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

Shortly after 6.30am this morning, the Statement of the Minister for Finance on Banking was distributed to the media, and pushed every other piece of entertaining political baiting, including opinion polls and Enda Kenny’s leadership survival prospects, down the news agenda. Publication of the Statement was followed by a flurry of publicity: an interview by the Minister [...]

Financial Times – Officials concede that the specialist property lender [Anglo Irish] was probably insolvent in September 2008 when the government guaranteed the balance sheets of all six domestic lenders.  But, as one senior official put it, “if we’d known then what we know now”, a different approach would have been taken. Brian Cowen, just [...]

The next step in the Allied Irish banks fire sale after the disposal of their Polish operation to Banco Santander is supposed to be sale of their 22.5 percent stake in the well-run American bank M&T to … Banco Santander.  The problem is that Santander wants to structure the deal as one in which it [...]

Thanks to politics.ie. FG 31 (-2) FF24,(nc) LAB 23 (-4) SF 10 (+2) GR 3 (+1) Oths 9 (+3) Underlines volatility of Labour vote. Also public satisfaction with Brian Cowen is 19% to 64% dissatisfied and 17% undecided. 29% are more likekly to vote vote FF with Cowen replaced, including 21% of FG and Labour [...]

Peter Sutherland — former board member of RBS, Goldman Sachs, and BP — calls for more pay cuts on the day that the Dept of Finance shows his 2009 pension from his Attorney General stint at €52,632.32.  It also appears that no former AG did the increasingly common 10 percent pension surrender in 2009.   It’s [...]

Dermot Ahern: Yes to consulting the Attorney General for a law that might modestly hurt property developers, No to consulting the Ombudsman for Children for a scheme that involves using youths as straw purchasers for booze.

Should former Irish finance ministers be helping with vulture shopping for assets of Irish banks whose supervision arrangements they oversaw?  That’s what Charlie McCreevy, architect of the Financial Regulator, is doing.

Friday news dump.  The European Central Bank on Ireland’s application to extend the Eligible Liabilities Guarantee scheme to end December 2010 from end September.  This is the guarantee that covers certain categories of newly issued bank debt, not the blanket guarantee.  But it’s needed to phase out of the blanket guarantee and it’s part of [...]

European Commission press release – The European Commission has approved under EU state aid rules a thorough restructuring of Parex that before the crisis was Latvia’s second biggest bank. Under the plan submitted by the Latvian authorities the core assets and operations of Parex are transferred into a newly established bank called Citadele, with the [...]

In the now infamous interview (transcript)with Morning Ireland, Brian Cowen – Could not provide a headline number for the total budgetary adjustment being sought next year Was reduced to vague jargon in trying to explain the budgetary process (‘estimates campaign”) — this from someone who served 4 years as finance minister Barely could muster an [...]

It’s been needling me since I read it in last Saturday’s Irish Times: “Whatever they say in public, most of them (i.e. Opposition TDs) have no illusions about the fact that they will be required to make deeply unpopular decisions when they achieve office.

Stephen Collins today reading the mood in the corridors of Leinster House – When the Dáil resumes next month, the Greens, the Independents and disgruntled Fianna Fáil TDs will all be looking at each other to see if anybody looks like losing their nerve and making a bolt for the Opposition benches. The other side [...]