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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Simon McGarr’s post raised the issue of state agency rationalisation. It is an issue we may well not care much for at the moment, as we’re ‘too busy’ with the recession. Yet we should be concerned that some the agencies being tied together and taken back into departments are those ones with a nasty habit [...]

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 [...]

Cowen was giving a speech last night where he conceded that corrective action on the economy is likely to be “painful”. Not a great time for the ESRI to recommend a rise in Social Welfare to E230 per week across the boards, yet interesting to see them call it a priority in a time when [...]

Later today Fianna Fail will host a discussion on globalisation and the Lisbon Treaty which should be interesting in itself. Farming issues will no doubt be front and centre as the WTO deadline has been extended and the effect of EU on that area up in the air. Beyond that there are issues of jobs, [...]

In a packed Dail chamber, Brian Cowen was elected Taoiseach of Ireland after a vote to choose between him, Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore. The vote was won by 88 to 76.
He was nominated by Bertie Ahern himself however it only became quite raucous as Mary Harney seconded Cowen’s nomination and defended the government’s record [...]

One of Bertie Ahern’s home stretch events today was to launch the Dublin Airport Authority’s plan for Dublin Airport City.   Not to put too fine a point on it, this seems like one of the crazier proposals to have emerged over the last year, and symptomatic of much of what is wrong with governance and [...]

Dublin City Council is considering the merits of imposing a “tourist tax” of €1 per night on beds in hotels, hostels and B&Bs in the city in order to raise additional revenue.
Ignoring the fact that this is the taxation equivalent of licking your plate clean after large a steak dinner, there are many questions that [...]

A sizeable portion of the Moyross housing estate in Limerick is located in Limerick County Council territory. This area could now be a part of the city as early as next week when, as recommended by the Fitzgerald Report on regeneration and tackling social exclusion in Limerick.
However, twenty years after the estate was built, [...]

If there is any element of good news out there for a party down to its vamps, it is that there will at least be a contest for the leadership. After it appeared that senior party figures were united in their desire not to lead the party, both Senators announced after the meeting today that [...]

Today’s Sunday Business Post poll certainly contains some eyebrow-raising figures - particularly where it shows a majority in disbelief of Bertie Ahern’s tribunal performance to date. But to the probably relief of Ahern, and the Fianna Fáil party as a whole, this majority is not maintained when the topic moves to those who call for [...]

Reading Politics.ie recently, what do I see? Well, actually, reading Magill I see an inaccurate swipe at Politics.ie in the most recent issue. Wigmore wrote:
Is there anything as awful as political blog sites? Not the sites of writers and personalities, but the bulletin boards and chat rooms. The hope that the [...]

It seems a happy coincidence that last week John Gormley announced national capacity for waste incineration in 2016 would be 400,000 tonnes and only two plants and today An Bord Pleanala give Indaver permission to increase the capacity of the Meath project and bring the capacity of their two plants in Cork and Meath up [...]

A fairly comprehensive statement today from the up-to-now quiet Enda Kenny on SNN-LHR. Perhaps some of the time was spent reconciling the position that FG will now adopt with their non-opposition to the Aer Lingus privatization (although they had complaints at the time about how it was managed). A few interesting things in [...]