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

With Gordon Brown’s one year stamp duty land tax holiday on properties costing £175,000 or less (up from £125,000), the differential between stamp duty on house purchases between the UK and Republic of Ireland is now even sharper.  The zero rate in Ireland is only up to €125,000 and then goes to 7%, the highest [...]

A nice event for Brian Cowen — he gets to meet his fellow leader-in-waiting north of the border, Peter Robinson (no mention of what Ian Paisley said about his lips), and they agree on a scheme which will see the International Financial Services Centre extended to Northern Ireland via a modification of IFSC’s tax exemption [...]

Original image The Chancer.

Judging by the current version RTE website story on Ian Paisley’s departure as FM and DUP leader, Enda Kenny was first out of the starting gate with a statement  Hopefully the government is not so distracted that this could catch them off guard.  One wonders if Paisley might now attend the 10th anniversary observance of [...]

Since we don’t yet have a firm date for an Irish vote of any kind, we might as well look at elections somewhere else for some material. In today’s Irish Times, Breda O’Brien (subs. req’d) takes a look at the US election and in particular the apparent phenomenon of Evangelical voters looking for a [...]

UnionistLite has raised the issue of ‘God save the queen’ and the IRFU in light of the latter’s recent refusal to meet two British Lords about the dispute.
It’s not the newest of topics but it’s one that’s yet to be resolved and surely worth discussing.
How can the IRFU claim to be the Rugby federation for [...]

In view of tonight’s news that Fianna Fail have registered as a political party in Northern Ireland, it’s worth reading this Slugger O’Toole post from a few days ago noting the lax regime covering donations to political parties in NI relative to the rest of the UK.  One wonders if the NI registration is really [...]

I thought it couldn’t get worse. I was wrong. And now, due to Eoghan Harris, we see the Coolacrease situation become elevated to a semi-political issue, hence my posting this to Irish Election as well as the Cedar Lounge Revolution.
Eoghan Harris in today’s Sunday independent writes about Coolacrease (Tom McGurk also writes about it sensibly [...]

Bertie gave the Bodenstown oration today and used it as an opportunity to return to the legacy issue theme of turning Fianna Fail into a 32-county party. He sought to reassure unionists that Fianna Fail will not be a sectarian influence of proponent of narrow nationalism as it seeks to move North.

Today’s Irish Times carries an opinion piece written by Dr. Alan Gillespie (subs req), chairman of the Ulster Bank Group, in which it is suggested that Ireland’s IDA and its Northern Ireland counterpart Invest NI should merge into an all-Ireland body.
This, it is argued, would benefit both Northern Ireland and Ireland as it would bring [...]

So, what to make of the news yesterday about Fianna Fáil exploring the ‘idea of advancing itself as a political party in the North’? Certainly it has considerable support amongst many FF members. But the more one examines the idea the less feasible it becomes.

Fianna Fail today sat down to their “think-in” out in the wilds of Wicklow. Chaired by Dermot Ahern, the gathering is a welcome opportunity for TDs, councillors and MEPs to get their heads around the serious business of governing for the next five years. An Taoiseach was plainly delighted to be sprung from Dublin Castle, [...]

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 [...]

Here’s an issue that has surfaced briefly at various times in the Shannon-Heathrow-Belfast dispute and has now been explicitly raised by IMPACT: is Belfast in Ireland?  We can probably all recall instances where one of the many usages for the two jurisdictions on the island has had a similar impact as fingernails being drawn across a [...]

After drifting a little bit the SNN-LHR controversy and the related issue of the Aer Lingus strike are heating up again this evening.   The latest non-Bertie non-Dempsey spokesperson for the government is Mary Hanafin — perhaps she was the only one around given the Leaving Cert results.  And the employee trust has spoken up.  This [...]

A dog that hadn’t barked up to now — Aer Lingus staff — is barking. Tonight brings news of a 48 hour strike by pilots next week, not in protest against the Shannon withdrawal per se, but the fact that new Belfast base is hiring pilots outside the collective bargaining contract. This arises from the [...]