Irish politics is an immensely silly business. No wonder they leave the real decisions about running the country to Dr. Holohan, and his team.
More and more voters are coming to the conclusion that change is required.
“What are the Labour Party for?”, asked a colleague who shall remain nameless, yesterday, as we were deciding who would write about this weekend’s party conference. “After all, what’s unique about them is not popular, and what is popular about them is not unique”. It’s hard to argue with that. The Labour Party is in […]
Councillor Treanor has long been a controversial figure, mainly because he says things about immigration, in very plain language, that more respectable politicians would never dream of saying. That is also, in large part, why he keeps winning elections.
In 2008, when the last great disaster befell us, there was a moment of post-fall clarity. “Yes”, the media said, “too many dissenters were shouted down. There was a Groupthink problem. It should never happen again”.
How remarkably convenient that the Fianna Fáil election post-mortem – 18 months late – should conclude that the party’s miserable performance at the polls at the last election was really the fault of pro-life TDs, and not at all the fault of Micheál Martin and his leadership. One might almost get the impression that a […]
Nobody told Micheál Martin that Katherine Zappone was to get the big job in New York until it arrived at Cabinet, in the form of a behind the scenes agreement amongst Fine Gael Ministers, and the hapless Taoiseach was bounced into going along with it. In the immediate aftermath, he had the look of a […]
We are now a week into sustained media coverage of the fake polling practices conducted by all of the major political parties in the State. Some, like my colleague John McGuirk, have argued that the story is being blown out of all proportion, that it is otherwise inconsequential and is only continuing because of a […]
The great paradox of modern Ireland is that the more power Irish liberals acquire, the more illiberal they become. We had, yesterday, a collection of taxpayer funded NGO’s in to visit the Oireachtas committee on Housing and Local Government, which is responsible for how Ireland runs its elections, amongst other things. Kitty Holland picks up […]
Credit where it is due: this is an interesting, and what Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister fame would have called “courageous” proposal, first reported by Hugh O’Connell of the Independent: “speaking at Government Buildings on Tuesday, Social Protection Minister Heather Humphreys said she had asked her officials to examine “pay-related benefit” where a person’s […]
No, seriously now, what were they thinking? The Bourne Election has just been released @DeirdreConroyIE @JohnLahart @lichamber @NiallCollinsTD @NiamhSmythTD @Fiona_Kildare @MarcMacsharryTD @PaulMcauliffe @cardagh @fiannafailparty #TeamDeirdre #ByElection2021 pic.twitter.com/LetEurASXz — Jim O'Callaghan TD (@OCallaghanJim) May 23, 2021 As a piece of political communication, the only redeeming feature of this video is that it is so bad that […]
Every time we report one of these polls, the comments on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms are the same: “fake poll”, or “they didn’t poll me”, or words to that effect. And that is understandable, nobody likes to be in the minority, or feel the country is against them. Least of all, […]