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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

That’s the deal now on offer to those workers making just above the minimum wage.  RTE on the inevitable income levy climbdown –
The Government has decided that people earning up to the minimum wage of €17,540 per year will be exempt from the 1% income levy announced in the Budget.
However, anyone earning above [...]

One of the biggest stories about the state of the Irish Economy came out on Friday to little notice. 
THE IRISH Financial Services Regulatory Authority has instructed accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to assess the extent to which the banks are delaying the collection of interest payments on loans to builders and property developers.
If banks are not collecting [...]

Consider the following hypothetical situation.  Two people both aged, say 76, with identical current incomes (e.g. state contributory pension plus a little deposit interest).  Both now have medical cards.  One got it under the pre-2002 means test due to lower income in some previous year than the other person.The other person got it under the [...]

Brian Cowen is talking to the EU Legal Service about drafting opt-outs and protocols to make the Lisbon Treaty “palatable to the Irish public” according to Jamie Smyth and others this morning.
Cowen, who said the France, which is the current president of the EU, had also asked the Council of Ministers’ legal services “to see [...]