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

  In the early months of 2011 it sometimes felt like 1989 all over again, the year when people power across Central and Eastern Europe brought about the final collapse of communism.  This year it was the turn of people who had endured decades of oppression and dictatorship in the Middle East and North Africa [...]

  A country is not a company and government is not a learning institution in which the top class are required to write assignments on a flawed module (the PfG)  for assessment by the head teacher who will then present them with ‘action points’ on how to do better in future.  Nobody appears to have [...]

The President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, is quoted in yesterday’s Der Spiegel: “We really ought to engineer a revolution against Merkel and Sarkozy,” he said, “but each of us needs the two of them for something.” No doubt David Cameron would agree, with the first of these sentiments anyway. The diehard home counties Tory view [...]

Big things are happening in a big week for Irish and European politics and, let’s be honest, most of us don’t really understand what’s happening, or why. The budget to be unveiled today and tomorrow will need to cut spending and increase taxes because of the banks, or something. The European summit being held on Friday will save [...]

Far from a ‘state of the nation address’ that showed any respect for our collective intelligence, what we were treated to last night was a long-winded, patronising, poorly constructed, badly drafted pre-Budget party political broadcast on behalf of the government. Granted, it was well delivered by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, but then that’s part of [...]

From Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report.  Illustrated here is that when it comes to deleveraging — banks dumping loans to shrink their balance sheets — NAMA is up there with the biggest of the European banks.  Indeed, for this purpose, NAMA is best seen as being like a massively overextended large European bank, banks [...]