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

Is there a curse of Mahon? Added to the list of deceased on the witness lists comes today’s announcement that Albert Reynolds has “cognitive impairment” and cannot give evidence to the Tribunal. Albert has had a strange twilight to political career, having inadvertedly given his name to the standard libel defence in English [...]

Its the same as number 1 and many subsequent solutions, the Indo has the leaked idea (is it really news though? - its been around for ages as the only solution). It beats the deadlines but only just.
THE guarantee of holding on to a European Commissioner will be the carrot for a [...]

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)

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 [...]

It has been noted in a few places over the weekend that the grand alliance on Europe, the three main parties plus the Greens and PDs, was beginning to take some strain. Yesterday’s poll released by Open Europe seems to provide further evidence of that strain. Labour appear to be distancing themselves from any “Tallaght [...]

It’s funny how transparent the government’s media trickery is.  Everyone knows that this is the time of year when Cabinet members will be on their holliers, except for the occasional pesky event like the WTO talks in Geneva, or Martin Cullen’s no doubt necessary 3 week jaunt to Beijing.  So what are the ways of [...]

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 [...]

Irishelection.com is delighted to announce ‘Green Ink’s Week‘ a new feature to the site where cartoon and blogging legend Green Ink posts his reflections on the week. Each Friday the exclusive cartoon will be posted to the front page of irishelection.com by the artist presently known as Green Ink (but aims for a future title [...]

The Sleep of Sarkozy produces Sarkozy…

Usually not a fan, but Diarmaid Ferriter’s in The Examiner today is well worth the read.
Some of the end-of-term report cards will make for sorry reading, with the exception perhaps of the Green party leader, John Gormley, who has made the transition from the opposition benches to cabinet with singular ease and who is basking [...]

It may be a catchy means of getting around the 9 and 15 month deadlines that seem to be naturally occuring to the EU leadership, but rerunning Lisbon next June in conjunction with European Parliament and Local elections has been ruled out by most parties. Not least because another ‘no’ vote could seep over into [...]

The following is my translation of an article in today’s Le Monde about proposals to get another Irish referendum. It is quite interesting in the kind of manoevering it reveals and also there is an interesting little comment at the end about the way the commission is evolving into something less than desireable. The article [...]

I got this email from Georg Pichler of rigardi.org and I thought I would pass it on.
As you might have heard the governmenting parties, Social Democrats (SPOE) and Conservatives (OEVP) have decided to end their coalition. After 1 1/2 years of constant quarrel and hardly any progress, the Social Democrats have decided to switch their [...]

The news that the ESB is to seek a 20pc price hike will if granted, drive the average annual bill up to a staggering €1,100. It is up to the Commission for Energy Regulation to sanction all such rises. Before it does so, it had better think hard about the hardship they could bring and [...]

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 [...]

BBC Radio 4’s Today in Parliament last night did a segment on Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech to the European Parliament in which he outlined the agenda of the French EU Council Presidency.  It begins 19 minutes into the program (Listen again/download).   Included in the post-speech interviews is Kathy Sinnott MEP, who says that she has offered [...]