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

Trying to cut some numbers to take account of the myriad comings and goings experienced in the current Dáil. Anyone want to poke holes? Sure am missing something. First draft looks like this:

How many do you have? Pictoral evidence to follow this afternoon once I get a pic from Tralee. Got my card in Dublin yesterday after applying to be taken off the Kerry register and put on DLR for the 2007 General Election. Got two then and two more now. Excellent work by our authorities. Anyone [...]

Fianna Fail put up the first group of videos of Brian Cowen taking questions submitted via the Fianna Fail website (first thought: get a decent mic). I embedded the economy one below, I am interested to know what people think.

Noel Dempsey followed up on his call to see those members of the Anglo 10 ‘nailed‘ with the quote that they had committed ‘economic treason’ yesterday. As Shane Ross noted back in April, this was not the way that the 10 saw it, an neither did the regulator or the politicians briefed by Anlgo. MINISTER [...]

It is thought to be the few places to do well in a recession (no doubt thanks to the E80 million that government put in the prize kitty every year) but your local bookie might be hurting. If they happen to be Celtic Bookmakers here are some of the more interesting politics bets you will [...]

Thanks to everyone who came on Saturday and those who watched the live stream online. Thanks to the guests for speaking – especially Zack for making the trip over to talk to us. I am currently working on getting the video uploaded. Tom Duke did a fantastic job of streaming and grabbing the video. If [...]

Reviewing one online campaign, and looking forward to the next. Six months on, it seems fairly clear that the impact of the web on the 2007 General Election campaign was minimal at best. Much was made in advance of May 2007 about the potential impact of the blogs (I remember the enthusiasm of the blogging [...]

One of the real problems of ‘reading’ Irish politics in the current period (since the 1990s) is the difficulty in assessing how much deliberate or contrived disagreements are used in order to shore up the credentials of one party or another in Government. We saw something of this in the first PD/FF administration where issues [...]

Flynn: ‘I never believed I did anything wrong’ Insight into the people of Mayo’s strange dependence on the Flynn can be found in the following film.

Ok so we lost Joe. And we miss him. We really do. At the Dail yesterday they all gave him a nod. Tony Gregory said the place wouldn’t be the same. It won’t. It will. But it won’t. Fianna Fail are still in charge but Fine Gael’s muscles have gotten some electoral steroids. How hard [...]

FF and Greens still in contact

The drunk and the powerful came together, they came with their wives and their fans, they slapped backs and winked at each other for they knew what so many had denied for so long – that Fianna Fail was going to win the 2007 general election. They gathered in groups of two and three, these [...]

Psychologists today warned of the dire consequences if the near-toxic levels of schadenfreude caused by the PD’s demise continue. For many socialists, liberals, libertarians and plain old democrats, the PD meltdown was a hidden diamond in the race to the centre-right that was election 07. The removal from office of so many hubristic, egotistical demagogues [...]

Again in that Doughty Street discussion one thing became clear was the huge inertia that exists within the Republic’s political system. Hopes of political renewal are often quickly dashed when, as Fintan O’Toole notes in his CiF blog this evening, the election result gives into weeks of internal horsetrading, and out comes an amalgam of [...]