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

In a carefully calculated Friday afternoon news dump which will be lost in all the financial excitement, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has added at least 6 months to his earlier timetable for a Victims’ Rights Bill.  This is a sequel to his killing of Alan Shatter’s private member’s bill on the same subject back [...]

The Dublin LGBTQ Pride Festival is well underway, and continued yesterday evening with the annual debate in the Walton Theatre in TCD at 7.30pm. The motion for discussion was : “Same-Sex Couples Want Access to Civil Marriage, not Civil Partnerships”Chair: Sen. Ivana BacikProp: Sen. David Norris & Ailbhe Smyth (MarriagEquality)Opp: Neil Ward (Dublin Pride) & [...]

I know I have been quiet of late in these parts trying to cut down on my time spent discussing politics. Anyway this story is forcing me to come out of retirement.
Cork South-West TD Christy O’Sullivan has said he is deeply embarrassed after being arrested on suspicion of drink driving over the bank holiday weekend.
The [...]

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 [...]

Bock has been following this for a while and gives his take on the Morris Tribunal report over on the blog, he is not impressed with the Gardai, neither is Justice Morris and neither is Jim Higgins.
Considering he was being moved on, it is clear that Lenihan was covering for any successor in dumping this [...]

Frank Dunlop won’t tell the Mahon tribunal which person, then seeking a High Court appointment and who subsequently got it, met him in February 2000. Here’s the complete list of current justices, although in principle someone could have cycled in and out of the job during the interval and not be on this list. [...]

Those with an interest in third-level education will no doubt recall the interest sparked by one Frank Prendergast Jr, whose High Court challenge to the quota system for medicine courses has been the cause of much discussion in educational circles.

What is it with Fine Gael and random Drug testing and searches. Do they have shares in it of something. Their usual hobby horse drug testing is schools has been around for about a year which has very little research supporting the notion that it works. But now they have moved on to clubs. Gardaí [...]

Announced this afternoon — the rule requiring that a driver on a 2nd provisional licence have a driver with a full licence in the car is postponed until end of June 2008. 8 months to clear the test backlog (209,000 currently on their 1st provisional, by the way). Statement from the Department of [...]

Inside Out Episode 5 is up over on the blog, head over there to download it (or just add it to ).
This Week: Quintin Oliver the man who brought Sinn Fein and the DUP to Finland to talk with Iraqi delegates about peace processes and John Longergan, Governor of Mountjoy Prison on the criminal [...]

Drug seizures are always big news, particularly when there’s some nice pictures to go along with them. Take for example the following RTE news story caught my attention last week:
Customs officers have seized 18kg of herbal cannabis with a street value of €216,000 at Dublin Airport.
A sniffer dog gave an indication that a passenger was [...]

Maybe we should have called the blog IrishElections.com.  Bertie has indicated today that he envisages 2 referenda next summer: the necessary ratification of the EU amending treaty, and the children’s rights referendum.  As he says the logic is to roll them together, but it does make one wonder what exactly the rush was for the latter back [...]

Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath TD have lost their challenge to the constituency boundaries.  McGrath says that the case was decided on a “technicality” although it’s not yet clear what that is.  One possibility is that neither was from a constituency that was underrepresented according to the 1 TD per 30,000 criterion (one issue being at [...]

Unborn in abortion case gets a lawyer
17-year-old seeking abortion challenges HSE

A four month pregnant 17 year old girl is taking the Health Service Executive to the High Court tomorrow after the Health Service Executive asked gardaí not to permit her to leave the jurisdiction for an abortion. The girl, who is under care of the HSE, found out a week ago that her baby has a condition [...]

Over at cearta, I have posted the following footnote to Election 2007:
Now that An Taoiseach (the Prime Minister) has put us out of our misery and finally called the long-awaited general election, all Bills currently pending will fall with the outgoing Dáil (Lower House). Of those of particular interest to this blog, this means that [...]