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

What a long strange road it’s been.  September 2008 – Irish Nationwide has reiterated that it has received no takeover approach from Anglo Irish Bank. The development follows speculation regarding the future ownership of the society. Today – The Direction Orders enable the State to commence the process of restructuring Anglo and INBS as envisaged [...]

Although we’re still in the phoney war stage of the election campaign, it seems that the basic FF strategy is to throw a bunch of, er, stuff, at the wall and see what sticks.  In that regard, we got today in the Senate an interesting and tendentious exchange between Sen. Alex White (Lab.) and Minister [...]

It’s too soon to say that we are in the home stretch of our political drama.  Brian Lenihan, wearing his Minister of Finance hat – “If you want to ensure that some person doesn’t pay tax, someone else has to pay tax. That’s now how we’re going to operate as a State. So as a [...]

In a news dump that would impress Andy Coulson, the government clearly put the word around yesterday that it would not be implementing the abolition of the so-called “Section 23″ property tax reliefs and this is confirmed in the Friday afternoon release of the Finance Bill, which was already overdue.  Specifically, according to the Minister’s [...]

From the start, there have been questions about the government’s number10.gov.uk style website,  merrionstreet.ie.   Despite the presence of special advisers, media affairs units, and handlers in government offices, there’s supposed to be a clear line between political boosterism and the provision of taxpayer-financed official information.  Yet within an hour of the Taoiseach’s unscheduled Thursday statement [...]

Quote from Brian Cowen — “In normal times you don’t see a diversion (sic) of interest between national interests or national advance if you like and political advance. So we live in very transformative times”. (11 minutes in) So during 1997-2007, there was no difference between the national interest and that of Fianna Fail.  Remarkable.

Brian Lenihan, 8 December 2010 – People should not be surprised that there’s a huge erosion of trust in the Irish banking system when we’ve an endless debate on whether we should be defaulting on the payment of our obligations,” he said.  “A small country like Ireland cannot default without the support of a central [...]

It’s going to be a long weekend for Brian Cowen so this will have to be a frequently updated post.  Let’s start with the seemingly damaging Irish Times story that Anglo lobbied Central Bank director and Druid’s Glen diner Alan Gray the day before the guarantee – Anglo had sought a €1.5 billion short-term loan [...]

Brian Cowen – The continuing attempt to suggest that the Government’s approach to the affairs of Anglo Irish Bank was influenced by political or any inappropriate considerations is utterly without foundation. The facts in this instance demonstrate that as do the findings of the independent review carried out by Professor Honohan which similarly found that [...]

What is an Irish Mortgage-Backed Promissory Note?  Below the fold, some thoughts — on what may be old news — about this question.

New statistics from Central Bank of Ireland – Credit institutions’ holdings of debt and equity securities issued by the Irish private sector rose by €5.3 billion in November 2010. Banks buying more securities issued by the private sector … what could possibly be the downside?

Question of the day, and really, we have no pre-conceived answer, why is it that both the Republic and Northern Ireland are having such difficulties with burst water pipes under quite different institutional arrangements for water supply (county councils vs government owned company)?  Note in particular that the problems of Northern Ireland are not mirrored [...]

Even if today’s Moody’s ratings downgrade could be brushed off with Ireland out of the bond market, there are two other notable developments — both dropped into the Friday afternoon news cycle.  First, the ECB and Bank of England have set up a 10 billion euro swap agreement in which the ECB can access up [...]

The AIB bonus payment row may be shaking loose some of the practices of the calcified Irish legal-political complex.  The government at first appeared to be in its standard legal paralysis mode when it comes to doing something it doesn’t want to do — claiming that legal advice meant it had no ability to revisit [...]

Under the National Pension Reserve Fund Act of 2000, the government is obligated to pay 1 percent of Gross National Product a year into the fund up to 2025.  Under 2009 amendments to this act (the passage of this bill being the critical decision to gut the NPRF, not the deal with the IMF/EU), the [...]

As has been widely noted, the Constitution says – The State shall not be bound by any international agreement involving a charge upon public funds unless the terms of the agreement shall have been approved by Dáil Éireann. The current talking points supplied by the government’s ace legal department are that since the loan program is [...]