senate. Resulting in [...]

The No Campaign failed to make the Abortion issue a major reason to vote no. But they certainly convinced the rest of Europe again. And yet again we have another person rather then reading the Eu-barometer results but let there own bias dictate their views. Sylvie Goulard, the president of the French section of the [...]