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

This  Government would probably gleefully order the ritual sacrifice of half a dozen of its junior Ministers at the foot of the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park if it thought such slaughter might avoid having to hold a referendum on the new intergovernmental Treaty.   Right now there is a different ritual underway. The [...]

It’s hard to gauge how strong and stable this government is. A Red C poll for Paddy Power last week suggests the public haven’t been too perturbed by the political and media shenanigans surrounding December’s hair shirt budget. As Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein each lost a point in their ratings,  Fine Gael went up [...]

  In the early months of 2011 it sometimes felt like 1989 all over again, the year when people power across Central and Eastern Europe brought about the final collapse of communism.  This year it was the turn of people who had endured decades of oppression and dictatorship in the Middle East and North Africa [...]

  A country is not a company and government is not a learning institution in which the top class are required to write assignments on a flawed module (the PfG)  for assessment by the head teacher who will then present them with ‘action points’ on how to do better in future.  Nobody appears to have [...]

The President of Cyprus, Dimitris Christofias, is quoted in yesterday’s Der Spiegel: “We really ought to engineer a revolution against Merkel and Sarkozy,” he said, “but each of us needs the two of them for something.” No doubt David Cameron would agree, with the first of these sentiments anyway. The diehard home counties Tory view [...]

Far from a ‘state of the nation address’ that showed any respect for our collective intelligence, what we were treated to last night was a long-winded, patronising, poorly constructed, badly drafted pre-Budget party political broadcast on behalf of the government. Granted, it was well delivered by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, but then that’s part of [...]

The ECB has announced it is participating in a joint initiative with the Central Banks of UK, Japan, Canada, US and Switzerland to provide liquidity support, i.e. cash, to banks to avoid a new major credit crunch across the western world. The mechanism to provide dollar loans to banks will be in place by the end of [...]

Kite-flying of draconian budget measures and individual posturing by members of the Cabinet, either to protect their own departmental turf or demonstrate their pugnacity in defence of their own interests to party backbenchers and supporters, has provided a further episode, and an unedifying, cringmakingly awful one at that, in the political pantomime that’s been this [...]

It’s just one rum thing after another… A week ago, the Irish government was internationally humiliated when it emerged that a Committee of the German Bundestag was examining Michael Noonan’s Budget 2012 proposals for a 2% VAT increase which the rest of Ireland, including its parliament, had no prior inkling was in the works. Yesterday, [...]

Remember that ‘magic beans economics ‘ moment before the 2011 General Election? Michael Noonan and Joan Burton having a very public row on RTE radio about…yes, you have it! … cuts to Child Benefit. Joan in the studio, Michael, as she put it, ‘shouting from Limerick’ as the now Minister for Social Protection lambasted Fine [...]

Is the Labour Party beginning to buckle under the strains of being in government? Willie Penrose has today resigned from his post as the Super–Junior Minister and from the parliamentary LabourParty over the closure of Mullingar Army Barracks. Leinster MEP, Nessa Childers, told national radio this afternoon how she was threatened with expulsion from the [...]

On Monday last, Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, appears to have suffered a rush of blood to the head, of the kind that used to afflict Taoiseach Brian Cowen in the final days of the latter’s ill-fated regime, and now looks likely to hasten his own political demise. Noon today and the Greek government appeared [...]

First, it was Enda Kenny who said it; then Michael Noonan repeated it on the News at One on RTE; followed by Leo Varadkar on Tonight with Vincent Brown on 26th October last: The payment of 700m euro of Irish taxpayers money to unsecured, unguaranteed senior bondholders of the former Anglo Irish Bank will not, [...]

The referendum on increased powers for Oireachtas Committees deserved to fail. Had the public debate that some members of the government this past weekend wistfully suggested might have made a difference to the final result taken place, the net result might have been failure by an even larger margin than a 53% ‘No’. There was [...]

It’s ironic that in the run up to the referendum on De Valera’s draft Constitution in 1937, the proposed role of the President was one of the most contentious areas of political debate. Fine Gael feared that De Valera was ultimately planning for a Presidential dictatorship of sorts. Such fears were misplaced. The Presidency, as [...]

Brendan Howlin didn’t turn up to reply to the Second Stage debate on the Constitutional Amendment to grant Oireachtas Committees new powers to investigate issues of public interest on the evening of September 15th. No doubt he had more weighty Ministerial matters to contend with. But his absence signalled a worrying complacency within this Government. [...]