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

An absolutely atrocious job by the RTE Radio News at One today. Dermot Ahern, in the course of an interview about Irish prisoners overseas, was asked (at about the 3:30 mark in his interview) about the Shannon-Heathrow route removal. In his response he (1) referred to the Irish Aid decentralisation to Shannon as [...]

As predicted a couple of days ago, the first significant government statement on the Shannon-Heathrow controversy is a classic of distractions and selective or irrelevant claims. A debunking of the Department of Transport’s response which accompanied Noel “Father Ted” Dempsey’s statement below.

After the debacle of Eircom you would think that the government would have realized the problem with privatization. Much of the flack over the privatisation of Eircom center on the fact that it failed. This was attributed to the fact that it was privatised not to the actually factors that made it fail. The reason [...]

Ongoing attempts to quantify the damage done by the Aer Lingus pullout suggest that 10,000 jobs may be at risk. Its primarily an issue of infrastructure and access to the region, which has become heavily populated with FDI and multinational companies thanks to Shannon Development. Fianna Fail is doing the usual trick of providing its [...]

Moving the Heathrow slots from Shannon (a 4 hour drive from Dublin and airport of choice for those in Limerick, Clare, Tipperary, much of Connacht and the North West) to Belfast (now a two hour leisurely drive from Dublin Airport thanks to the M1 looks like it has had its first victim.
The Dromoland Castle development [...]

A day after Michael O’Leary’s letter to the government proposing a joint call for Aer Lingus to retain its Heathrow service from Shannon, Michael Noonan TD puts pen to paper to write an actual letter to Willie Walsh, British Airways chief executive, to ask him to consider a Shannon-Heathrow service. Does this move the [...]

What does a company do when a majority of its ownership wants to pursue a particular policy? This is the issue that Aer Lingus in theory faces with 50.3 percent of its ownership claiming that the Shannon-Heathrow route should be maintained. Thus the hot potato that Michael O’Leary has tossed towards the government.

I didn’t get a chance to comment earlier on the news that Mary Harney  is to seek a rule change in order to allow the Progressive Democrats to draw their leader from outside the Dail. This is likely to put Tom Parlon into the driving seat for the leadership (barring a surprise tilt from Fiona [...]

Labour/Fine Gael/Green missed out by 7 seats. Where were these 7 seats that they could have won that would have won the election. Here is 3 seats that decided the outcome.

Cork South Central - Kathleen Lynch is being joined by her brother-in-law Ciaran in the 30th Dáil. So that’s husband and wife and mother and son elected today.
(Familial values in this post were earlier misappropriated - take the issue up with our Cork Representative! My Apologies! I thought he was a bit old to be [...]

Pat Breen elected

Just a word to say many thanks to Will and Stephen for their fantastic reporting from the Cork Counts on Mysay. We’ll deliberate later but I think we can say Mysay.com got tried out big time today and it’s only the job as they say in the Peoples Republic (that’s mega, fab, great, wonderful)

Green Party TD Dan Boyle is eliminated in Cork South Central

Wicklow could elect 3 FF TDs as it seems that Fitzgerald has gone ahead of De Burca on tallies, putting him in position to take a third FF seat. Count there in 30 minutes.
Meanwhile in Cork South Central Lynch is beating Dan Boyle of Green Party by 200 before Buttimer’s 5,760 are transferred.

Our favourite candidate Morgan Stack got 116 votes. Emmm I smell Neo-con conspiracy here. Ah well in fairness he did try.
Edit: His email to the Times.

Results from 6th count: Coffey(FG): 5382 Cullinane(SF): 3697 Deasy(FG): 8546 Halligan(Workers P): 2093 Kenneally(FF): 6699 OShea(Lab): 6545 Wilkinson(FF): 6395 Halligan has been elim. Halligans results are now being distrib. Wilkinson has lost his lead on O’ Shea. O Shea should get a large amount of Halligans votes as both are left and from the city.