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

Results, courtesy of Neil: Fianna Fáil 23%  (-5) Fine Gael 33% (+2) Labour Party 19% (+2) Green Party 7% (n/c) Sinn Féin 8% (+1) Independents/others 10% That poll would have been taken on Monday and Tuesday. As always, you get the results first here on IrishElection.com! Update: RTÉ now has more on this.  When asked [...]

Update Simon: On RTE player now. About  18 minutes in. For non-Ireland Residents here  A full blow by blow account is available as we speak thanks to the live blog set up by Suzy. John McGuinness went on the Late Late to further air his discontent with the government and their handling of the economy. [...]

John MCGuinness took his demotion to the back benches in a manner that makes all other parties pause in there poll support. The dynamic of Fianna Fail behaving as it’s own opposition kicked in almost immediately as McGuinness went on The Last Word Wednesday evening to defend his attack on the public service. [display_podcast]

From the awesome kildarestreet On 18 February 2009 Tom Sheahan Fine Gael mentioned something in the Dail that no one in the country was supposed to know. On the Employment Law Compliance Bill 2008: Second Stage (Resumed) Wednesday, 18 February 2009. We learned The purpose of this Bill is to establish NERA on a statutory [...]

So Alexa is not the greatest tool for tracking the usage for a website. But it is interesting non-the less. If we check out the stats from MiCanidate.eu against the main party websites and us here at Irish Election.  You can see that the graph has pretty poor axis. But what you can also see [...]

fair play to Handelaar and Gavin. The irish version of they work for you – in beta – is now live at Kildarestreet.com. Pop over to give it a whirl. No pro account necessary.

From Fine Gael ( I would link to the release save the crap new website does not give you permalinks) Fine Gael Leader Enda Kenny TD will today (Wednesday) lead a Fine Gael delegation on a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in order to witness the aftermath of the conflict between Hamas and [...]

Thanks to a tweet earlier today from the Green Party, my attention was drawn to their new-ish campaign to get Ireland growing its own food. Spearheaded by Junior Minister (re-appointed) Trevor Sargent, the campaign wants to get people planting and looking after their food needs. Welcome to Trevor’s crib:

Alistair Darling didn’t have much to work with today.  But it’s nonetheless interesting to look around the edges of his bleak budget and compare to the Irish context.  In that regard, what stands out  are the tax and pension measures.  A new top rate of income tax of 50 percent.  Pension relief scaled back for [...]

Update: The full list is available now from Taoiseach.gov.ie – 7 gone two in place for fifteen junior ministers.You might be interested in the speech that got McGuinness the sack. Interestingly there is now no junior minister for drug strategy despite their merging of the drug and alcohol strategy recently. Dept of Enterprise retains three [...]

From Fianna Fail CORK TEXTERS TO BENEFIT AS EU CUTS MOBILE COSTS – MINISTER MICHEÁL MARTIN, TD “There will be significant reductions in the costs of text messaging and downloading data, such as pictures, home movies and audio following the decision of the European Parliament to reduce costs.” “The savings for Cork phone users will be [...]

The IMF has released its latest Global Financial Stability Report.  With recent events, they might need a new title.  Given its global coverage it doesn’t get too deeply into any economy besides the major ones, and being a public international organization, it has to be careful in how any criticisms are couched.  Nevertheless, a few [...]

“What,” asked my interlocutor, “is the worst-case outlook for the world economy?” It wasn’t until the next day that I came up with the right answer: America could turn Irish. It doesn’t get much better as we have broken most of the rule of depression economics for the sake of international investors. Always an interesting [...]

Fintan O’Toole lays into Michael Lowry in the Irish Times today. Michael Lowry is a cheat and a liar. He entered public life and rose to the highest level of public trust as a member of the cabinet but showed utter contempt both for the law and for his social obligations. Over a decade ago [...]

UPDATE/CORRECTION: I have received some correspondence from The Irish Times “The Irish Times has paid no licensing fee and currently has no arrangement of any sort with MiCandidate”. This raises three questions – 1. Are the other media outlets paying a license fee? 2. MiCandidate have been saying they have deals done with certain media [...]

Sindo Poll: FF 23, FG 26, Lab 18, SF 5. Greens 3, Ind 4. Yes I know that adds to 79! Leaders: Cowen 20, Kenny 33, Gilmore 65, Gormley 38, Adams 27. Hat tip to Aoife. Update: It appears those are the “raw” numbers, and the 21% spare is the undecideds.  Depending on how you [...]