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

Speaking at the launch of the Merchants Quay Ireland 2006 report, Junior Minister for Drug Strategy Pat Carey suggested the government may look at implementing a needle exchange programme nationally. The programme seems prompted by the volume which the smaller Merchants Quay project deals with. Last year nearly 40,000 visits to the programme were logged [...]

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.

FF and Greens still in contact

Brian O’Neill of Sportsspread.com told Slugger today that they have a seen a huge shift in money over the weekend in the political spread market. In just three days, Fianna Fail have had a surge in money, moving them from a predicted 63 seats up to 70. In the same period, Fine Gael and Labour [...]

(Originally posted on AdamMaguire.com)
I’ve had more than a passing interest in politics for many years now and I’ve always believed that young people need to engage and be engaged in the larger political discourse. I believe that the main instrument of youth participation within Ireland’s political parties, the youth wing, is actually counter-intuitive and counter-productive [...]

Irish Anarchist Organistion, the Workers Solidarity Movement, today launched a campaign to encourage public understanding of our democratic system in the run up to the general election. The campaign will focus on groups such as young people, the working class and ethnic minorities, who have a history of high rates of abstention.
The campaign launched with [...]

I set out tonight to focus in on blogs from left-wing candiates, but first a quick mention of
Thomas Byrne, FF candidate for Meath East, who got into a bit of a tizz with Mary Hanafin over the issue of education and autism. His comments were reported in the Drogheda Indo, while Thomas gets to grips [...]

This morning we got two further announcments from the two major parties and Sinn Fein launched their transport policy;

The doorstep challenge has just been helped out by a very interesting idea over at William Wall’s website. I will let him introduce it;
“What do you say when perfectly nice people, who happen to represent a corrupt party, knock on your door?
I humbly propose the Citizen’s Manifesto, free to download in PDF format. I urge [...]

The Greens launched their tax and economic policy this morning. It is interesting to note, first off, that the Green Party reckon growth forecasts should be no higher than 4% over the coming years. The PDs on Sunday used 5%+ and I think FG and Labour had a similar figure.

Will look something like this it seems, Pat today announced a 100 day in office plan (modelled on this?). Below are the ten priorities (from labour.ie):

In todays Irish Times (subs req’d), Bertie gives his reasons for a Thursday poll;
“I listened to the argument the last time. And it didn’t work. Friday did not work. I was all over the city on the Friday. What people do now is get out of the city on a Friday afternoon. [...]

Following up on his announcement to run for president in the USA, democratic hopeful Barack Obama has replaced his initial exploratory site with a much improved web 2.0 version featuring some especially heavy use of social networking software. One wonders how long before politicans get on the social networking bandwagon here…

According to a report on Newstalk, Bertie Ahern is still looking to press ahead with a Children’s Rights referendum prior to the next election. Beyond the purely electoral, there isn’t any really good reason why this referendum should be held separate from the general election, but that really isn’t here or there. What is though, [...]

€500: that’s approximately what the surplus means to every man, woman, and child in Ireland today. What could you do with €500? Maybe buy a new government, or maybe add it with your neighbor’s €500 and help fix up the local medical facilities, or maybe your estate residents could help fund a rapid transit stop [...]

Back at the Blogging the Election conference, an idea crept up on me of using YouTube and cheap video technology to bring the real Irish politician to light. The idea in essence is see if the people standing for election are as generically amenable as they often seem to portray themselves as being. After all, [...]