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

A couple of semi-formed thoughts of issues that perhaps deserved a little more attention in all the relentless punditry.

Rediscovering his “mandate” mojo on Election Eve, Brian Lenihan has moved virtually all of Anglo’s deposits and NAMA bonds to AIB.  An impolite question: where exactly is AIB getting the €3.5 billion in cash that it’s paying for the NAMA bonds?  Yes, it just sold the Polish operation to Banco Santander but that cash was [...]

Today in Commercial Court – Mr Justice Peter Kelly was told today that the [M1] tolling company is claiming it had a legitimate expectation, including a promise from the Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey, that tolls would go only up. The court heard that the Minister told the Dáil in June last year that the by-laws [...]

Bank of Ireland has done a Friday afternoon news dump of a provisional set of accounts for 2010 and an associated announcement that it will make a dividend payment on the National Pension Farewell Fund’s preference shares in the company — last year, the Bank was under a “dividend stopper” order from the European Commission [...]

To the extent that we weren’t already at that point, we’ve reached the limit of Brian Lenihan’s ability to credibly perform his role as Minister for Finance.   A week after claiming that he had no mandate as Minister to implement the recapitalisation of AIB, B of I, and EBS, he offered a string of inflammatory [...]

We’ve known for a while that Brian Lenihan’s statements are very slippery and therefore require especially careful analysis.  Consider therefore today’s deferment of the recapitalisation of the AIB, Bank of Ireland, and EBS to March – This was to be completed by the end of February. However, the Minister has informed the European Commission, the [...]

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 [...]

Brian Cowen last discussed the government side-deals with the 2 independents on 10 November.  We’ve got the whole exchange below the fold, but the key point is that the Michael Lowry and Jackie Healy-Rae agreements are with the leader of Fianna Fail, not an Taoiseach.  Brian Cowen inherited them from Bertie Ahern but they are [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]