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

Bertie at the Tribunal – The Money Trail | Keith @ Granite Shavings Keith has a great post tying together the threads of Bertie's evidence at the Mahon Tribunal

It’s been a particular achievement of the last 11 years of government to have had Eircom try a few years with every just-past-its-prime ownership model.  The current is the Australian innovation of an investment bank which runs a separate fund bringing in other investors to own and manage the target company which is acquired with [...]

Reads very well for the deal to benefit private sector workers before public sector and address concerns over the lower paid. It might be a nightmare to get passed by ICTU though. From PRIVATE SECTOR PAY TERMS It is agreed by the parties that the following basic pay terms shall apply in the Private Sector: [...]

Unfortunately I missed Questions and Answers last night, however today I was greeted by the nice news that I didn’t need to subject myself to the RTE media player when instead Simon and Suzy had liveblogged it using scribblelive. It is a better, and briefer, programme for it. More of this will hopefully be available [...]

Today its up to a once-off £30,000 which the Tribunal put to Ahern he received from developer Owen O Callaghan after a March 1994 meeting about the tax status of Quarryvale and Blanchardstown shopping centres. When he looks around at the empty press gallery and reads headlines of economic woe, he must think it was [...]

McCain’s Dishonour Obama takes the gloves off and the US Election gets dirtier. Take a gander at his new ad attacking McCain's dirty campaign.

And the overall economy?  Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on what sounds like advanced deliberations inside Dell about shifting its manufacturing capacity from Limerick to Lodz in Poland.  Office jobs in Ireland would be retained.  But as the article explains, Dell is unusual among computer makers in its retention of substantial manufacturing capacity — most [...]

Lehman’s collapse could not be prevented over the weekend and we are definitely facing into “Great Depression” territory now in the banking system. It doesn’t create the greatest macro-economic background for a globalised economy but one thing could make it worse; a collapse of a bank here leading to queues around corners for money. Will [...]

IF you haven’t glimpsed the Sunday Independent, you can guarantee that the edited extract of a speech given by Junior Minister at the Department of Trade and Enterprise John McGuinness will be dominating discussion of the Social Partnership talks over the coming days. It remains unclear if the governmen is capable of steering a course [...]

Perhaps in an attempt at balance, however it seems more like a dose of split-personality the Irish Times delivers the thousandth installment of the “nuclear option” saga. The softening up of public opinion for a second vote on Lisbon continues alongside the much-decried “soothing noises” of Michael Martin and others in Cabinet. Again today Stephen [...]

Grealish keeps spinning the bottle

Before lunch at the conference on October 4 we will be hearing from a number of people active in the NGO sector on the role of the internet and social media in their work and activism. Our own Damian O Broin from askdirect will be along to talk about his work and we are working [...]

Noel Grealish prolongs the agony for Progresive Democrats by failing to kill them of.

As if we didn’t need another reason to vote No to the Lisbon Treaty, along comes news that a bunch of Commission nitwits in Brussels have written a secret report (ooooh) proving beyond all doubt that we Irish are being brainwashed into becoming Euro-sceptics by an increasingly independent and, therefore obviously, tabloid media. Details of [...]

I am a bit behind the curve on this one -wierd since we are organising it! In the next couple of days, we here at irishelection.com and  partners at EU Irish Representation will be announcing full details of the 2008 Blogging and Social Media Conference. Running on October 4th in the EU Building on Dawson [...]

The Telegraph are saying this is the likely date for our second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. I must say, I like the name of the briefing paper: The Solution to the Irish Problem