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

There are various reasons why the “12 Days of Christmas” went down like a lead balloon.  Central Bank board member David Begg seems to have settled on blaming the media.  But among the explanations is also that the government and the unions were promising to deliver something that people thought had already been promised — [...]

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. 

The trial in Cork of Ted Cunningham, accused of laundering proceeds from the Northern Bank raid, heard detailed and sometimes bizarre testimony from the prosecution today — much of it drawn from transcripts of Garda interviews.  The most interesting twist is the return of the name of Phil Flynn, onetime chairman of Bank of Scotland’s [...]

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.

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.

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, [...]

Brian Cowen released a statement in the last hour announcing his candidacy for the Fianna Fail leadership and succession of Bertie Ahern. It is interesting to see he was nominated by Brian Lenihan, a man widely tipped to have his eye on becoming the Brian Cowen’ to Brian Cowen and succeeding the next Taoiseach when [...]

It strikes one as serendipity – for the opposition at least – that the Dail debates a motion on the three reports from last week into Port Laoise, the one that gave rise to the Naughton letter and entered ’systems-failure’ in the political lexicon by failing patients in a grotesque multiplicity of manners while the [...]

“To me, services for cancer patients are worse now than they were seven years ago in the midlands”
…
“I am writing out of a deep sense of despair and frustration…I have written to senior management about seven times in the last two years…outlining how we would deal with the problem…all to no avail”

James Reilly of Fine [...]

James Reilly is calling for the Minister for Health Mary Harney to resign after it was revealed that the misdiagnosis scandal in Portlaoise continued to claim more unfortunate victims. I think the problem is getting beyond the Minister in this case though, Professor Brendan Drumm is also getting roped into the politics of this scandal [...]

It’s unlikely to rate a mention with all the other unfortunate events swirling around the government, but the Financial Times has offered a mixed-bag verdict on Brian Cowen’s job performance relative to the rest of the Eurozone finance ministers (unfortunately they don’t provide a matching table of salaries).  The punchline is that Cowen has slipped [...]

Today’s Irish Times has the report (it was always going to happen really, sadly) on the letter sent to Mary Harney’s office in 2005 by a Consultant Peter Naughton who said that radiology in the Midlands Regional Hospital was being provided by those who “had no expertise in the area”.
The ’smoking gun’ as it were [...]

RTE has seen a letter from nearly a year ago from the radiology department to Midlands Regional Hospital management warning of the risk of missed diagnoses of breast cancer due to the out-of-date equipment that the hospital was using for screening — X-ray images on film when state of the art is digital imaging that [...]

Bringing the Irish angle on the global credit crisis to a wider audience, today’s New York Times reports on the case of Structured Credit, a small Dublin based fund whose lending arrangements with various international banks are under severe strain due to continued requests for collateral and which is now in court-supervised restructuring.  And all [...]

Fianna Fail have made available the prepared text of Cowen’s remarks in Ballina this afternoon.  One could question what the value added of the pugnacious speech is, especially as the event is presumably intended to leave some of the partisan politics aside for a little while.  Nevertheless it does usefully collect the FF (and ex [...]