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

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 the [...]

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 will [...]

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 in one [...]

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 [...]

Any floating voters in Dublin North East may be interested in the results of my little local experiment.
The constituency is quite broad in that it extends from Howth and Sutton to Darndale and Coolock. I am in the Darndale/Coolock end of the constituency and I had hoped to be proved right that all our candidates [...]

Do you know why a Politician is like a good pint?
After you fill the pint with brown stuff, it starts to empty.
After you slip the politician the brown envelope, it starts to empty.

and you just can’t keep either of them filled up

What was that about? Were they talking about Afghanistan?

Inspired by an earlier conversation with Damien. Certainly not inspired by whazzizname off the telly, you know, that twat in the suit. Not Bertie, the other twat.

Callely’s rabbits, Pole Up The Hole, Spliffogate, and now Willie O’Dea exercises his willie live on Today FM:
“This morning Mary O’Connor from Lisnagry, Co. Limerick was the envy of every young girl in the country…ahem!
The obsessed fan finally had her dreams come true and this morning she met her idol….eh…Willie O Dea!

Mary even managed to [...]

UPDATE: Ruairi Quinn has but didn’t inhale, and Willie O’Dea thought he had, but actually got shit-faced off a ciggie. Interviews on Lunchtime on Newstalk today.