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

Just getting around to reading the Morris Report. One quick note. In the Irish Times Bredan Howlin (gets Jim Higgins party wrong) says
“I am confident that I acted responsibly at all times when allegations were made to me by a criminal lawyer with more than 20 years practice regarding senior gardaí in 2000. I brought [...]

It has been revealed in the last few hours that former Dun Laoighre Councillor Ness Childers has resigned from the Green Party. It is believed that she is hoping to secure a nomination for the European Elections as a Labour Party Candidate in the East Constituency.
Ms Childers resigned from Dun Laoighre Council in [...]

The EU Commission has said that it will look into whether the Irish bank plan breaches competition rules and if it does, the commission will force Ireland to recoup the money from banks. This may sound like more of Brussels poking its nose into our affairs. You know what it really is: a God send [...]

So Mandelson is coming back to the UK cabinet. So what is the chances of Charlie McCreavy coming back?

Good day for a news dump…
The Minister for Health Mary Harney has said that major cutbacks are underway to prevent cost over-runs in the Health Service Executive.
The minister was responding to questions in the Dáil about the HSE’s budget over-run which was expected to exceed €300m by the end of this year.
Minister Harney said a [...]

I was listening to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times talking on KRCW’s To the Point. Friedman has been arguing for years that the US needs to drastically cut its dependence on oil and to transition to more sustainable technologies and behaviours. “The problem for the US economy” he said “is that it has [...]

The world is falling in.

Voters are not ignorant, according to Bryan Caplan, they are irrational. Caplan is the author of the provocative “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, a book in which he lays a large part of the blame for poor political outcomes on the shoulders of voters. The voter messes things up because he or she makes [...]

Twelve year old Rebecca has a hole in her heart. It is a congenital defect and it may cause her problems in the future. But it is not by a long way her biggest challenge in life. Rebecca’s parents are both heroine addicts and they have abandoned her to her granny who is now in [...]

The Taoiseach formerly known as Bertie wants a title. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions. Here are mine:

Iar infection

Iar wig

Iar relevent

Iar ittant

Iar-ksome

Iar of the sow (that you can’t make a silk purse from)

Wasn’t it funny when people pointed out that, in wanting to be referred to as Iar Taoiseach, he’d forgotten the aspiration!

As if we didn’t need another reason to vote No to the Lisbon Treaty, along comes news that a bunch of Commission nitwits in Brussels have written a secret report (ooooh) proving beyond all doubt that we Irish are being brainwashed into becoming Euro-sceptics by an increasingly independent and, therefore obviously, tabloid media. Details of [...]

Yesterday I went to the welfare office. There remains a tinge of stigma on anything to do with welfare. I will admit that I’m not immune from it. As I made my way to the ‘dole’ office, something gnawed at my pride. Of course, this effect is shaped entirely by the orthodoxy that insists we [...]

A senior manager called by my desk last Wednesday and asked if he could have a word. There was nothing unusual in that. He had occasionally asked me to his office to discuss a project or a customer. And anyway, my immediate boss was on holiday and we had just put in a bid for [...]

McCain’s choice of running mate is not as inspiring as it looked at first. Tomaltach’s first reaction was very close to that of his old friend, An Spailpín, who gives a glowing assessment of McCain’s choice. True, on the face of it, Palin’s selection is a stroke of genius, a relatively young woman with considerable [...]

In a move that seems to have surprised not just the commentariat but some advisers, McCain has picked Sarah Palin, governer of Alaska, as his running mate. Hugely surprising given she hasn’t been in the Washington inner circle and of course - because she’s a woman! She is not just the first republican female candidate [...]

Who can be surprised by the announcement - reported in today’s Irish times - that Village Magazine is to cease publication?
Village went intro terminal decline pretty quickly. From the start the mag made losses that were as impressive as its copy was unimpressive. True there were a handful of strong journos at times - Justine [...]