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

Reports reached me over the weekend of sightings of tag rugby games by canvassers in various parks in the South East Dublin area.  The story went that canvassers went from park to park in t-shirts playing matches and there were posters about and much merriment.   No match reports or sightings of new players emerging to [...]

Too many interesting things to hold back until later in the week. Many thanks for all the emails and texts! Keep them coming. (Previous round ups can be read here). Eamon Gilmore has been getting on his bike, it’s the windswept look it seems. Pictured at the Alex White Campaign Poster launch today.

You are very welcome back to the web roundup. (Previous editions). Speaking of catchy images, is this the wierdest local election poster ever? The Fianna Fail blog continues to introduce us to up and coming candidates and their family histories. Though Michael Kingston comes vaguely close to standing for something, he shys away at the [...]

So much stuff to cram in to the round up and in so many formats. Fianna Fáil’s four new bloggers are introducing themselves in a series of posts on the Fianna Fáil website. I look forward to hearing more about the campaign trail, the reasons they are running and reactions to policy and it’s implementation [...]

Once the dream, now a reality with thanks to the genius over at Le Craic. A new plugin for Firefox called See the Failure is an add-on that replaces any occurence of Fianna Failure with Fianna Failure and Brian Cowen with Biffo. Its a bit of fun, have installed it and it works well once [...]

Can you feel it in the air? No, not the palpable excitement as election day draws near, its the tension of those who move through the night to bring you a feast of election posters on Wednesday. Like a Christmas morning (but a bit less like a good Christmas morning) we woke up to a [...]

leaked via Suzy the new website is currently housed at finegael.org. Minutes after Suzy leaked the url, Steph has done the background and it looks like the site is a basic cog of BBC.co.uk (which is clear if you look at the site). The CSS files hold the answers. Update Simon: The site is back [...]

I think this is worth posting on the day that is in it. As micandidate and other social media ontroponooors trot out meaningless twaddle about fixing politicians up with their yoof social media market (for a small fee per month) the list of those who are getting on fine without spending hundreds on the promise [...]

Interesting to note over the weekend that despite their lack of Obama juice, Labour sent out an excellent email to their list complete with embedded video and a call to donate. No mega bucks on US consultants who were there on a MAC when Obama swept North Carolina but none needed. It is not about [...]

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.

Germany has gone back to the paper ballot today with a decision by the German Federal Constitutional Court to immediately cease the use of electronic voting machines, in particular the Nedap ESD1 and ESD2. The Court said its decision was based on the evidence that the current technology had defects and was difficult to control. The devices were felt to contradict the principle of public elections with vote transparency as their defects make it possible to lose secrecy and control over the counting of the votes.

Ryanair are ratcheting up the pressure on Ministers to sell Aer Lingus to them. They issued an ISE announcement earlier today outlining the details of their meeting with Noel Dempsey today. It includes a commitment to recognise unions at the airline and give the government control of the slots at Heathrow. I have the full [...]

Barack Obama’s victory might not have been certain until late on, however his online victory was secured long before this. Anyone who attended the conference last month where Damian O Broin and Zack Exley gave an incredible breakdown of the online campaign would know that Obama’s superiority was borne of simplicity, ruthless organising and intelligent [...]

I am just wondering if any of our readers/bloggers are heading along to the education protest at Leinster House tomorrow evening? If so – and you fancy doing some blogging from there – could you get in touch via the comments or the email to arrange something with us here? Thanks

Over at the Property Pin they have been digging away at the proposals in yesterday’s budget for affordable housing provision. The website set up (homechoiceloan.ie) appears to suggest the government is steppign into subprime mortgages for those refused by banks and building societies as well as stipulating the houses purchased come from the 35,000-50,000 new, [...]

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)