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

Clearly picking up from the political ether that the Mahon Tribunal report is coming out next week, Micheál Martin wants it to be known (via the Irish Times) that at least after the fact, there’s a new sheriff in town: There is a view within Fianna Fáil that if the leader is not seen to [...]

Bertie Ahern used a bit of Yeats (the municipal gallery poem) in his retirement speech to the O’Donovan Rossa cumann this evening.  The latter-years Yeats liked to tour through the memories and link them and and so it’s not surprising that there were echoes of Bertie’s more difficult moments even in the sanctuary of the [...]

Dan Boyle is on the war path again. A statement released through the Green Party communications office following his speech at the MacGill Summer School today said… Addressing the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, the Green Party Finance spokesperson said progress required a prompt end to the culture of ‘No Blame – No [...]

Apropos only 19 of 145 judges taking a pay cut, Niall Collins TD for Fianna Fail in Limerick wants a referendum: “This group of elite untouchables should be subjected to the regular procedures administering the pay of higher civil servants. In the modern day being protected by the Constitution is simply not good enough given [...]

Interesting Bloomberg News decades-long perspective on the Irish economy.  Among the quotes – “I can’t remember anyone at any level telling me, ‘The banks are giving hundreds of millions of euros to developers, and they’re borrowing this at short rates, so if anything happens to them, they’re caught,’” says Bertie Ahern, 57, prime minister from [...]

The honors cannot stop falling upon the head of our dear Taoiseach. Not alone is he honoured in Latin America, part of a worldwide bureau of speakers and an in demand figure for global events, Bertie Ahern is to take up a post at NUI Maynooth as Honorary Adjunct Professor of Mediation and Conflict Intervention [...]

Today its up to a once-off £30,000 which the Tribunal put to Ahern he received from developer Owen O Callaghan after a March 1994 meeting about the tax status of Quarryvale and Blanchardstown shopping centres. When he looks around at the empty press gallery and reads headlines of economic woe, he must think it was [...]

Today’s Humbert Summer schools has the opposition berating Cowen and attempting to frame the narrative for the upcoming election run-in. In her speech (wonderfully titled Brian Cowen and the Riddle of Cleopatra’s Nose) Then, Brian Cowen enjoyed huge public and media approval and was received in his home county as a conquering hero. That has [...]

As Bertie Ahern does his screen-test for a future job on The Sunday Game or Late Late, he was quick to defend his handling of the economic downturn. Unemployment now at 5.1% and construction workers falling like flies – and little re-training to give them a hand up. The Dublin Central TD, who quit office [...]

What? The price of a house on two offices? On a refurbishment? The space needed renovation and cleaning, and according to figures obtained by RTÉ News, the OPW spent approximately €220,000 to do this and to fit it out with furniture. The work took around three weeks to complete.

The first poll after the Lisbon result comes with little by way of surprise. The Sunday Business Post/Red C poll finds the Irish electorate looks unlikely to have engaged in a mass volte face with regard to the major parties after Lisbon. Fianna Fail 40% (unchanged) Fine Gael 25% (-3)

“Ahern said he was not really a gambling man, but he enjoyed attending festive race meetings when he had the opportunity.” So reported the Irish Times at the end of December last year when Bertie Ahern was at the Leopardstown races. Despite that, he appears to have been quite successful at the old gee-gees.

Does any of this sound familiar? – Not all of the money was a gift, New York businessman Morris Talansky told the court.  Some of the cash “donations” handed over to Olmert were loans, which he expected to be repaid. “Famous last words,” Talansky jokingly told the court when he explained that the money was [...]

An interesting clash of interpretation on the widely discussed style of the new Taoiseahc. For Pat Leahy the new style is “clear thinking and firm decision-making”. For the Sunday Indo, it is “authoritarian” and “stalinist”. An enigmatic man.

The Offaly Independent reports that a massive caravan of Offaly folk will descend on the Dail today to celebrate the election of Brian Cowen to the post of Taoiseach (at around 3.30pm – live on Oireachtas.ie) “There`ll be a festive atmosphere,” Tom O`Donovan of O`Donovan Cowen Solicitors, a firm in which Minister Cowen is involved, [...]

Just a short post linking to this BBC story apparently drawn from Paris and Brussels gossip about the candidates for the position of EU Council Presidency — a job of course whose existence later this year is dependent on Ireland passing the Lisbon treaty (and if the No votes spikes up with each round of [...]