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

We don’t discuss the topic of electoral reform here on Irish Election, so I thought I’d throw out some crazy ideas I’ve had on how we can reform the process to fix some of the endemic problems in our system of government.

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 paper-audit-trail nor a voter verified [...]

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 [...]

(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” [...]

(Originally posted on AdamMaguire.com) I’ve had more than a passing interest in politics for many years now and I’ve always believed that young people need to engage and be engaged in the larger political discourse. I believe that the main instrument of youth participation within Ireland’s political parties, the youth wing, is actually counter-intuitive and [...]

Trevor issued a big call today on making sure you are registered to vote for Thursday. He is as miffed as we are about a Thursday vote, so Bertie can take some joy from something after a tough week so far. Anyway Trevor reminded me to elevate Daithi from Lex Ferenda‘s advice again as it [...]

All the talk has been that Bertie will call or decide his election date this week. Thursday has been bandied about a bit and all. Well it seems that could be delayed for as long as a week if the case before the High Court taken by Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath. A motion filed [...]

In todays Irish Times (subs req’d), Bertie gives his reasons for a Thursday poll; “I listened to the argument the last time. And it didn’t work. Friday did not work. I was all over the city on the Friday. What people do now is get out of the city on a Friday afternoon. You might [...]

Here is a novelty: if the decision on the age of consent should be lowered, why not let the citizens most affected by the decision be allowed to vote on the subject? Why not lower the voting age to 16 and put the decision up to the people. That would let the TDs and Dail [...]

Fianna Fail have put up a site called RegisterToVote.ie which gives information about registering to vote and links to county and city council pages where you can check if you’re on the register. Not all the councils provide the page though, which is something of a pity. Ignore that. “Keith” (not me, obviously) mentions another [...]

Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up. On the day that Roche launches Fianna Fáil electoral register campaign with the aim of “encouraging young people to get on the electoral register,” they are the only party not to turn up at a student electoral registor drive at NUI Galway organised by the Political Debate Society [...]

A report from today’s Irish Times states that the Government has refused a request from Senator David Norris to take legal steps to ensure that over 700 graduates of Trinity College, who were disenfranchised because of a misplaced file, can be allowed to vote if there is a Seanad election before June of next year. [...]

Four months after a survey carried out by members Sinn Féin in Limerick, revealed that the residents of three large estates immidiately north of the Limerick City/County border, would prefer to be within the city limits, there seems to have been little or no movement on the boundary issue. Sinn Féin’s representative and city councillor, [...]

The controversy of the voter register is back again from the Nenagh Guardian Hundreds of names about to be wiped off Register of Electors for Newport. Newport is a small town on the Tipperary-Limerick border that has saw a massive increase in population in recent years. Due to its proximity to Limerick City (around 10 [...]

The latest Sunday Business Post/Red C opinion poll shows Fianna Fáil support rock solid at 35%. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has previously called this poll standing ‘acceptable enough’, and he seems confident that it provides a firm foundation for the party’s 2007 election campaign. I was polled by Red C last week and, as well as [...]

Apart from the startling figure of 400,000 foreign born residents, the preliminary census estimates released in the Republic yesterday could have some startling implications for the next general election, with constituencies in West Dublin and Meath growing exponentially, and rural constituencies falling.