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

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

As Bertie Ahern does his screen-test for a future job on The Sunday Game or Late Late, he was quick to defend his handling of the economic downturn. Unemployment now at 5.1% and construction workers falling like flies - and little re-training to give them a hand up.
The Dublin Central TD, who quit office in [...]

The Prime Ministers of France and Spain pull their cabinets out of their August holidays for emergency meetings about the economy. Gordon Brown is back on the job while high profile ministers deal with messy dossiers. Even Belfast’s politicians are managing signals of their presence — if only to get involved in [...]

A thread on boards.ie has been the source of some impressive citizen activism in the last week and it seems the campaign there is just getting started.
As some people already know, Dublin City Council recently signed a deal with advertising group JCDecaux which would see a number of advertising panels erected on the city’s streets [...]

Pardon the spelling if dickying is incorrect but I highlighted a post earlier today on Open Europe - as much for myself to return to later than anything else and yes those links in the sidebar do change!. They have a copy of the original Commission poll(PDF) that informed the awful reporting in the Independent [...]

The Dublin LGBTQ Pride Festival is well underway, and continued yesterday evening with the annual debate in the Walton Theatre in TCD at 7.30pm. The motion for discussion was : “Same-Sex Couples Want Access to Civil Marriage, not Civil Partnerships”Chair: Sen. Ivana BacikProp: Sen. David Norris & Ailbhe Smyth (MarriagEquality)Opp: Neil Ward (Dublin Pride) & [...]

Thomas Byrne TD will be familiar to blog readers. The newly elected TD competed via blog and on the ground with Dominic Hannigan for votes last May. Anyhow, turns out his former speciality was solicitor specialising in EU law and in a public message on the blog he is inviting voters (I doubt he could be that picky [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the referendum.  To the reporter’s credit, he avoids the usual style of foreign reporting — asking taxi-drivers on the way in from the airport to the 5-star hotel — and goes to Carlow and Laois to get the viewpoint of farmers.  Declan Ganley and Ulick McEvaddy [...]

An interesting clash of interpretation on the widely discussed style of the new Taoiseahc. For Pat Leahy the new style is “clear thinking and firm decision-making”. For the Sunday Indo, it is “authoritarian” and “stalinist”. An enigmatic man.

When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair last summer, he was hit by the floods and then the foot and mouth outbreak — and went up in the polls. Brian Cowen might need a similar trend over the next couple of months. With Lisbon and the economy already looking like the hot potatoes of [...]

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 record [...]

The Offaly Independent reports that a massive caravan of Offaly folk will descend on the Dail today to celebrate the election of Brian Cowen to the post of Taoiseach (at around 3.30pm - live on Oireachtas.ie)
“There`ll be a festive atmosphere,” Tom O`Donovan of O`Donovan Cowen Solicitors, a firm in which Minister Cowen is involved, [...]