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

Some astonishing facts and figures from Brian Dowling on RTE’s News at One this afternoon which put into perspective just how badly Fianna Fail are doing. Bear in mind that FF are currently averaging around 16% in opinion polls. 1. Since 1932, the lowest vote FF have ever picked up in a general election was [...]

Six writers – Cian O’Flaherty, John Handelaar, David Cochrane, Alexia Golez, Suzy Byrne, and Christine Bohan – give their verdict on tonight’s leaders’ debate on TV3 between Eamon Gilmore and Micheal Martin, while Jason Kennedy outlines what happened with Enda Kenny’s rival speech.

Part of the reason this campaign has been so quiet (i.e. dull) so far was summed up by Sean O’Rourke on the News at One this afternoon. All the focus has been on the parties re-iterating previously held positions. Everyone already knows where Labour stand on the IMF/EU deal and what Fine Gael want to [...]

As Debategate hogs the limelight for yet another day and FG scrambles to defend Enda’s bizarre intransigence on taking part, the other parties have been happy to sit back and let the attention focus on this non-issue issue. FF released 5 (!) press releases about it in the past 24 hours, with Michéal Martin saying [...]

Today was dominated by one question: what exactly is Enda Kenny thinking? As Fine Gael maintain their impressive lead over the other parties in the opinion polls, Kenny’s amateurish bungling of the leaders’ debate has done exactly what FG has wanted to avoid – it has thrown Enda into the national limelight on his own, [...]

The kindest thing that can be said about today, the second full day of election campaigning, is that everything passed off smoothly. No-one rocked the boat. There were no major changes in party results in the latest poll. The parties focused on heavily stage-managed events – policy launches, charity events, walkabouts – while candidates wrestled [...]

Back in January, when it became clear that Bord Snip wanted to hit social welfare benefits hard, Minister Mary Hanafin tried to ease the pain. “It’s very difficult to take anything away”, she said, insisting that the priority would be to protect vulnerable people who are reliant on social welfare. That hasn’t happened. The Bord [...]

Word from the count centre is that Catherine Byrne (FG) is going to be elected without reaching quota on the final count, which means that Aongus O’Snodaigh (SF) will shade it ahead of Eric Byrne (Lab), with just 67 votes between them. Right now papers are being re-checked to make sure that none of Eric’s [...]

Seriously, where has Bertie been all day?Pat Rabbitte has been on RTÉ the whole time, Enda’s popped up to celebrate every couple of hours, McDowell was very quiet but well, that was for a good reason, and since he got elected Sargent has been on all the time too. What’s the story? Edit by Cian: [...]

Cyprian Brady: 939 Mary Fitzpatrick: 1,725 Bertie: Over 12,000 Unbelievable stuff

Earlier today Damien noted that there were strong rumours that Fianna Fáil campaigners had been telling people in Dublin that the Green Party were in favour of abortion and would legalise it if they got into government. It’s sounds slightly far-fetched that a party would spread such clear lies about another party. It’s not. A [...]

Qu’est-ce que c’est? This picture of Michael D on a bus shelter in France went up on the Labour Flickr page a short while ago Quel enthusiasm… Update: Labour aren’t sure how it got there either.

Michael McDowell today predicted that, contrary to pretty much everything that’s been written in the entire election campaign, the PD’s are actually on course to gain 2 seats, bringing them up to 10 seats overall. Now think about that. Paddy Power are currently offering evens that the PD’s will keep between 1 and 3 seats. [...]

Adore him or abhor him, when McDowell’s on form he’s always entertaining. In tonight’s debate, he was the lynchpin; he was a foil to the earnestness of Sargent, a bully who refused to let Adams away with attempts to avoid discussing paramilitarism and a constant antagonist to Rabbitte. More than anyone (Mark Little included) he [...]

Pat Rabbitte was just on the tail-end of the 9 o’clock news,  saying that he doesn’t know whether it’s going to be a ‘fiery’ debate or not, but that most people ‘have already made up their minds who they’re going to vote for’ so it’s not the most important debate ever. Er, wtf? Last time [...]

Pat Rabbitte will be answering questions live on ireland.com tomorrow between 1.30pm and about 3pm. If anyone’s interested in submitting questions then click here (you can submit them until 2.30pm tomorrow).