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

The headline: “Buying imported food a traitorous act, guide claims” to which the story doesn’t really add anything. This is just a representative manifestation of the Buy Irish, shop local, self-sufficiency good, imports bad sort of protectionist nonsense – like the outcry over Christmas shopping in Newry – that sends my blood pressure through the [...]

[edit: We were 2 days ahead of the Indo and unlike them, we provide original sources for the quotes.  Read on ...] The Cork flood.  From the technical yet fascinating “Flood risk management through reservoir storage and flow control” (2001) by J. Fitzpatrick and T. Bree of ESB International – A study was undertaken by [...]

One potential area of interest in the handling of the pork scare is that it’s the first big food chain disruption with the Greens in government.  And in some ways, what we know about the problem should be a vindication of the “green” ethos, since as with BSE, the contamination comes from not agriculture in [...]

The WTO talks are a little like the Tribunals. For the most part, progress is confined to a tiny box on page 8 of the Irish Times or Indo unless the leading lights drag it up the agenda. While both are meaningful in themselves and have great symbolic (on the perception of cleansing politics or [...]

The World Food Summit being held by the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome today is likely to call for a successful conclusion of the Doha WTO talks (see for example the going-in position of the US Agriculture Secretary).  This is symbolic of why Brian Cowen cannot make a formal commitment to veto an agreement [...]

Today’s Sunday Times story would have been old news had the IFA Executive Council meeting gone ahead last week and not been delayed. As it stands the IFA are due to decide their position on Tuesday or Wednesday. There are at least 28 members of the 53 member of the Executive Council calling for a [...]

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the referendum.  To the reporter’s credit, he avoids the usual style of foreign reporting — asking taxi-drivers on the way in from the airport to the 5-star hotel — and goes to Carlow and Laois to get the viewpoint of farmers.  Declan Ganley and Ulick McEvaddy [...]

One of Bertie Ahern‘s home stretch events today was to launch the Dublin Airport Authority’s plan for Dublin Airport City.   Not to put too fine a point on it, this seems like one of the crazier proposals to have emerged over the last year, and symptomatic of much of what is wrong with governance and [...]

Newstalk’s Marc Coleman has a nice perch on the Financial Times comment page today to outline his fairly optimistic long-term view of the Irish economy despite the current property downturn.  His essential argument, to be outlined in more detail in his book, is that Ireland has two key assets for its long-term growth prospects: people [...]

The Six one News had a report about the todays jobless figures showing a rise in unemployment coming mainly from construction. They had a report about how many rural areas depend much on construction something I mentioned a few weeks ago. What it reminded me of was a clip on reeling in the years. In [...]

This is a story that was supposed to be published in The Irish Times way back when but for some reason or another it didn’t. It relates to wikipedia edits made by someone in a Government department and was researched and written back when the joys of the WikiScanner was discovered by everyone. To the [...]

Governments in the west spend over $300 billion a year on farm subsidies. Think about that figure. Imagine what could be done if that figure was invested in health care in the third world? But not also is it diverting finds that could be used for better means it also hurts people in poorer countries. [...]

Here’s an interesting profile from the Financial Times a few days ago of Padraig O’Ceidigh, now the chairman but at one time the hands-on businessman who developed Aer Arann out of its island service base into a decent sized regional point-to-point carrier.   It’s not clear whether this is the right model for Shannon, where long-haul [...]

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.

In 2002 the Government was accused of buying the election with an overly generous budget. This year it could be argued that they’re trying to do the same again with the majority of SSIAs maturing in the coming weeks (what a coincidence!), the launch of the next NDP a few months ago and a not [...]