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

This is an excerpt from the NY TIMES about Greenspan’s grilling by lawmakers in Washingon: Mr. Greenspan conceded a serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as [...]

Every time a crisis point arrives in relation to funds for our GPs the elephant in the living room pulls on its camoflage and goes completely invisible. Here is the truth: our GPs in Ireland are vastly overpaid for what they do.

I travelled to Brussels this week with a group of Irish journalists on a media trip to the EU which co-incided with the Summit. In the two days leading up to the Summit we met a number of Irish and non-Irish MEPs, several senior officials in the Commission and Parliament (including the highest ranking civil [...]

The EU Commission has said that it will look into whether the Irish bank plan breaches competition rules and if it does, the commission will force Ireland to recoup the money from banks. This may sound like more of Brussels poking its nose into our affairs. You know what it really is: a God send [...]

I was listening to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times talking on KRCW’s To the Point. Friedman has been arguing for years that the US needs to drastically cut its dependence on oil and to transition to more sustainable technologies and behaviours. “The problem for the US economy” he said “is that it has [...]

Voters are not ignorant, according to Bryan Caplan, they are irrational. Caplan is the author of the provocative “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, a book in which he lays a large part of the blame for poor political outcomes on the shoulders of voters. The voter messes things up because he or she makes [...]

Twelve year old Rebecca has a hole in her heart. It is a congenital defect and it may cause her problems in the future. But it is not by a long way her biggest challenge in life. Rebecca’s parents are both heroine addicts and they have abandoned her to her granny who is now in [...]

Yesterday I went to the welfare office. There remains a tinge of stigma on anything to do with welfare. I will admit that I’m not immune from it. As I made my way to the ‘dole’ office, something gnawed at my pride. Of course, this effect is shaped entirely by the orthodoxy that insists we [...]

A senior manager called by my desk last Wednesday and asked if he could have a word. There was nothing unusual in that. He had occasionally asked me to his office to discuss a project or a customer. And anyway, my immediate boss was on holiday and we had just put in a bid for [...]

McCain’s choice of running mate is not as inspiring as it looked at first. Tomaltach’s first reaction was very close to that of his old friend, An Spailpín, who gives a glowing assessment of McCain’s choice. True, on the face of it, Palin’s selection is a stroke of genius, a relatively young woman with considerable [...]

In a move that seems to have surprised not just the commentariat but some advisers, McCain has picked Sarah Palin, governer of Alaska, as his running mate. Hugely surprising given she hasn’t been in the Washington inner circle and of course – because she’s a woman! She is not just the first republican female candidate [...]

Who can be surprised by the announcement – reported in today’s Irish times – that Village Magazine is to cease publication? Village went intro terminal decline pretty quickly. From the start the mag made losses that were as impressive as its copy was unimpressive. True there were a handful of strong journos at times – [...]

Here we go again with another round of debate on third level fees. And again we all climb back into our ideological boxes. Free fees are fair because education should be free to all, scream the egalitarian idealists, or at least those who made a politicial stroke out of free fees. Too right, scream the [...]

I was delighted that Formula One boss, Max Mosley, won his case against the News of the World who paid one of his prostitutes to secretly film one of their orgies. The paper ran the headline “F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with 5 hookers”. Mosley sued the paper for invasion of privacy. The paper [...]

Kevin Myres has written another article which has caused a bit of stir. This time on Africa. Myres laments that aid to Africa has only allowed its population of miserables to multiply and propped up several vile regimes in the process. The Indo letters page was bombarded. Then in today’s Irish Times Bryan Mukandi from [...]

The following is my translation of an article in today’s Le Monde about proposals to get another Irish referendum. It is quite interesting in the kind of manoevering it reveals and also there is an interesting little comment at the end about the way the commission is evolving into something less than desireable. The article [...]