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

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 wrote this on my own blog this morning, but I thought I would share it here too…
I have written about this before and I will say it again.  One of the worst things to ever happen to education in Ireland was when Niamh Breathnach as minister for education abolished fees.
Ostensibly, this was to [...]

Brigid Laffan gives her analysis of the Lisbon Referendum in today’s Irish Times suggesting that we are in a minority of one, with scepticism rising about our commitment to Europe and the EU. Vincent Browne is not in agreement - it will plod along as usual.
I am minded to agree with him, it will be [...]

Intersting analysis over at Open Democracy about the reasons Lisbon was rejected and an attempt to conceptualise the ‘democratic deficit’ that was apparently at the heart of the rejection. It is interesting from perusing the papers today that this analysis is taking a lot of hold, that it was the local context that informed voters [...]

It would be foolish to completely rubbish the newly-announced plans to introduce road safety classes to Transition Year students as any move in that direction is a positive one; but the whole thing does leave you asking ‘is this it?’

We had this up yesterday about the Fine Gael proposals on Schools and the piece about cheap laptop provision to all students. Hanafin has laughed off the possibility of supplying laptops to all 344,000 secondary pupils for a total of €23m – or just under €67 each. The main reason is the requirement for software suites [...]

I thought it couldn’t get worse. I was wrong. And now, due to Eoghan Harris, we see the Coolacrease situation become elevated to a semi-political issue, hence my posting this to Irish Election as well as the Cedar Lounge Revolution.
Eoghan Harris in today’s Sunday independent writes about Coolacrease (Tom McGurk also writes about it sensibly [...]

The folks at the Political Science Department at Trinity are very capable, you know. Not alone do they study for exams and prepare election surveys but they have pulled time from somewhere to create pickyourparty.ie. The premise is simple, they ask you a few questions and they measure your response against a series of elite [...]

Since the Nixon and Kennedy series of Great Debates, politics and television have become a critical medium for campaigns. Nixon was twenty pounds underweight with a sickly pallor, dressed in a ill-fitting shirt, and he refused makeup to improve his color and lighten his perpetual five o’clock shadow for the television debate, needless to say, [...]

It seems in FF’s hurry to get some vague campaign website up and running that they’ve missed out on hiring some competent designer for their new “Next Steps” campaign site. The resulting image is shown here:

The site, as it now stands, has a confusing visual effect occuring on the main page which does not seem [...]

By chance, I was browsing around the Fianna Fail site this morning and there was a little puff piece on the ‘Next Steps’ for the environment. The first two were; 1)Lower carbon emissions and 2) ensure that Irish water quality is the best in Europe. It got me thinking about how government goes about carrying [...]

I decided to merge these two since they are related. First a quick update on the weekend vote petition. It is just over a week since we kicked off the petition for a weekend vote this General Election. We have gone over the arguments and there is healthy debate over the rights and wrongs of [...]

Irish media and politics are still recovering from the “Luntz” effect and the first use by a media outlet of a political focus group. Frank Luntz conducted the focus group of “undecided” voters from the Dublin/Leinster region for RTÉ’s The Week in Politics programme. The premise of the program was that there is approximately 18 [...]

There is a growing realisation about the use and potential for weblogs and social networking tools such as Flickr or YouTube in the mainstream media. The article Web-based politics and democracy for the 21st century in today’s Irish Times by Karlin Lillington is just the beginning of what will be the most Internet-savvy general election [...]

Fine Gael recently announced their “radical” proposals for the education system, putting forward a 7-part plan which they claim will future-proof our place as leaders of knowledge. Without dissecting the plan completely, one idea of their’s—and, I think, Labour’s—caught my eye: the provision of laptops to every secondary school pupil. As part of this policy, [...]

In recent months I’ve found myself craving some solid political reading of some description. In the last few years, the only overtly political books I’ve ventured into have been the type of pop-politics favoured by Michael Moore and others but now I want something broader, deeper and different. I figure with all of the politically-minded [...]