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

Compared to the billions going to the banks (and perhaps soon needed for Quinn), the mere €450m that we will lend to Greece “centrally pooled by the European Commission” may not seem like much.  But according to Brian Lenihan – “The costs of all countries participating, including Ireland, in this facility would be fully covered. [...]

The carefully phrased European Commission approval of NAMA under state aid guidelines is only the beginning of the process.  Bank of Ireland and AIB will still need clearance for the specific balance sheet clearance (NAMA sales plus capital injection) that are still to come.   In that regard, it’s important to look at the seemingly separate [...]

How long before she is “that woman” in the corridors of Leinster House?  An all-guns-blazing statement from Deirdre de Burca in response to the Sunday broadsheet spinning about her resignation.  It’s one little detail after another (going back to Dermot Ahern’s blasphemy bill) but including this nugget – The Green Party had favoured Pat Cox [...]

A couple of days ago, we had a discussion about whether a Fiscal Policy Council could work for Ireland.  There is one basic problem: as such a council would imply reduced power for Fianna Fail, they’d never go for it.  Anyway, move along to another power that FF governments will never surrender: appointments.  Today the [...]

4 days is a long time in politics.  Remember when the George Lee resignation seemed to dominate?  Deirdre de Burca in today’s Irish Times – In fact, matters have become more serious of late where Brian Cowen appears to have failed to honour two specific agreements that were made at the highest level (ie between [...]

The Irish Times has an interesting two part series on the predicament of the Irish unions.  Today’s installment provides a good insight into the minds of the union leadership and in so doing illustrates the challenge of relevance.  David Begg and Jack O’Connor now say that after 20 years of Social Partnership™, all they ever [...]

The Irish Times and RTE say that a team from KPMG Netherlands office is doing an assessment of Anglo Irish Bank’s options, with one option apparently being a wind down.  At some point we’ll have to do a complete list of Brian Lenihan’s statements about Anglo Irish over the last 14 months, but it has [...]

Maire Geoghegan Quinn’s statement on her nomination to be Ireland’s next commissioner is below the fold.

Simon gave me a bell in work today. It seems he has been doing some research into rulings by the European Court of Justice and the EU Court of First Instance on asset management and the legalities surrounding the application of state aid. The beauty of working in journalism is you can spend time checking [...]

I was at a meeting tonight for a local Yes to Lisbon campaign and someone brought along a COIR leaflet, then I came home and I saw Evert’s post – it really highlighted how the No Side could win and how the Yes Side are actually at a disadvantage. How? They can afford to misinform, [...]

Update: Official Press Release here. – In a decision sure to spark furious condemnation from “no” campaigners, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland has announced new regulations on airtime set to grant the political-parties the vast majority of airtime during the campaign. Broadcasters are not required to allocate exactly the same amount of time to both [...]

We can see already that there are groups with a multitude of colours sharpening swords for the impending Battle for Lisbon. This time though it appears it will be a battle not of parties but of people. The Yes side has conscripted an array of celebrities to their army including Bill Cullen, Eimear Quinn (Of Eurovision fame, apparently) and [...]

Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheal Martin is in charge of the Lisbon II campaign.  With summer schools apparently forming the main forum for policy debate with the Dail in recess, he was perhaps giving us a preview of what the Yes campaign will look like in this evening’s remarks to the MacGill event.  Writing as [...]

Labour launched their 2nd Lisbon campaign today, making a start to a summer where all and sundry from across the Irish political spectrum will tell us stories on why we should vote yes for this 2nd treaty. And boy will they be stories. We can see concoctions worthy of the greatest Irish Seanachaí and on [...]

So the new Lisbon deal will be formally agreed with our EU colleagues over the next couple of days.  The media coverage is going be particularly unreliable on this one, because the line to the media from Brian Cowen and Micheal Martin will be to show their efforts in extracting every possible concession and driving [...]

Here we go again.  Aer Lingus is withdrawing more services from Shannon.  But this row is going to play out very differently than the end of Shannon-Heathrow.   The latter row caught the government on the hop but also featured an Aer Lingus in a very different mood, confident that it could launch a sub-hub in [...]