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

From last night’s debate on a private members motion (FG) on Crumlin cutbacks.
During the debate in the Dail, Ms Harney said: “I find it strange that when we ask hospitals to make efficiency savings, some hospitals decide that the most sensitive area is the area that should be cut first.”
Those nasty hospitals….taking spin to a [...]

If there is one thing you should do today it’s buy The Irish Examiner. Go, g’wan, buy it. Even if you’re not from Cork. Even if you’re not from Munster. Feck it, go and buy it if you’ve never bought a paper or watched the news before. Please, for the good of the country, buy [...]

PD local councillor Cait Keane has joined Fine Gael in Dublin South. There is by-election coming up and with Tom Kitt steppign down in 2012 Fine Gael might lick their chops at a potentail third seat.

Back in March of 2007 I queried the professional backgrounds of the then FF/PD cabinet with respect to their experience of the realities of making things and what could be termed the productive sector of the economy. Batt O’Keeffe appears to have revived interest in the topic in recent days by suggesting that we need [...]

ITs a good week for Red C to take the latest tracking poll for the Sunday Business Post. Markets are falling like stones (Friday has the potential to be another massive dead cat bounce) and the government don’t look to have stamped authority on many aspects of policy.

Good riddance. Or as WorldbyStorm writes over at Cedar Lounge Revolution, ‘The PDs get a a four week reprieve. Then they die.’ Can’t come soon enough. The only downside is that we’ll have to endure a plethora of obituaries telling us how the PDs made a difference, how they shaped whole [...]

IF you haven’t glimpsed the Sunday Independent, you can guarantee that the edited extract of a speech given by Junior Minister at the Department of Trade and Enterprise John McGuinness will be dominating discussion of the Social Partnership talks over the coming days. It remains unclear if the governmen is capable of steering a course [...]

Grealish keeps spinning the bottle

Noel Grealish prolongs the agony for Progresive Democrats by failing to kill them of.

Stephen Collin’s story in the Irish Times today is one of those ones that feeds into a zeitgeist. Political leaders who have let the Social Partnership talks slip, are in charge of an economic slowdown and on 13 weeks of summer holidays receive their final pay increase today.
TDs WILL receive a pay rise of some [...]

Even before the Irish people’s democratic decision to reject the fatally-flawed Lisbon Treaty, (which would have deepened the democratic-deficit in Europe still further), the source of Libertas funding was a bane of “yes” campaigners. To the elite, the possibility of the ‘mainstream’ parties being so decisively outspent by this upstart pro-business [...]

Missed this earlier today but didn’t spot it picked up here. Jamie Smyth got his hands on the confidential part of the Eurobarometer survey into the Lisbon result. The findings are interesting – also interesting they weren’t released. I would have guessed at who leaked were it not coming from Brussels correspondent.
LISBON: party supporters’ votes
[...]

If it weren’t for the fact that we are in the middle of an international crisis of global proportions in the uncharted waters of unpredictability (ed – that is enough hyperbole), the government would be getting covered in other forms of excrement. Not least due to the admission that:
 ”high proportion of existing schools are in [...]

The first poll after the Lisbon result comes with little by way of surprise. The Sunday Business Post/Red C poll finds the Irish electorate looks unlikely to have engaged in a mass volte face with regard to the major parties after Lisbon.
Fianna Fail 40% (unchanged)
Fine Gael 25% (-3)

In a great day for Irish and European democracy, the Irish people, on a higher turnout than Nice II, rejected the illegitimate and anti-democratic Lisbon Treaty by 53.4% to 46.6%. In doing so, they have struck a blow for freedom and against remote, unaccountable and undemocratic rule by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. They have shown [...]