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

Here’s the Tribune story with the key points from Noel Dempsey’s interview with them about Shannon-Heathrow. In remarks that are likely to inflame the crisis, at least in the short-term, Dempsey states that: Shannon-Heathrow is a lost cause for now (consistent with the imminent deadline to have a new route in place); that he [...]

The departments of an Taoiseach and transport have made available the report of senior officials on the Shannon-Heathrow route along with a press release from the government  summarising the report and outlining next steps.  The press release is the usual blather and jargon but the detailed report is actually a little more substantive, indicating that [...]

Here’s another shoe dropping in the SNN-LHR row.  Ryanair is putting Stansted flights from Belfast City (George Best).  4 a day.  They also want a runway expansion to facilitate additional flights from Belfast City as a new base.  As usual, every move can be spun various ways.  Aer Lingus will now claim vindication: that Ryanair [...]

It’s probably not on your regular websurfing list but the website of the Irish Stock Exchange has been very lively recently, as seemingly arcane company announcements can occasionally pertain to fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis.  But sitting there today is Ryanair’s formal notification to the exchange that it is seeking an EGM, along [...]

A fairly comprehensive statement today from the up-to-now quiet Enda Kenny on SNN-LHR. Perhaps some of the time was spent reconciling the position that FG will now adopt with their non-opposition to the Aer Lingus privatization (although they had complaints at the time about how it was managed). A few interesting things in [...]

Here’s the text of the (hastily written?) press release from the Department of Transport following the Cabinet meeting on Shannon-Heathrow today.  The statement is mostly the familiar litany from the government and avoids the issue of the call for an Aer Lingus EGM or the purpose of the 25 percent shareholding.  But there might be [...]

Here’s an issue that has surfaced briefly at various times in the Shannon-Heathrow-Belfast dispute and has now been explicitly raised by IMPACT: is Belfast in Ireland?  We can probably all recall instances where one of the many usages for the two jurisdictions on the island has had a similar impact as fingernails being drawn across a [...]

Here’s an interesting profile from the Financial Times a few days ago of Padraig O’Ceidigh, now the chairman but at one time the hands-on businessman who developed Aer Arann out of its island service base into a decent sized regional point-to-point carrier.   It’s not clear whether this is the right model for Shannon, where long-haul [...]

After drifting a little bit the SNN-LHR controversy and the related issue of the Aer Lingus strike are heating up again this evening.   The latest non-Bertie non-Dempsey spokesperson for the government is Mary Hanafin — perhaps she was the only one around given the Leaving Cert results.  And the employee trust has spoken up.  This [...]

A dog that hadn’t barked up to now — Aer Lingus staff — is barking. Tonight brings news of a 48 hour strike by pilots next week, not in protest against the Shannon withdrawal per se, but the fact that new Belfast base is hiring pilots outside the collective bargaining contract. This arises from the [...]

An absolutely atrocious job by the RTE Radio News at One today. Dermot Ahern, in the course of an interview about Irish prisoners overseas, was asked (at about the 3:30 mark in his interview) about the Shannon-Heathrow route removal. In his response he (1) referred to the Irish Aid decentralisation to Shannon as [...]

As predicted a couple of days ago, the first significant government statement on the Shannon-Heathrow controversy is a classic of distractions and selective or irrelevant claims. A debunking of the Department of Transport’s response which accompanied Noel “Father Ted” Dempsey’s statement below.

A day after Michael O’Leary’s letter to the government proposing a joint call for Aer Lingus to retain its Heathrow service from Shannon, Michael Noonan TD puts pen to paper to write an actual letter to Willie Walsh, British Airways chief executive, to ask him to consider a Shannon-Heathrow service. Does this move the [...]

What does a company do when a majority of its ownership wants to pursue a particular policy? This is the issue that Aer Lingus in theory faces with 50.3 percent of its ownership claiming that the Shannon-Heathrow route should be maintained. Thus the hot potato that Michael O’Leary has tossed towards the government.

I missed this last week; (hat-tip Dec)