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

The ECB has announced it is participating in a joint initiative with the Central Banks of UK, Japan, Canada, US and Switzerland to provide liquidity support, i.e. cash, to banks to avoid a new major credit crunch across the western world. The mechanism to provide dollar loans to banks will be in place by the end of [...]

Kite-flying of draconian budget measures and individual posturing by members of the Cabinet, either to protect their own departmental turf or demonstrate their pugnacity in defence of their own interests to party backbenchers and supporters, has provided a further episode, and an unedifying, cringmakingly awful one at that, in the political pantomime that’s been this [...]

It was the ECB wot done it: Dick Roche takes the Fianna Fail defence to the pages of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

It’s just one rum thing after another… A week ago, the Irish government was internationally humiliated when it emerged that a Committee of the German Bundestag was examining Michael Noonan’s Budget 2012 proposals for a 2% VAT increase which the rest of Ireland, including its parliament, had no prior inkling was in the works. Yesterday, [...]

Remember that ‘magic beans economics ‘ moment before the 2011 General Election? Michael Noonan and Joan Burton having a very public row on RTE radio about…yes, you have it! … cuts to Child Benefit. Joan in the studio, Michael, as she put it, ‘shouting from Limerick’ as the now Minister for Social Protection lambasted Fine [...]

Is the Labour Party beginning to buckle under the strains of being in government? Willie Penrose has today resigned from his post as the Super–Junior Minister and from the parliamentary LabourParty over the closure of Mullingar Army Barracks. Leinster MEP, Nessa Childers, told national radio this afternoon how she was threatened with expulsion from the [...]

On Monday last, Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, appears to have suffered a rush of blood to the head, of the kind that used to afflict Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the final days of the latter’s ill-fated regime, and now looks likely to hasten his own political demise. Noon today and the Greek government appeared [...]

First, it was Enda Kenny who said it; then Michael Noonan repeated it on the News at One on RTE; followed by Leo Varadkar on Tonight with Vincent Brown on 26th October last: The payment of 700m euro of Irish taxpayers money to unsecured, unguaranteed senior bondholders of the former Anglo Irish Bank will not, [...]