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

Our economic woes may be at an end - Suzy has the scoop.
The package will be all about the three T’s - ‘Timely, Targeted and Temporary’. It will include proposals for tax cuts, fast tracking of Structural Funds to stimulate growth, and a percentage of GDP (maybe 1% or maybe not) from member states. There [...]

The Finance bill that was published yesterday got a lot of attention for getting rid of the JP McManus Cinderella Rule.  But there’s another provision that, to this tax non-specialist, looks designed to get a few London-based non-domiciled residents to move to Ireland.

But Brian Lenihan is ranked 18th out of 19 European finance ministers covered in the Financial Times’ latest ranking of their job performance (his predecessor was 4th last year).  Of course Lenihan is mainly being penalised by things that happened before him, but the “political ranking” will tend to reflect the recent impressions of the [...]

Were things good, Joan Burton would be roundly accused of talking down the economy. However, things aren’t good and so the answer to her Parliamentary Question on tax reliefs for construction holds some pretty grim reading. In the financial year 2006, the government waved of €464.4m in 19 property based tax exemption schemes. This included [...]

Ireland now sticks out like a sore thumb among countries whose banks are heavily exposed to property.  While the guarantee scheme made a huge splash when it was announced, other countries have since moved onto banking system capital as a major focus of their efforts — providing banks with enough of an additional buffer to [...]

Finally, a slim ray of light.
‘The problem we have in the public finances is as a result of the fact that the economy is in a recession . . . we have a problem in the economy which has created difficulties in the public finances. It’s not the other way around.’
So said Eamon [...]

Our economic boom was built on 2 pilars. Foreign Direct Investment and property. Now that we are down too one pillar that pillar has to take even more weight. 80% of Irelands exports are from multinationals. 20% of Irish GDP comes from just 3 American companies Dell, Microsoft and Intel. This has been possibly our [...]

It is a long running line ‘tax revenues were off predictions’. For good or bad tax revenues repeatedly failed to conform to targets and expectations. On the way up property inflation yielded a massive boon to the exchequer and fuelled increases in state spending and shrinking of the tax base. On the way down - [...]

Those who were left with the fallout from Bertie Ahern’s ten years in office, namely Cowen and Lenihan, were probably impressed by the production value of the Bertie documentary series last night - if nothing else. The programme was exceptionally well put together and surpassed what I had expected it to be. It wasn’t reliant [...]

If you click on the party news link on the top you can see the latest Press Releases from the political parties.
Bruton exposes Irish oil rip-off: diesel 20.1% dearer, petrol 11.3%, heating oil 13%
Reading that headline you would think that he himself had exposed the rip-off. Telling us tales of going undercover in the local [...]

Dan Boyle was selected last night to run for the Green Party in the Euro-South constituency next summer. The senator’s work will be cut out for him getting into one of the three seats.
The field is likely to have two sitting MEPs who won in 2004 and a third who was parachuted in for Simon [...]

There is a set of very interesting charts with this Wall Street Journal article (should be free access via Google News) about investor expectations of the likelihood that EU countries could default on their debt.  The shocker: for Ireland, the probability is 10%.  That’s huge for a rich country.  We’re joined at that level by [...]

Is it really a big story? Really? Personal insults do not mark out a quality debater but nonetheless the big picture last night was that many thousands turned out in the hail, sleet and snow to protest at education cuts.
Those cuts have yielded horror stories around the country. Like the school in Cloneen, Tipp which [...]

I am just wondering if any of our readers/bloggers are heading along to the education protest at Leinster House tomorrow evening? If so - and you fancy doing some blogging from there - could you get in touch via the comments or the email to arrange something with us here?
Thanks

Where is the radical reform in the civil service ? Sunday Times figures show that almost every civil servant in the country has received a pay increase. The Government seemed happy to let the civil servants write the budget and now we find that the oversight process for employees in the civil service, the Performance [...]