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

Well the story of the US campaign season, how a cartoon managed to raise $95,000 in days for a new aspiring politician, Sean Tevis in Kansas. If you’ve ever read XKCD read on. (Wikipedia entry for XKCD)

There was a lively atmosphere on O’Connell Street in Limerick today with a red army again packing the street. Today rather than rugby, it was the issue of Shannon and its slots that were the main event. The press are pulling their punches at the moment but the only FF TD, John Creegan, on the [...]

USI is reeling from a massive internal coup this afternoon as both plotter and president have fallen on their swords. A letter from earlier this week addressed to the President and listing a litany of failures, sparked some furious debate on politics.ie which has been followed up by confirmation from David Cochrane, editor of P.ie [...]

A visible blue tide has moved Fine Gael back to 1997 levels.

There is a surprise in Dublin North-East as Terence Flanagan shades Martin Brady to join Michael Woods and Tommy Broughan in the Dail on SF transfers from Larry O’Toole.

Clare tally - missing 1700 votes. See full details.

The scandal from Limerick East is that Kieran O’Donnell is looking strong to take O’Malley’s seat and even potentially pip Peter Power for the fourth (2 boxes missing or lost from the tally). Limerick West is looking set for a repeat performance with both Dan Neville and Michael Finucane only 350 votes apart after the [...]

Looks like this is a first but it seems that tomorrow’s IMS poll will show the Alliance for Change, i.e. FG/Lab on 39% putting it just ahead of the current Government, i.e. FF/PD on 38%.
It’s a first as this is the first time that all the major polling companies have FG/Lab outpolling the current [...]

Since the Nixon and Kennedy series of Great Debates, politics and television have become a critical medium for campaigns. Nixon was twenty pounds underweight with a sickly pallor, dressed in a ill-fitting shirt, and he refused makeup to improve his color and lighten his perpetual five o’clock shadow for the television debate, needless to say, [...]

FF 34 (-3)
FG 31 (+5)
Lab 10 (-1)
Greens 6 (-2)
PD 3 (+2)
SF 10 (+1)
Ind 6 (-2)
The poll was conducted over last Monday and Tuesday from a representative sample of 1,000 voters at 100 sampling points across the country and in particular after the parties had all published the key economic aspects of their manifestos. Tomorrow’s Irish [...]

It seems in FF’s hurry to get some vague campaign website up and running that they’ve missed out on hiring some competent designer for their new “Next Steps” campaign site. The resulting image is shown here:

The site, as it now stands, has a confusing visual effect occuring on the main page which does not seem [...]

Here’s my first attempt from Photoshop.

It seems reading and listening to the political journalists that everyone is fixated on the wrong question, when asking Trevor Sargent or Pat Rabbitte about the possibility of joining a coalition with Fianna Fail after the next election.
The real question to either Trevor or Pat should be
Would you considered joining Fianna Fail in a coalition [...]

Following up on his announcement to run for president in the USA, democratic hopeful Barack Obama has replaced his initial exploratory site with a much improved web 2.0 version featuring some especially heavy use of social networking software. One wonders how long before politicans get on the social networking bandwagon here…

Irish media and politics are still recovering from the “Luntz” effect and the first use by a media outlet of a political focus group. Frank Luntz conducted the focus group of “undecided” voters from the Dublin/Leinster region for RTÉ’s The Week in Politics programme. The premise of the program was that there is approximately 18 [...]