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

Part of the UK’s new short-selling rules is to require that investors disclose short positions in quoted financial institutions.  The list reveals that some big investors are looking negatively at Irish banks –
[Wall Street Journal, subs. req'd] Lansdowne and Blue Ridge Capital disclosed short positions in Anglo Irish Bank. Kynikos Associates held a short position [...]

In a carefully calculated Friday afternoon news dump which will be lost in all the financial excitement, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has added at least 6 months to his earlier timetable for a Victims’ Rights Bill.  This is a sequel to his killing of Alan Shatter’s private member’s bill on the same subject back [...]

It’s been a particular achievement of the last 11 years of government to have had Eircom try a few years with every just-past-its-prime ownership model.  The current is the Australian innovation of an investment bank which runs a separate fund bringing in other investors to own and manage the target company which is acquired with [...]

And the overall economy?  Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on what sounds like advanced deliberations inside Dell about shifting its manufacturing capacity from Limerick to Lodz in Poland.  Office jobs in Ireland would be retained.  But as the article explains, Dell is unusual among computer makers in its retention of substantial manufacturing capacity — most [...]

Today’s Financial Times carries a bleak interview with Aer Lingus CEO Dermot Mannion, which of course is part of a pattern of bleak economic news these days.  One part of it brings us back to the uproar that surrounded the departure of Aer Lingus from Shannon for the El Dorado of Belfast –

With Gordon Brown’s one year stamp duty land tax holiday on properties costing £175,000 or less (up from £125,000), the differential between stamp duty on house purchases between the UK and Republic of Ireland is now even sharper.  The zero rate in Ireland is only up to €125,000 and then goes to 7%, the highest [...]

The above is a picture of a toll plaza on the Dulles Toll Road in the US state of Virginia. Note the structure: barrier free lanes on the left with an overhead gantry for transponder (EZ Pass) users with separated toll lanes on the right giving a choice of exact change payment or full [...]

The Prime Ministers of France and Spain pull their cabinets out of their August holidays for emergency meetings about the economy. Gordon Brown is back on the job while high profile ministers deal with messy dossiers. Even Belfast’s politicians are managing signals of their presence — if only to get involved in [...]

Is there a curse of Mahon? Added to the list of deceased on the witness lists comes today’s announcement that Albert Reynolds has “cognitive impairment” and cannot give evidence to the Tribunal. Albert has had a strange twilight to political career, having inadvertedly given his name to the standard libel defence in English [...]

It’s funny how transparent the government’s media trickery is.  Everyone knows that this is the time of year when Cabinet members will be on their holliers, except for the occasional pesky event like the WTO talks in Geneva, or Martin Cullen’s no doubt necessary 3 week jaunt to Beijing.  So what are the ways of [...]

BBC Radio 4’s Today in Parliament last night did a segment on Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech to the European Parliament in which he outlined the agenda of the French EU Council Presidency.  It begins 19 minutes into the program (Listen again/download).   Included in the post-speech interviews is Kathy Sinnott MEP, who says that she has offered [...]

Not that it’s any use in solving the problem, but has anyone done a cost comparison on the storage costs for the e-voting machines versus the cost of having a backup radar system for Dublin Airport?  In a cinematic note, the existence of a backup radar system was of course a key plot twist in [...]

The centrepiece of today’s announcement of public spending cuts by Brian Lenihan and Brian Cowen is a claim that the motivation is to cut only current spending while preserving capital spending.  This may make for pleasing-sounding spin and apparent commitment to the NDP but it ignores one simple thing: capital projects don’t exist in isolation.  They [...]

You know the image.  There’s one house in the estate that’s always trouble.  Every time they walk in the door, the neighbours are looking through the curtains wondering what trouble will be coming this time.

The Bloggingheads consortium does a chat on the Lisbon vote — prolific academic bloggers Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner. I’ve picked out an 8 minute clip where they get into some of the deeper international relations issues associated with EU integration. If nothing else, an example of one direction where blogging technology is [...]

Historian Norman Stone in today’s Wall Street Journal on the Irish mouse that roared.  He’s in favour.