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

A little less than a year ago, if you can remember back that far, we were all in thick of pre-election mania. Irish Election was buzzing with successive posts on the important matters of the day. Some were brilliantly incisive, bringing keen analysis far beyond the abilities of many journalist hacks, but most were just [...]

A writer for The Dubliner magazine, Robert O’Byrne, has written 3,442 words attempted to define what it means to be Middle Class in Ireland today. The title of the article is In Defense of the Middle Class, but apart from dwelling on clichéd notions of class in the 19th Century he doesn’t seem to know [...]

After the 2007 Budget last December, Brian Cowen was called Santa Claus by those quick witted subeditors eager to fill a snappy headline. After all, the surprisingly large tax returns, mainly provided by the rampantly inflated housing market allowed him to provide a bumper ‘giveaway’ budget.
This year of course, with credit crunches and a collapsing [...]

Helen Shaw has an interesting insiders take(sub req) on the current Crown Affair (a title for a controversy that she seems to have taken directly from P.O’Neill’s excellent post on Irish Election because she says, rather sarcastically, ‘the blogosphere drums are beating with the so-called John Crown Affair’).
The bones of her argument are actually fair [...]

In my post on The Irish Times Gives Award to Itself Dav of mediabite.org, kindly left a link to a very interesting and wide-ranging interview that mediabite had with Fintan O’Toole this year. In relation to the post on the Property Developers series in the Irish Times its very informative on the symbiotic relationship between [...]

You may find it curious that at the moment the Irish Times is doing extensive coverage of Irish developers, those brave and assiduous men, and they are all men, who are bringing this country the type of shopping centres and office blocks that we could only have dreamed of when we sat watching Dallas in [...]

We are always giving out about RTE, the State of Us was dire, Fair City risible, and Killinascully is a vacuous black hole of comedy which has all the laughter sucked out.
But what about RTE’s election coverage? It was supposed to be the most extensive coverage ever and sure enough the RTE TV studio [...]

Both Mark Hennessy, in his Correspondent blog and RTE news tell us that lawyers, acting for Bertie at the Mahon Tribunal, have accused the Tribunal of allowing itself to become part of a malicious campaign against the Taoiseach. Shock and/or Horror!

So I was wrong. Everyone was. Before the time passes completely and the recent memory of the last week of the election campaign is wiped out of our collective memory by the inevitable rewrite once the negotiations for government begins, we should remember that everyone thought that Fianna Fail were going to get less than [...]

How was the election for you? Perhaps the question is a little premature as it’s still dragging on, with FG leader Enda Kenny, like a WWF contender having been knocked to ground by a devilish leg swing from an opponent he confidentially thought was floored, swinging back with the kitten punches of a child. On [...]

“My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”
This quote is from The Opposite an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza, the middle aged short man with a pudgy demeanor and frumpy dress sense, not a million miles from our beloved Taoiseach, realizes that every major decision he has ever made [...]

Lovely weather we’re having, is it? I was up at 6:30 this morning to feed littlest his good morning bottle and as I opened the bedroom curtains I was elated to see the empty street bright with early morning sunshine. Not a cloud in the sky, a clear Californian blue. It’s the sort of weather [...]

Seanachie, of the superlative Pleasures of Underachievement highlights something that perhaps should be getting as much prominence as the Weekend vote issue but has, so far, managed to go completely under the electoral radar.

Almost all TV critics, when under whelmed by the first offering of a new series that has generated a certain amount of critical anticipation based on the pedigree of those involved, will tell us that they would prefer to restrain their full fury until after more episodes have aired.
‘Perhaps’, they opine with uncharacteristic charity, [...]

All the best to Irish Election in their various categories at the Irish Blog Awards tomorrow night and to Cian and Simon for the Best Contribution to the Irish Blogosphere category. Dublin Opinion shares consideration for the News/Current Affairs slot, but it’s more than enough for us to get shortlisted, so I’m happy for Irish [...]

In the Young Ones, Rik Mayle played ‘Rick,’ the agit-prop politics student who shouted ‘fascist’ whenever he started to lose an argument. The character was a satirical swipe at all those mid 80s student lefties who simply regurgitated Trotskyite slogans and spat out their venomous hatred of the Tories and Margaret Thatcher at every available [...]