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

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Stop “Hillary-care” now! | Salon Frank Luntz, hailed here as a guru for his knob twiddling poll-tricks, gets engaged in the health care debate in the US. Interesting how one can have the double persona of objective pollster overseas and partisan spin doctor at home.

With a week to digest the election results, the Green Party might be credited with an emerging strategy to take into their negotiations for a renewed programme for government and, in theory at least, the second part of the process of government for however long it lasts. It was assessed here and elsewhere that the [...]

In the course of my work today I was looking back over Libertas’s campaign, how the organisation emerged, it’s modus operandi etc etc and it struck me – it could be argued that even putting the words ‘Libertas’ and ‘organisation’ beside one another, was a bit of a stretch. There doesn’t seem to have been [...]

Here we go again.  Aer Lingus is withdrawing more services from Shannon.  But this row is going to play out very differently than the end of Shannon-Heathrow.   The latter row caught the government on the hop but also featured an Aer Lingus in a very different mood, confident that it could launch a sub-hub in [...]

“Tabloid politics” was how Mary O’Rourke described the Dail Debate on the Confidence Motion. And she was right. There was no policy discussion of merit – apart from Brian Lenihan‘s effort – about where we are going and what we need to do to get there. Insults were liberally traded on all sides. Enda Kenny [...]

Enda Kenny has dropped Frank Flannery as the Fine Gael director of elections following controversy caused by Flannery’s remarks during the recent election campaign, The Indo reports. Update: The Irish Times say that it is not a “demotion” but that the director of elections position was not a continuous role. For those not up to [...]

Today at 12.00 from the Garden of Remembrance. Sign the petition and bring a white ribbon if you are attending. Today’s order of business in the Dail is the worst political failure I have seen: 10.30 a.m. * Leaders Questions * Motion re Confidence in Government (to conclude at 5.30 p.m.)

Toying with a deckchairs and titanic comment and it is hard not to when you hear that Cowen plans to modernise Fianna Fail in time for that 2012 general election we keep hearing about. They will get a shock, once they dig into their members list and realise many of them are, like names on [...]

The Irish government through the National Pension Reserve Fund’s preference share capital infusion to Bank of Ireland has a 25% voting stake for key decisions in the Bank, including those related to the board.  RTE says that the government and the board have agreed to install Pat Molloy as a director and make him chairman [...]

Today the motion of no confidence tabled by Fine Gael seems certain to fall, meaning they will not be able to table another such motion for six months – early December. With the Government’s Dáil majority looking shaky, I’m going to assume Fianna Fáil will push to have the Donegal South-West bye-election to replace Pat [...]

In case you missed it earlier here’s the entrance of Maureen O’Sullivan TD and George Lee TD into the Dáil Chamber this afternoon.

Suzy brought you Alan Kelly’s rap before the election and went on with Matt Cooper to show it to Ireland. Looks like GMC wasn’t done, he gave a new final verse to Matt Cooper on the Last Word today. The full interview is on the blog (and the interview with Suzy is still there too). [...]

Councilor Christy Burke has resigned from the Sinn Féin party. After more than thirty years of at times frayed relations with the party’s Dublin HQ he has stepped down taking his council seat with him. Sinn Féin are calling on him not to make the seat independent, stating that he was elected on a Sinn [...]

In Dublin the Greens were wiped off the map in the local elections. The result truly was horrific. There is no way to hide the fact that support for the party collapsed – pretty much dropped by about 50%. But I noticed two things that I think were relevant in the decline. First is the [...]

Marian Harkin, Pat ‘the cope’ and Jim Higgins were elected early this morning to the final three MEP seats. A total seat count for the locals is as follows: FG 340 (+38), FF 218 (- 84), Lab 132 (+31), Other 136 (+40), SF 54 (-), GP 3 (- 15) and at Euro level FF 3, [...]