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

Resignations from Mary Harney, followed by Noel Dempsey, Dermot Ahern, and Tony Killeen.  As Brian Cowen appears to have been sitting on at least one of these letters for over a week, we don’t know the timing.  But Mary Harney correctly pointed to the problem with TDs intending to retire from politics — and thus [...]

What exactly are the Government expecting in their Department of Justice budgeting:

Re: the cuts in the Defence Forces proposed by the McCarthy Report.

Headscratching stuff. The Defence Forces have already been pared down to the bone from a decade-long transformation arising from the PricewaterhouseCoopers report in the Nineties. So where is the ‘fat’ meant to come from, exactly?

In a week dominated by harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in the ongoing Russian-Georgian conflict over the separatist region of South Ossetia. There are shades of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, when Hitler, on the pretext of defending a ‘persecuted’ German minority in that region of Czechoslovakia, was appeased and allowed to annex it, followed [...]

It’s very rare for Ireland to have a potential military dilemma given that any overseas military activities are always under the colour of the United Nations.  While there have been occasional concerns expressed about whether European Union military operations might breach neutrality, those concerns have never been able to overcome the general momentum of EU [...]

Maybe it’s just for public consumption but it’s another day of chastened-sounding statements from FF. Willie O’Dea managed to go a bit beyond Bertie’s “work harder” and dropped a hint that the Cabinet is taking another look at the pay review recommendations for ministerial and public service posts.

Friday’s Irish Times reports on a potential hurdle in coalition formation that while not fatal, will deal a blow to the credibility of several of the independent TDs if/when a dodge is found around it. The issue is that some of them signed a pledge not to participate in any government that allowed the Shannon [...]

Unanswered because it seems no one in the Dead Tree Press is asking them. I was drawn a fortnight ago to the Minister of Defence Willie O’Dea’s entry in the register of Oireachtas members interest. The minister as many people will know has a weekly column in the Sunday Independent. Now, politicians writing the occasional [...]

Given the regular migration of UK policy proposals to the Republic, here’s one worth watching: Home Secretary John Reid’s announcement that he’s seriously considereing splitting the Home Office into 2 departments — which might be a tempting idea for an under-siege Minister for Justice to float the next time a scandal hits the department. 

I know we go on about this a bit. But anyway Fine Gael and Labour disagree again. On Tuesday in the Dail. Billy Timmins of Fine Gael said of the Triple Lock (UN approval for military action).

The other day I argued against the neutrality “triple lock” requiring a United Nations resolution for the defence forces to act. Fine Gael agree. Irish ‘Triple-Lock’ is a potential massive embarrassment – Allen

No post about Willie O’Dea can not be complete without the picture. Willie O’Dea was talking today about EU battle groups in Limerick. He gave his speech at the Institute of European Affairs Conference on “EU Battlegroups –Perspectives from Neutral and Non-aligned states”. From Wikipedia “The European Union battle groups is a project done in [...]