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

Gordon Brown statement to House of Commons on Hillsborough Agreement –
None of this could have been achieved without working closely with the Irish government – and I pay tribute to Brian Cowen, the Irish Foreign Minister, Micheal Martin and to the Taoiseach’s predecessors Bertie Ahern and Albert Reynolds.
Who’s missing from that list of predecessor Taoisigh?

The Department of Finance has published the January exchequer returns.  The main focus of course is on the revenue side.  It’s not easy to figure out where the January returns are relative to expectations since they don’t tell us “the profile” for January.   On the face of it, what’s worrying is the big percentage declines [...]

Red C poll capturing post-budget reaction for Sunday Business Post with previous poll (22nd Nov) in parentheses: FF 27% (23%), FG 34%(36%), Lab 17%(17%), SF 8%(10%), Green 5% (5%), Ind. 9% (9%).
These results are not easy to interpret.

In a move that suggests a news dump (Friday afternoon, anyone with an eye on news waiting for events in Stormont), the Minister for Finance has named the expert who will write one of the pre-reports into the banking system inquiry.  He is Klaus Regling and his track record seems to feature the kind of [...]

The Irish Times has an interesting two part series on the predicament of the Irish unions.  Today’s installment provides a good insight into the minds of the union leadership and in so doing illustrates the challenge of relevance.  David Begg and Jack O’Connor now say that after 20 years of Social Partnership™, all they ever [...]

Get ready for the 1st word above to spring from Brian Cowen’s mouth in the Dail any day now. Or perhaps not.  Anyway, the context is that Ireland’s “light touch” regulation during the boom years resulted in a free-for-all not just for our friendly local banks but also for Dublin-based operations of foreign banks who [...]

After establishing himself as the one minister making actual decisions during the recent cold spell, Batt O’Keeffe has struck again today with an abrupt decision to abolish the National University of Ireland.  As anyone with a degree from UCD, UCG, UCC, and Maynooth knows, NUI is the body that actually awards the degree, and also [...]

The cold weather, in addition to matching the economic mood, as highlighted some structural issues in Irish local government — issues that have slipped down the agenda with all the focus on the budget and NAMA.  A few things worth mentioning.  The frequent word in government statements about the weather is “local” as in local [...]

Of a Christmas Eve, no less, Brian Lenihan has issued the statutory definition of eligible assets for NAMA.  This raises the incidental point that it’s really not a good time for the media to take their eye of the ball, as the Department of Finance has also in effect admitted that performance-related “bonus” was part [...]

Hot on the heels of the NAMA board, Brian Lenihan is delivering his Christmas pressies ahead of schedule with the valuation regulations for NAMA.  Before we get into a potentially key detail, have your calculators ready for the following.  Let’s suppose that you are an ordinary decent developer with a project that has revenue of [...]

Did you know that when it comes to the financial sector, Ireland has “stronger oversight and better regulation”?  That’s the sales pitch from Billy Kelleher TD who has the Trade and Commerce portfolio within the department of enterprise and employment.  It’s a quote from a Financial Times story which says that Ireland is marketing itself [...]

There are various ways to summarize the vision represented by Budget 2010.   One is provided by taking a look at Table 10 in the Stability Programme Update which sets out the path to get us back to the Maastricht limit of a general government deficit at 3 percent of GDP by 2014.

As was hinted at before, Royal Bank of Scotland has reversed its previous position that most of its distressed Ulster Bank loans would be going into the UK’s Asset Protection Scheme.   The UK Treasury has quietly published a detailed account of the loans that RBS is putting into their “insurance” scheme and while the agony [...]

There are various reasons why the “12 Days of Christmas” went down like a lead balloon.  Central Bank board member David Begg seems to have settled on blaming the media.  But among the explanations is also that the government and the unions were promising to deliver something that people thought had already been promised — [...]

The Department of Finance has news dumped an analysis of “Replacement Rates and Unemployment” while everyone is waiting for the 12 Days of Christmas deal with the public sector unions to be finalized.  The replacement rate is defined as the percentage of potential disposable income in a job that could be retained by a household [...]

SIPTU’s Manus O’Riordan (head of research) has put on his wellies and waded through the recent CSO releases on wages and employment to argue that the media fixation with large double-digit wage differences between public and private sector workers is not warranted.  He has several points.