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

It’s time to put the government’s stewardship of the economy firmly on the agenda.  The report of the National Competitiveness Council makes interesting reading.  It’s a dry and somewhat technical document and it takes a useful survey of Ireland’s position in relation to the globalised economy and summarises its structural strengths and weaknesses.  It notes [...]

Back in November I linked to A Fair Deal: Fighting Poverty and Exclusion that had just been released by the Labour Party. There were elements of the document that I found very positive but I pointed out that there were missed opportunities to develop a more rigorous critique of the Celtic Tiger economic model. [...]

In the Guardian blog Comment is Free, Professor Anthony Giddens bemoans the lack of esteem with which intellectuals are held in the UK. He compared the bestseller non-fiction lists in the UK and USA and finds that the latter’s list is dominated by works “of a quite intellectual nature,” which compared unfavourably with the [...]

The somewhat portentous title above is to hail the arrival of a new blog called Notes on the Front. The perspective of the author, Michael Taft, an old friend of mine, is firmly that of the socialist left, although at this stage he would welcome even a bit of muscular social democracy! His most [...]

Labour has taken quite a hit in the recent opinion polls. When Pat Rabbitte was elected leader, I was pleased that the party would be led by someone who was capable of devising the kind of political strategy that might take the party beyond the limits of traditional labourism. While the party quickly dispensed [...]

Today’s poll in the Sunday Business Post is bad news for the ruling party. Fianna Fáil has dropped another 2 points and its three month average figure in the Red C tracking polls is now at 34 per cent. This is not guaranteed to put them out of office but it makes it more likely. [...]

After reading a friendly piece in today’s Indo by John Cooney in advance of the new RTE series to mark the former Taoiseach’s birthday, I turned to Garret’s weekly column in the Saturday Irish Times. It is a most astute piece of commentary. Garret wants to reiterate the point that if Bertie Ahern [...]

Senan Molony in the Irish Independent makes much of a poll appearing in the current Farmers Journal that appears to show that “Fine Gael has siezed control of the crucial farming vote”.  According to the poll, seemingly based on responses to a questionnaire, it seems that 41.6pc intend to give their first preference to Fine [...]

Columnist Noel Whelan is fond of referring to that wonderful and already much missed TV drama West Wing. In his last column for the Irish Examiner he referred to President-elect Santos’s effort to get CJ Cregg to stay on and work for the new administration because of her “institutional memory” and made a comparison [...]

The latest Irish Times/TNSmrbi poll indicates that people prefer the alternative government by a margin of 4%. But when asked to predict who will actually win, the current coalition has a nine point lead. The appetite for change is clear but many voters still see a problem of credibility with the rainbow alternative. [...]

That’s one of the questions that springs to mind after digesting the poll in this morning’s Irish Times. The media may have been critical of aspects of the recent Fine Gael ard fheis and Enda Kenny’s speech in particular, for pandering to public opinion for the sake of it. But, as Marl Brennock [...]

Update: Originally posted as mine but actually Gerry’s post
Is that a trick question? Of course they matter. But the question is do the personalities of party leaders matter sufficiently to swing the outcome of an election? There is a belief that such personalities are hugely important and this is reflected in the [...]

Frank Flannery, the national Director of Elections for Fine Gael, is an experienced and shrewd analyst of electoral politics and, according to the Irish Times this morning, his calculations show Fine Gael and Labour coming well shy of a majority. In what is described as an internal Fine Gael analysis [...]

The Sunday Business Post has published another of its monthly tracking polls. It shows a five per cent surge in support for Fianna Fáil, up to 38%, and a corresponding drop of 2% and 3% for Fine Gael and Sinn Féin respectively. The numbers confirm the trend that FF does better when the [...]

Summing up some of the issues that arose at the PDs conference last weekend, a commentator in the Irish Independent remarked that “when it comes down to politicking and jockeying for position, it’s more a case of compatible personalities than policies”. He argued that anyone who watched “the ‘laugh-in/love-in’ between [...]

Stephen Collins in yesterday’s Irish Times remarked that “the decision of the PDs to go back to the well for more tax-cutting policies suggests a belief that a significant number of voters out there are still in the market for more cuts”. This raises the question to what extent individual [...]