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

Source: Ballyer.net/Sundayworld It would be remiss of us here not to congratulate Kenneth Egan on his excellent performance in the semi-final of the Olympics light-heavyweight boxing. Class and poise, well done and best of luck.

As Bertie Ahern does his screen-test for a future job on The Sunday Game or Late Late, he was quick to defend his handling of the economic downturn. Unemployment now at 5.1% and construction workers falling like flies – and little re-training to give them a hand up. The Dublin Central TD, who quit office [...]

In a week dominated by harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in the ongoing Russian-Georgian conflict over the separatist region of South Ossetia. There are shades of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, when Hitler, on the pretext of defending a ‘persecuted’ German minority in that region of Czechoslovakia, was appeased and allowed to annex it, followed [...]

Even before the Irish people’s democratic decision to reject the fatally-flawed Lisbon Treaty, (which would have deepened the democratic-deficit in Europe still further), the source of Libertas funding was a bane of “yes” campaigners. To the elite, the possibility of the ‘mainstream’ parties being so decisively outspent by this upstart pro-business group with financial interests [...]

Well the story of the US campaign season, how a cartoon managed to raise $95,000 in days for a new aspiring politician, Sean Tevis in Kansas. If you’ve ever read XKCD read on. (Wikipedia entry for XKCD)

Irishelection.com is delighted to announce ‘Green Ink’s Week‘ a new feature to the site where cartoon and blogging legend Green Ink posts his reflections on the week. Each Friday the exclusive cartoon will be posted to the front page of irishelection.com by the artist presently known as Green Ink (but aims for a future title [...]

The news that the ESB is to seek a 20pc price hike will if granted, drive the average annual bill up to a staggering €1,100. It is up to the Commission for Energy Regulation to sanction all such rises. Before it does so, it had better think hard about the hardship they could bring and [...]

What? The price of a house on two offices? On a refurbishment? The space needed renovation and cleaning, and according to figures obtained by RTÉ News, the OPW spent approximately €220,000 to do this and to fit it out with furniture. The work took around three weeks to complete.

We have been playing it for a while, though we are repeatedly at pains to point out that there was no single reason why this Treaty failed. Voters voted for different reasons. Anyway, over on his blog Jon Worth gives his two cents on who gets to shoulder the blame in Euro-ville. The candidates? Charlie [...]

Cowen was giving a speech last night where he conceded that corrective action on the economy is likely to be “painful”. Not a great time for the ESRI to recommend a rise in Social Welfare to E230 per week across the boards, yet interesting to see them call it a priority in a time when [...]

The Financial Times’ Brussels blog has a very interesting story about the manouvering taking place on European Commission numbers from next year. As we found out, Nice will govern the makeup of the Commission from January next year – rather than Lisbon. This means there has to be less Commissioners than there are member states, [...]

Yup, recession. We are going to be hearing a lot about it thanks to the ESRI quarterly report and forecast. Forecast contraction this year 0.4% Unemployment next year forecast at 7% It anticipates that the economy will contract in size by 0.4 per cent this year after growing by 4.5 per cent in 2007. This [...]

Pardon the spelling if dickying is incorrect but I highlighted a post earlier today on Open Europe – as much for myself to return to later than anything else and yes those links in the sidebar do change!. They have a copy of the original Commission poll(PDF) that informed the awful reporting in the Independent [...]

I haven’t posted though its a topic I have wondered about for a while. Newstalk’s Brenda Power took to calling civil  servants in the HSE a while back in response to calls made to her phone-in show. Callers who had issues could expect them to be followed up by Power with calls made live on [...]

Conor and Richard  have spent a lot of time deconstructing the poll “data” that has been circulating around the two major broadsheets in the past few days. Not alone does the data not tally in some cases (under-15s voting?, 105% of the electorate giving a response?) it is still not publicly available to peruse days after [...]

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 [...]