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

Sarah Carey lifts the lid on the Lisbon campaign from inside the Sunday Times. This one, as they say, has juice with a second referendum coming up - always good to get the narrative up and running early.
Politicians and commentators who argued for the Lisbon Treaty did so because they believed it was in Ireland’s [...]

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 [...]

Dan Boyle was selected last night to run for the Green Party in the Euro-South constituency next summer. The senator’s work will be cut out for him getting into one of the three seats.
The field is likely to have two sitting MEPs who won in 2004 and a third who was parachuted in for Simon [...]

Contrary to what many government TDs might like you to believe, the past is not a foreign country. In 2002, when the Fianna Fail promised to invest in the education system, it was because Ireland needed to improve its system if its youth were to receive their right to an adequate education and if Ireland [...]

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

REd Mum has the post on Michael Kennedy TD at the pensioner protest on Wednesday.
He spoke of the money given to single parents and their ‘10 kids’ and, get this, ‘FREE HOUSES’. (They are actual quotes.) Seriously my daughter is 16 years old now and he is saying there are free houses, given what I [...]

Yesterday, in the aftermath of the climbdown regarding the Medical Cards fiasco, I read a post on the weblog of Green Party Justice Spokesperson Ciarán Cuffe, which dealt with the Medical Cards issue.
After reading the post, I gave him my view of the Fianna Fáíl / Green coalition, and put some questions to him and [...]

Labour’s Cllr Dermot Lacey notes over on his blog that Dublin City Council have started their voter registration drive for the new electoral register.  Nice posters, which include messages in English, Irish, Chinese and what is presumably Polish, are up in Smithfield and other areas with high numbers of people who don’t have English as [...]

We hear that Fianna Fail county councillors are so outraged about the medical cards that they have arranged a regional meeting of an entire Euro constituency of councillors at 24 hours notice for tomorrow. No doubt they are spitting at the prospect of taking the largest of kickings in June for the measure.They aren’t the [...]

On the back of the solidarity being shown by Ministers in taking a 10% pay cut for next year, a source got me wondering whether those Ministers with additional income streams - like teachers’ pensions - might not be convinced to forgo these also. What with them spending enough time in the Dail to qualify [...]

AT this rate it is the last dose of humour we will see today. Keep an eye out here for details of liveblogging around the ’sphere.
Update: Live blogging of the budget will be taking place over at Suzy’s scribblelive plot.

PD local councillor Cait Keane has joined Fine Gael in Dublin South. There is by-election coming up and with Tom Kitt steppign down in 2012 Fine Gael might lick their chops at a potentail third seat.

As per last night’s post, the full details are below. The clear responsibility for the prolonged downturn the ESRI expect is the bad state of government finances. They don’t have the capacity or room for manouvere to use the budget counter-cyclically and ramp up government investment in economic activity.
- We now expect GNP to contract [...]

Joe Zefran is the editor of RTE online at RTE.ie - the online presence of the State broadcaster and he is going to be attending the Irish Social Media conference on October 4. He will be talking about the developments in the mass media here with regard to the internet and technological change. I met [...]

And the overall economy?  Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on what sounds like advanced deliberations inside Dell about shifting its manufacturing capacity from Limerick to Lodz in Poland.  Office jobs in Ireland would be retained.  But as the article explains, Dell is unusual among computer makers in its retention of substantial manufacturing capacity — most [...]

IF you haven’t glimpsed the Sunday Independent, you can guarantee that the edited extract of a speech given by Junior Minister at the Department of Trade and Enterprise John McGuinness will be dominating discussion of the Social Partnership talks over the coming days. It remains unclear if the governmen is capable of steering a course [...]