London’s demographics, a new book you should read; the Irish soccer mess, and why Gript won’t stop asking about the Bike Shed.
Before the debate, all of the fundamentals pointed to a very tight election decided by a handful of votes in a few states. After the debate, that remains the case.
The budget surplus for this one year alone in Ireland was projected by the Minister for Finance in April to be in the order of €8billion.
Only a fool meddles with a system that is producing good outcomes
If one candidate wins it bigly, then the other will obviously demand more debates, but the victor will have no incentive whatsoever to agree to them.
If it’s just another political memoir about climbing the greasy pole and getting bored once you reach the top, then we can toss it in the “I might read that later” column, with all the other political memoirs.
In modern democracies, political offices are just one of a whole series of interlocking institutions that wield political power. Capturing one of them is not enough. There are no shortcuts.
We have a bizarre situation where the next Government will be bound – at least to some degree – by major spending decisions taken in the dying days of this one.
Also: Fintan O’Toole’s extraordinary attack on cataract busses.
Politicians have both a political and economic incentive to tell you that everything is fine, until it isn’t. It’s not lying, necessarily – but it might just be unwarranted optimism.
Would we grant that level of benefit of the doubt to some working class white guy from Alabama who tweeted that Barack Obama was a Kenyan?
We are supposed to treat accused people with the presumption of innocence – or in other words the presumption that they have been wrongly accused.