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

Were things good, Joan Burton would be roundly accused of talking down the economy. However, things aren’t good and so the answer to her Parliamentary Question on tax reliefs for construction holds some pretty grim reading. In the financial year 2006, the government waved of €464.4m in 19 property based tax exemption schemes. This included [...]

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 [...]

I am just wondering if any of our readers/bloggers are heading along to the education protest at Leinster House tomorrow evening? If so - and you fancy doing some blogging from there - could you get in touch via the comments or the email to arrange something with us here?
Thanks

Peruse the diagram above. The green/yellow states are those voting with DREs with a voter-verified paper-trail (VVPR) (except in Tennessee, Colorado and Maryland where the relevant legislation has been passed but doesn’t come into force this year) and with/without (respectively) a paper audit-trail. The red-states are those requiring neither a [...]

The Dail voted this morning to take Tuesday off (wonder if my boss would respect a democratic vote of workers to abstain from Tuesday?). Ah sure they must be wrecked placating 30,000 protesters on the streets of Dublin before facing another week of batterings over education cuts.
This is ridiculous, it may be tradition but that [...]

Labour’s Cllr Dermot Lacey notes over on his blog that Dublin City Council have started their voter registration drive for the new electoral register.  Nice posters, which include messages in English, Irish, Chinese and what is presumably Polish, are up in Smithfield and other areas with high numbers of people who don’t have English as [...]

Over at the Property Pin they have been digging away at the proposals in yesterday’s budget for affordable housing provision. The website set up (homechoiceloan.ie) appears to suggest the government is steppign into subprime mortgages for those refused by banks and building societies as well as stipulating the houses purchased come from the 35,000-50,000 new, [...]

IF you haven’t glimpsed the Sunday Independent, you can guarantee that the edited extract of a speech given by Junior Minister at the Department of Trade and Enterprise John McGuinness will be dominating discussion of the Social Partnership talks over the coming days. It remains unclear if the governmen is capable of steering a course [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The WTO talks are a little like the Tribunals. For the most part, progress is confined to a tiny box on page 8 of the Irish Times or Indo unless the leading lights drag it up the agenda. While both are meaningful in themselves and have great symbolic (on the perception of cleansing politics or [...]

Update: Head office must have been worried for the press released the result this evening. It is a blow for any who may have wished to see a return of the Spring dynasty to this particular fold as Senator Alan Kelly took the nomination for Labour candidate for MEP in the South. It was widely [...]

A thread on boards.ie has been the source of some impressive citizen activism in the last week and it seems the campaign there is just getting started.
As some people already know, Dublin City Council recently signed a deal with advertising group JCDecaux which would see a number of advertising panels erected on the city’s streets [...]

A headline, and article, you don’t see that often from the Indo
Public job salaries falling well behind private sector rates
But wait there is more….
due to agreed terms in Towards 2016…
In civil servant jobs, such as accountants, architects or solicitors, the gap between the public and private sector is vast. Public sector employees can expect to [...]

The Financial Times’ Brussels blog has a very interesting story about the manouvering taking place on European Commission numbers from next year. As we found out, Nice will govern the makeup of the Commission from January next year - rather than Lisbon.
This means there has to be less Commissioners than there are member states, prompting [...]

[Edit: To say hello and welcome stumblers. Take a look around and tell us what you think.]
The prevailing mantra of Irish and European politicians, still reeling at the Lisbon ‘No’ vote in Ireland, is that we as a small nation cannot hold up the EU. Apparently, if 26 nations have said ‘Yes’ the breaks should [...]