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

Big things are happening in a big week for Irish and European politics and, let’s be honest, most of us don’t really understand what’s happening, or why. The budget to be unveiled today and tomorrow will need to cut spending and increase taxes because of the banks, or something. The European summit being held on Friday will save [...]

From Bank of England’s Financial Stability Report.  Illustrated here is that when it comes to deleveraging — banks dumping loans to shrink their balance sheets — NAMA is up there with the biggest of the European banks.  Indeed, for this purpose, NAMA is best seen as being like a massively overextended large European bank, banks [...]

The Evening Herald has claimed that SF Presidential candidate Martin McGuinness is the main suspect in the murder of two policemen gunned down in an IRA ambush in Derry: SINN Fein Presidential candidate Martin McGuinness is the main suspect in the brutal murder of two policemen, the Herald can reveal. Sergeant Peter Gilgunn (26) and [...]

For the past few days (ending on Friday), an Irish delegation of doctors and politicians was in Bahrain to seek the freedom from detention of doctors imprisoned during the protest crackdown in that country. The link arose because the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland has a long-standing partnership to train Bahraini doctors and some [...]

Recent months have seen the issue of prostitution come to prominence as the Presidential election approaches. A disturbing parallel with the Lisbon debate is evident in the near unanimity of the political and intellectual ‘Establishment’ for a blind support of traditional policy approaches. How can someone simultaneously claims the mantle of liberalism while also attempting [...]

IMF statement on the US$3 billion loan for Egypt – A number of fundamental structural reforms, including the transition to a VAT-like consumption tax and reform of the highly inequitable and costly system of subsidies, are needed to improve the efficiency of public spending and help reduce the fiscal deficit in the medium term. We [...]

Wall Street Journal article with an interesting bit of news – Last fall, the [UK] FSA [Financial Services Authority] successfully pushed the Bank of Ireland to convert its U.K. operations from a branch into a subsidiary that required more capital, according to people familiar with the matter. The agency also required the U.K. subsidiary of Allied Irish Banks [...]

BBC Radio 4 with another scoop that should probably have been dug up by an Irish media outlet first.  The Manx2 crash at Cork Airport with the plane coming from Belfast.  The “airline’s” response to all queries — nothing to do us, sorry, we only sold the tickets.  A question for regulators both sides of the [...]

With the trilogy of Lenihan-era reports into Ireland’s financial collapse now completed (Regling-Watson, Honohan, and now Nyberg), there is now a lot of good information from which to draw.  But if you were hoping that completion of the trilogy meant something on the order of Return of the Jedi in terms of closure, you’d be [...]

At this pace of news dumps, we’re going to need a bigger Dumpster.  Today it’s the report into why Brian Lenihan misled Chris Andrews in response to his parliamentary question about the payment of bonuses at Bank of Ireland (the same question triggered the AIB bonus row).  First, a digression.   Let’s suppose you were considering [...]

Brian Lenihan has finally released his favourite selective leak document of the last couple of months, the independent review into the capacity of the Dept of Finance and its performance over the last 10 years.  As the Minister — fresh from his Alamo stand for Fianna Fail in Dublin — says The Minister appointed the [...]

A couple of semi-formed thoughts of issues that perhaps deserved a little more attention in all the relentless punditry.

Rediscovering his “mandate” mojo on Election Eve, Brian Lenihan has moved virtually all of Anglo’s deposits and NAMA bonds to AIB.  An impolite question: where exactly is AIB getting the €3.5 billion in cash that it’s paying for the NAMA bonds?  Yes, it just sold the Polish operation to Banco Santander but that cash was [...]

Today in Commercial Court – Mr Justice Peter Kelly was told today that the [M1] tolling company is claiming it had a legitimate expectation, including a promise from the Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, that tolls would go only up. The court heard that the Minister told the Dáil in June last year that the by-laws [...]

Bank of Ireland has done a Friday afternoon news dump of a provisional set of accounts for 2010 and an associated announcement that it will make a dividend payment on the National Pension Farewell Fund’s preference shares in the company — last year, the Bank was under a “dividend stopper” order from the European Commission [...]

To the extent that we weren’t already at that point, we’ve reached the limit of Brian Lenihan’s ability to credibly perform his role as Minister for Finance.   A week after claiming that he had no mandate as Minister to implement the recapitalisation of AIB, B of I, and EBS, he offered a string of inflammatory [...]