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

Ian Kehoe in this morning’s Sunday Business Post on the An Bord Snip report (not online yet):
The Bord Snip report will be given to minister fo finance Brian Lenihan this week. He plans to bring it to Cabinet the following week. Lenihan’s preference is to publish the report despite growing tension between his department and [...]

When I put the headline on this post, I thought, cheekily, that I could have gotten away with just saying Journalism in Ireland: Waste of Time. It would still be a launch pad for a viable post: over the last number of years, journalism in Ireland hasn’t been a pretty place. The big broadsheets have [...]

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Michael Lowry released the statement below in the last hour, he’s airing some grievences about how he feels the Moriarty Tribunal is operating. Nobody seems to have done anything with it yet – maybe for reasons I am not aware of – the statement itself is fairly defensive.

Last night the government put forward plans to invest in jobs to the trade unions as part of the social partnership plans. The fund will initially consist of a €250 million investment with a possible pot of €1bn in theory.

Much of page 12 in today’s Irish Times is given to follow-up articles on yesterday’s conference on political reform. Like most conferences, it had its good parts and…
I spent the day in a bunker-like lecture hall deep in the bowels TCD’s Arts Block listening to highly-informed journalists and academics. The vast majority of the speakers were either insightful, educational or [...]

According the Irish Times the date for Lisbon II will be set for Friday October 2nd. It’s not a weekend and it would be preferable to have this vote at a time that suits many people. Nonetheless this is the date we have.

Apropos only 19 of 145 judges taking a pay cut, Niall Collins TD for Fianna Fail in Limerick wants a referendum:
“This group of elite untouchables should be subjected to the regular procedures administering the pay of higher civil servants. In the modern day being protected by the Constitution is simply not good enough given that [...]

The letter worked it seems – as Cowen and Martin arrive home with a victory over intransigent EU leaders. Spin cycle set to overload for the next 24 hours. “Hard victory” “good deal for Ireland” “heart of Europe” and onward toward a new date for a Lisbon vote.
Agreement on the shape of the deal followed [...]

So the new Lisbon deal will be formally agreed with our EU colleagues over the next couple of days.  The media coverage is going be particularly unreliable on this one, because the line to the media from Brian Cowen and Micheal Martin will be to show their efforts in extracting every possible concession and driving [...]

So yeah, the facebook wall of John McGuirk, Libertas’ Irish press officer is below. I said Libertas was an organisational shambles last week, the downfall will reflect exactly why. Expect law suits to be splattered all over the place (edit: in fact, they already are being thrown about, a letter was sent by Simons’s solicitor to [...]

With a week to digest the election results, the Green Party might be credited with an emerging strategy to take into their negotiations for a renewed programme for government and, in theory at least, the second part of the process of government for however long it lasts. It was assessed here and elsewhere that the [...]

Here we go again.  Aer Lingus is withdrawing more services from Shannon.  But this row is going to play out very differently than the end of Shannon-Heathrow.   The latter row caught the government on the hop but also featured an Aer Lingus in a very different mood, confident that it could launch a sub-hub in [...]

“Tabloid politics” was how Mary O’Rourke described the Dail Debate on the Confidence Motion. And she was right.
There was no policy discussion of merit – apart from Brian Lenihan’s effort – about where we are going and what we need to do to get there. Insults were liberally traded on all sides. Enda Kenny dubbed [...]

Today at 12.00 from the Garden of Remembrance. Sign the petition and bring a white ribbon if you are attending.
Today’s order of business in the Dail is the worst political failure I have seen:
10.30 a.m.
* Leaders Questions
* Motion re Confidence in Government (to conclude at 5.30 p.m.)

Toying with a deckchairs and titanic comment and it is hard not to when you hear that Cowen plans to modernise Fianna Fail in time for that 2012 general election we keep hearing about. They will get a shock, once they dig into their members list and realise many of them are, like names on [...]