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

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 allowed to annex it, followed [...]

The report of the 2007 Consituency Commission is out, some would say a little bit too late but how and ever. Kerry is to remain split, with Kerry South a 3 seater while Kerry North joins to West Limerick in also remaining a 3 seater. Dublin Euro is a 3 seater, Dun Laoghaire is a [...]

Last month I wrote a post about the glut of housing in Ireland, and how, as a society, we have experienced a mortgage boom, rather than a simple housing boom. A couple of people have suggested that “holiday homes down the country” account for the large amount of empty Irish housing units. Others have said [...]

(All figures available from the Central Statistics Office website, here. This is about as definitive as you can get. The census figures show an Ireland that is undergoing huge change, but not quite in the way we have been told. First of all, the actual number of non-nationals employed in construction challenges the “common sense” [...]

Earlier this evening, Questions and Answers flirted briefly with the issue of the Irish language, following the leaking of a report which predicted the end of Irish as the Gaeltacht’s lingua fraca within twenty years. Eamon Ó Cuív was asked whether he was embarrassed that only 46% of students in Gaeltacht schools can speak the [...]

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 [...]

Having watched one of my favorite movies, “The American President” a movie I usually cry over, with a feeling of pride and honor. I realized that at no time in resent memory could I ever express such Pride and Honor over a real politician. With the gross lack of any real Honor, Respect and Pride [...]

We are in the court for preliminary hearing. Report to follow once the case is finished.

The four month advance calender from the CSO is not the biggest headline grabber. Except in an election year. The calender, released 5 Jan, confirms that the 2006 Census will be released no later than April 30th. I’m not a legal scholar, so I leave it open to readers to reckon whether the legitimacy of [...]

So it’s Dublin West.  We noted a while back that the Census results had the potential for a tricky constitutional problem: that a constituency might have grown too quickly to maintain its constitutional minimum of 1 TD per 30,000 voters.    And it’s happened.

Stephen Collins’ column in Saturday’s Irish Times (subs. req’d) raises another potential problem with the electoral register (some existing problems discussed by us here and Sarah Carey here) — that since the census results will be available by the next election, there is scope for a legal challenge on the grounds that a constituency has fallen [...]