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

Speaking at the launch of the Merchants Quay Ireland 2006 report, Junior Minister for Drug Strategy Pat Carey suggested the government may look at implementing a needle exchange programme nationally. The programme seems prompted by the volume which the smaller Merchants Quay project deals with. Last year nearly 40,000 visits to the programme were logged [...]

Brian Lenihan has been a man willing to walk in and out of the spotlight, look at his low profile adopted viz the Rostas family. Today though, the Justice Minister is talking about tackling our drinking culture, a theme similarly associated with his predecessor’s ‘cafe-bar’ proposal. The Minister suggested today that the government would be [...]

Pat Carey was talking today about plans in the programme for government to make registration of mobile phones compulsory. One wonders first how this would be enforced short of making the mobile companies responsible for the registration. He agreed though that this would pose issues for privacy and civil liberties but the need to fight [...]

I have been saying it here for a while now. Ireland is the least violent country in Europe, according to a new study by the World Health Organisation. The research compared murder and assault rates across 27 European countries. It found that Finland has 1.96 killings per 100,000 people, while the Scottish rate is 1.75. [...]

Ok so we lost Joe. And we miss him. We really do. At the Dail yesterday they all gave him a nod. Tony Gregory said the place wouldn’t be the same. It won’t. It will. But it won’t. Fianna Fail are still in charge but Fine Gael’s muscles have gotten some electoral steroids. How hard [...]

New Earswick was a 1000 house village near York in the UK. It was built by the Joseph Rowntree foundation. (Yes the same Rowntree’s as Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles) In an effort to make people feel safer in the community they started to introduce community policing in an effort to make the people feel safer and [...]

What was that about? Were they talking about Afghanistan?

One of the perceptions is that the country is awash with crime that we are a gangland mecca with the highest crime in Europe. And many people seem to believe it. Fintan O’Toole has a good piece on this in the Irish Times today(subs regd) and how crime is not rising an awful lot and [...]

Also known as Saturday’s Irish Times. The story most politicians and backroomers will chew over this morning is the dramatic figures which suggest nearly 3/4 of the electorate will not pay more tax in order to fund services. The data prior to this from Red C polls in the Business Post had the figure at [...]

As if Bertiegate didn’t have enough tentacles already, the Irish Times reports (subs. req’d) on Albert Reynolds putting another cat among the pigeons with his reflections on the events precipitating the collapse of his government over the Brendan Smyth affair.  Albert’s remarks provide valuable context on Bertie’s thinking in late 1994, but also need to [...]

McDowell warns about prison contraband

Their first joint announcement of the campaign seems to reiterate what has gone before (just in case you forgot). There is now a two horse race (something the last few days seems to have confirmed) between competing coalitions. The choice now is much harder for the voters. It seems that Enda has hit the country [...]

The Indo sounds the first real note of realism so far this election by asking the very pertinent question “what if there is a down turn?”. We noted earlier that the Green Party went with a 4% average estimate for growth in the coming years while FF are also below 5% on their last economic [...]

Labour have just launched their latest campaign video, “This is Bernard” , as part of their campaign for safe and secure communities. And I don’t like it.

This morning we got two further announcments from the two major parties and Sinn Fein launched their transport policy;

To highlight their community policing proposals and the anti-social behaviour theme they have been running for a while, Labour have launched their latest youtube video. This is Bernard;