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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There is a growing realisation about the use and potential for weblogs and social networking tools such as Flickr or YouTube in the mainstream media. The article Web-based politics and democracy for the 21st century in today’s Irish Times by Karlin Lillington is just the beginning of what will be the most Internet-savvy general election [...]

The Internet and it’s social networking tools such as Flickr and YouTube have drastically changed the form and structure of electioneering within the US. In this article, I’ll outline some of the recent changes and give some examples of technology being applied to aid in campaigning. (PDF Full Text version.)

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings In the case of Ireland’s electronic voting machines, it is more the case of one key to rule them all rather than one ring [...]

A couple of comments to frame the scene and that echo my feelings: It wasn’t wrong, but if I’d known you were going to give me such hassle about it, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I’d also like to apologise to those who had to listen to you all giving me hassle about it. [...]

Seems that commuters in the greater Dublin region have finally had enough of the wishy-washy promises from the current government when dealing with their issues and have now formed the Ten Hour Families political party. The goals of this party are include dealing with issues such as quality of family life, transport, housing and urban [...]

Reading this weekend’s Sunday Business Post, there was one article which focused on a major problem for political parties in Ireland – the lack of new members.

So its that time again when everyone rushes to figure out what the latest poll is saying about the state of voter intentions. RedC research, has the latest poll out in tomorrow’s edition of the Sunday Business Post. As RedC use a different methodology, its only fair to stick in the TNS / MRBI figures [...]

I can remember being amazed by the whole use of citizen media in the US in the Senate race between Thune and Daschle (see blog entry) where the DashcleVThune online community of bloggers were able to set the tone of the election as part of Thune’s wider strategy. It was part of a wider development [...]

Here in CityWest for the Fine Gael Ard Fheis the latest news on the grapevine is that Councillor Terence Flanagan is set to join Brody Sweeney in Dublin North East on the Fine Gael ticket for the forthcoming General Election.