Katherine Zappone in 2015: “The practice of appointments made with a nod and wink to State boards has no place in our open modern democracy and could damage our economic recovery.”
A few caveats here: First, Behaviour and Attitudes has consistently found Sinn Fein support higher, and other party support lower, than other pollsters. That does not mean they are wrong, but it is worth noting. Second, they were not hugely accurate at the last general election, though that also does not mean they are wrong […]
Bye-elections are a curious beast, not least because with just one electoral area, and therefore a smallish number of candidates, the focus of politicos becomes hyper-intense. There’s gangs of them digging for gold, or even votes, in the leafy streets of Dublin Bay South at the moment. Ministers are pictured getting down with the party juniors […]
Una Mullally’s savage, over the top, and downright nasty attack on Fine Gael by-election candidate James Geoghegan in this week’s Irish Times should be a wakeup call for the party, but it will not be. For most of the last decade, Fine Gael has sought to win the respect, admiration, and votes, of people like […]
On Thursday, the good people of one of Ireland’s wealthiest constituencies, and one of its most liberal, will go to the polls to select a replacement TD, after Fine Gael’s Eoghan Murphy decided – quite rationally – that he had just about had enough of the carry on in Leinster House. In a constituency that […]
The government is reportedly planning to potentially use rapid antigen testing to allow indoor dining and drinking by the end of July, in defiance of NPHET. Government officials and representatives of the hospitality industry will be meeting today to discuss the re-opening of the sector, and according to several senior cabinet ministers, antigen testing is […]
Leo Varadkar said Fine Gael is the party to “unify our island”.
Aontú Candidate for the Dublin Bay South Bye Election, Mairead TóibÃn has slammed the ongoing revelations about Government and Opposition parties conducting fake polls as evidence of a deep malaise in Irish politics. She said there was a that is rife in modern Irish politics, where citizens are seen as passive outsiders to be used […]
The Irish media is presently gorging itself on the revelation that for a number of years, at least four Irish political parties (and probably more) asked volunteers to pose as fake polling companies in order to go door to door and conduct market research. First, we learned that Sinn Fein did it. And then, because […]
Student volunteers promised €50 each, but never paid.
One of the rather more desperate attempts by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to recoup lost ground to Sinn Féin has been to focus on the latter party’s apparent track record in voting against proposals to build housing developments. Sinn Féin has indeed pursued inconsistent policies, as we shall see, but the political reality is […]
The claim that all improvements in living conditions are illusionary distractions was pioneered first by Lenin in What is to be Done? and updated as part of new left ideology in the 1960s by Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of Marxism. It still forms the basis of current identity politics in which the traditional working […]