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

Clearly picking up from the political ether that the Mahon Tribunal report is coming out next week, Micheál Martin wants it to be known (via the Irish Times) that at least after the fact, there’s a new sheriff in town: There is a view within Fianna Fáil that if the leader is not seen to [...]

From Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report.  Illustrated here is that when it comes to deleveraging — banks dumping loans to shrink their balance sheets — NAMA is up there with the biggest of the European banks.  Indeed, for this purpose, NAMA is best seen as being like a massively overextended large European bank, banks [...]

It was the ECB wot done it: Dick Roche takes the Fianna Fail defence to the pages of the Wall Street Journal Europe.

IRA members seek US Medicaid assistance?  Only in conservative prank video.

For the past few days (ending on Friday), an Irish delegation of doctors and politicians was in Bahrain to seek the freedom from detention of doctors imprisoned during the protest crackdown in that country. The link arose because the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland has a long-standing partnership to train Bahraini doctors and some [...]

HSBC to pay $US63 million compensation to investors in light-touch regulated Irish investment fund linked to Bernie Madoff.

IMF statement on the US$3 billion loan for Egypt – A number of fundamental structural reforms, including the transition to a VAT-like consumption tax and reform of the highly inequitable and costly system of subsidies, are needed to improve the efficiency of public spending and help reduce the fiscal deficit in the medium term. We [...]

Wall Street Journal article with an interesting bit of news – Last fall, the [UK] FSA [Financial Services Authority] successfully pushed the Bank of Ireland to convert its U.K. operations from a branch into a subsidiary that required more capital, according to people familiar with the matter. The agency also required the U.K. subsidiary of Allied Irish Banks [...]

BBC Radio 4 with another scoop that should probably have been dug up by an Irish media outlet first.  The Manx2 crash at Cork Airport with the plane coming from Belfast.  The “airline’s” response to all queries — nothing to do us, sorry, we only sold the tickets.  A question for regulators both sides of the [...]

BBC Radio 4 gets Brian Lenihan’s version of recent events at 1.30 today, Sunday. More than he could thought he could get past the voters or his party colleagues, apparently.

Saudi Arabia thinks Batt O’Keeffe is still Minister for Enterprise (as of 15:50, 20 April) not Richard Bruton.

With the trilogy of Lenihan-era reports into Ireland’s financial collapse now completed (Regling-Watson, Honohan, and now Nyberg), there is now a lot of good information from which to draw.  But if you were hoping that completion of the trilogy meant something on the order of Return of the Jedi in terms of closure, you’d be [...]

At this pace of news dumps, we’re going to need a bigger Dumpster.  Today it’s the report into why Brian Lenihan misled Chris Andrews in response to his parliamentary question about the payment of bonuses at Bank of Ireland (the same question triggered the AIB bonus row).  First, a digression.   Let’s suppose you were considering [...]

Brian Lenihan has finally released his favourite selective leak document of the last couple of months, the independent review into the capacity of the Dept of Finance and its performance over the last 10 years.  As the Minister — fresh from his Alamo stand for Fianna Fail in Dublin — says The Minister appointed the [...]

In a sequence that will revive memories of Dick Roche’s desk-clearing approval of the M3 motorway near Tara in 2007, acting Minister for Communications, Energy, and Natural Resources Pat Carey has approved the Corrib gas pipeline project.   As with Tara, the next minister might view this either as a hot potato glad to be off his to-do list or as a [...]

“When I am on holiday, I am not foreign minister.”  It’s not just Ireland where ministers have blind spots about their connections.