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

Last night I attended a lecture in Trinity College on Ireland’s role in achieving the Millennium Development Goals given by the Minister of State for Overseas Development, Peter Power. The topic was unfortunate given the recent savaging of the overseas aid budget, which means that Ireland will be spending 22% less than in 2008. These [...]

As BNIFFO-gate rumbles on, it’s easy to forget that the European Union is essentially in crisis today.  People are racking their brains to remember the last time that a government collapsed while holding the EU Council Presidency, but the Czech government has certainly picked a most inconvenient time to do so: half way through its [...]

There’s one trick Fianna Fail can still manage: media management.  The Brian Cowen trip to the USA is Exhibit A, with much of the glowing coverage achieved by the simple expedient of getting hacks represented at the same booze-flowing events attended by the politicians.  Here’s today’s Irish Times editorial working straight from a press release [...]

At the time of the first Lisbon referendum, Declan Ganley marched out on front of the cameras with three tickets for the leaders of the pro-Lisbon parties. We were, Ganley told us, to send these politicians back to Brussels to renegotiate the treaty. Many journalists mistook Ganley’s pro-social behaviour for a political stunt. After all, cheap stunts are to politicians what concrete blocks are to builders, but these commentators failed to remember that Ganley is not a politician.

The collapse of New York trading and investment advisory firms bearing the name of their founder, Bernard Madoff, is making news around the world.  Madoff has apparently told federal investigators that he ran a $50 billion Ponzi scheme i.e. in which the principal of new investors is used to pay returns to previous investors.   [...]

The office of Czech President Vaclav Klaus has published the transcript of what apparently was a blazing row that erupted in a meeting between him and MEPs Daniel Cohn-Bendit (the ‘68 veteran) and Fianna Fail MEP Brian Crowley.  Elements of the row are reported on in the Irish Times today but Klaus has since decided [...]

Enda Kenny and David Cameron met for just under an hour yesterday.  It’s an interesting pairing (photo).  As Enda told the Irish Times, they have the common predicament of being in opposition against a long-standing incumbent party.  The actual common policy areas are tricky.  As Guido Fawkes has emphasized, the un-Labour approach to coping with [...]

Peruse the diagram above. The green/yellow states are those voting with DREs with a voter-verified paper-trail (VVPR) (except in Tennessee, Colorado and Maryland where the relevant legislation has been passed but doesn’t come into force this year) and with/without (respectively) a paper audit-trail. The red-states are those requiring neither a [...]

Brian Cowen is talking to the EU Legal Service about drafting opt-outs and protocols to make the Lisbon Treaty “palatable to the Irish public” according to Jamie Smyth and others this morning.
Cowen, who said the France, which is the current president of the EU, had also asked the Council of Ministers’ legal services “to see [...]

In a week dominated by harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in the ongoing Russian-Georgian conflict over the separatist region of South Ossetia. There are shades of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, when Hitler, on the pretext of defending a ‘persecuted’ German minority in that region of Czechoslovakia, was appeased and [...]

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 [...]

The WTO talks are a little like the Tribunals. For the most part, progress is confined to a tiny box on page 8 of the Irish Times or Indo unless the leading lights drag it up the agenda. While both are meaningful in themselves and have great symbolic (on the perception of cleansing politics or [...]

I’m one of those people who hasn’t quite decided which way they’re going to vote on in the referendum. This is because I haven’t got around to reading all of the text I’m voting on yet. However, there’s one incredibly stupid argument the no camp is bandying about right now. It’s an argument that does [...]

*Sub-Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Fine Gael Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs Bill Timmins met with the Foreign Minister of the Tibeten Government in-exile today and suggested that the visit of the Dali Lama to the UK (May 20-31) represented a great chance to have him address the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Why not the Oireachtas as [...]

Libertas have an outraged press release accusing the Irish government of a systematic campaign to hide information on the Lisbon Treaty based on what they call “an email from a very senior Irish official to his British counterpart” which the Daily Mail published today. Headlined the Treaty Con, this story is picked up by a [...]