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

One of the over looked aspects of the last week was the calling of the election for the 11th of March. The significance of that date is that it is a Friday. Now traditionally Irish general elections are on a Thursday. Back around the time of the last general election we started a campaign called [...]

The final sticking plaster to put Humpty Dumpty Ireland together again is the Commission on Taxation report, due for presentation to the Minister for Finance at the end of the month. It’s the flip side of the coin to last week’s An Bord Snip Nua, or McCarthy Report, which sets out the agenda for fixing [...]

Re: the cuts in the Defence Forces proposed by the McCarthy Report.

Headscratching stuff. The Defence Forces have already been pared down to the bone from a decade-long transformation arising from the PricewaterhouseCoopers report in the Nineties. So where is the ‘fat’ meant to come from, exactly?

Dublin-centric is too light a phrase for the Snip report. Rural Ireland is nailed – and I say this as someone born and bred in Blanchardstown, west Dublin. Many of the local services and State initiatives that combine to sustain the West are singled out for particular attention.

For all its amazing level of detail (farewell then, Newfoundland-Labrador Partnership p204 Vol II), there are a couple of issues where An Bord Snip Nua puts some hot potatoes on the table and then kicks to touch (to mix the metaphors). 

Written by Niall of Associate Notes – The report on this section begins by outlining the role of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, (D/AFF) before going establishing that the D/AF&F accounts for €3.3bn of expenditure in 2009. It claims that the D/AF&F and its associated agencies employ circa 6,200. The Bord is proposes [...]

Written by Aoife Carroll Barrister-at-law (and for full disclosure, member of the Labour Party) – The Snip report makes various recommendations about the courts structure and the administration of the courts which, as a barrister, I read with significant interest. There is to be savings of €23.2 million in relation to the organisation of the [...]

The HSE gets 10 pages to itself in the report, on top of the 6 pages given to the department of health. The report in general recommends that citizens pay for services they are currently entitled to – this comes on top of a reduction in the number of people who are entitled to these [...]

Health, ah the Dept of Health. Not just the DHC but the HSE. And staff levels. Bertie and his failure to deal with it at inception means that the Bord Snip report goes to town on an already battered service. The Dept of Health is a policy body since the creation of the HSE and [...]

Savings of €41.7m have been identified from the €800m current annual expenditure. 65 staff should be cut according to the proposals. How it would be done: Rationalisation of the overseas embassies by reducing their number from 75 to 55. Reduce pay grade of Ambassadors from Assistant Secretary level to principal officer level in all cases [...]

The report recommends cutting the Department of Transport’s €3.1bn budget for 2009 by €127.1m, or about 5%, with corresponding staff reductions of 50. The report believes most of its recommendations could be implemented within a short timescale and stresses that its savings proposals “should be considered as conservative.” Try telling that to the CIE management [...]

Back in January, when it became clear that Bord Snip wanted to hit social welfare benefits hard, Minister Mary Hanafin tried to ease the pain. “It’s very difficult to take anything away”, she said, insisting that the priority would be to protect vulnerable people who are reliant on social welfare. That hasn’t happened. The Bord [...]

Written by Rob Heigh of Gazette Headline items: Departmental snips will lead to €238m in “savings” and 600 redundancies – respectively meaning, in other words, reductions of 12% of budget and 11% of workforce. Recommendations: All science, technology and innovation funding channeled through one pipeline to remove what they identify as the duplication of resources [...]

Warning: This thread will be constantly updated by various writers as details emerge. Readers are free to point out anything we’ve missed in the comments section and we’ll subsume them into the post. It is written somewhat on-the-fly, so apologies for potentially poor English, we post first then edit. – The Irish Times and Independent [...]

Back in the heady day of the Celtic Tiger. We here on Irish Election ran a campaign to get the day of the election moved away from Thursdays(loads of posts here).  Getting 1381 signatures. We got on radio and in the media. Fine Gael even brought a motion in the dail up. We even had [...]

In a packed Dail chamber, Brian Cowen was elected Taoiseach of Ireland after a vote to choose between him, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore. The vote was won by 88 to 76. He was nominated by Bertie Ahern himself however it only became quite raucous as Mary Harney seconded Cowen’s nomination and defended the government’s [...]