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

Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin is in charge of the Lisbon II campaign.  With summer schools apparently forming the main forum for policy debate with the Dail in recess, he was perhaps giving us a preview of what the Yes campaign will look like in this evening’s remarks to the MacGill event.  Writing as [...]

This is the fourth in a series of posts looking at who would or would not keep their seats if an election was called now. With not much  local polling to go on this is entirely my opinion and probably wrong. If you have any ideas on it please drop a comment. Meath East. 

Although there’s already plenty of documentation of the impact of the economic crisis, it’s interesting to look at how outsiders see it.  Here’s today’s Wall Street Journal looking along the Liffey/N4/M4 and in particular at the postponed plan to move most Guinness brewing to Leixlip.  As the article notes, property prices were critical to the [...]

The Oireachtas has today launched a detailed profile based on the 2006 Census of all the constituencies in the country. The information is quite interesting and comprehensive and details all 42 constituencies in the country.

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 [...]

Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath TD have lost their challenge to the constituency boundaries.  McGrath says that the case was decided on a “technicality” although it’s not yet clear what that is.  One possibility is that neither was from a constituency that was underrepresented according to the 1 TD per 30,000 criterion (one issue being at [...]

As Mick notes in the comments here, we have three siblings to join the brother-in-law/sister-in-law, husband/wife combinations elected to Dáil Eireann. Tom Kitt, Michael Kitt and Aine Brady (nee Kitt) are all elected to the 30th Dáil.

Amidst the plethora of “2006-in-review” articles populating today’s papers, there is one very interesting piece in the Tribune. The way our electoral system works makes polls slightly unhelpful—ignoring particularity within constituencies and also the nature of transfers—but the Tribune have taken a look across the most contested constituencies to attempt to predict the likely election [...]

In what is unlikely to be an isolate scenario politicians from all parties are getting worried about the levels of voter apathy in the Kildare constituencies. “Fianna Fail TD Sean O’ Fearghail has already expressed concern that large numbers of people entitled to vote are not even registered to do so especially in new housing [...]