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

Our economic woes may be at an end - Suzy has the scoop.
The package will be all about the three T’s - ‘Timely, Targeted and Temporary’. It will include proposals for tax cuts, fast tracking of Structural Funds to stimulate growth, and a percentage of GDP (maybe 1% or maybe not) from member states. There [...]

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 [...]

Where is the radical reform in the civil service ? Sunday Times figures show that almost every civil servant in the country has received a pay increase. The Government seemed happy to let the civil servants write the budget and now we find that the oversight process for employees in the civil service, the Performance [...]

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 [...]

Anyone know why the ESRI shifted their embargo on the Quarterly Summary to 09.30 tomorrow? Conspiracy theorists would have a field day with the possibilities but it seems odd to deny the Irish Times their splash headline tomorrow.
News is bad by the way, contraction wll break 1% of GNP this year.

Unfortunately I missed Questions and Answers last night, however today I was greeted by the nice news that I didn’t need to subject myself to the RTE media player when instead Simon and Suzy had liveblogged it using scribblelive.
It is a better, and briefer, programme for it. More of this will hopefully be available to [...]

Stephen Collin’s story in the Irish Times today is one of those ones that feeds into a zeitgeist. Political leaders who have let the Social Partnership talks slip, are in charge of an economic slowdown and on 13 weeks of summer holidays receive their final pay increase today.
TDs WILL receive a pay rise of some [...]

Suzy has the theory. It consists of two words; stop over.

Someone emailed this from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform apropos our post on the mergers of the Equality Authority, National Disabilitiy Authority and IHRC (among others). Source asks about the vetting process and the final two three organisations in the press release relative to the others.

A tiny autonomous archipelago off Finland could soon add to the EU’s Lisbon Treaty woes…BBC
That isnt the kind of thing you expect to read everyday on the BBC website - or perhaps it is. Anyway it seems that not alone can the Irish do damage to the treaty by effectively killing it. A small island [...]

Source: Ballyer.net/Sundayworld
It would be remiss of us here not to congratulate Kenneth Egan on his excellent performance in the semi-final of the Olympics light-heavyweight boxing. Class and poise, well done and best of luck.

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 [...]

In a week dominated by harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in the ongoing Russian-Georgian conflict over the separatist region of South Ossetia. There are shades of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, when Hitler, on the pretext of defending a ‘persecuted’ German minority in that region of Czechoslovakia, was appeased and [...]

Even before the Irish people’s democratic decision to reject the fatally-flawed Lisbon Treaty, (which would have deepened the democratic-deficit in Europe still further), the source of Libertas funding was a bane of “yes” campaigners. To the elite, the possibility of the ‘mainstream’ parties being so decisively outspent by this upstart pro-business [...]

Well the story of the US campaign season, how a cartoon managed to raise $95,000 in days for a new aspiring politician, Sean Tevis in Kansas. If you’ve ever read XKCD read on. (Wikipedia entry for XKCD)