Posted by Elaine Byrne The editors of this website, Elaine Byrne, David Farrell, Eoin O’Malley, Jane Suiter and Matt Wall, published an opinion piece in the Irish Times today arguing that the path to rebuilding a Republic should start with a citizens’ assembly. So what is it? A Citizens’ Assembly is a means of citizens recapturing…
Ken McDonagh 13 April 2011 Vincent Browne has a new bugbear – party finance. In today’s Irish Times he writes: ‘The only reason anyone would give money to a political party is because they expect to get something in return’ He goes on to link the problem of private funding for political parties to the…
Eoin O’Malley (28 February, 2011) Although the election was a seismic event in the redevelopment of the Irish party system, the decisions made in the next week as to the structure of the government will have a greater long term impact. The decision Labour has to take as to whether to go into government or…
By Jane Suiter The campaign we have just witnessed is unusual in Irish party political terms and may be one of the first where national policy has played an important part. There is little doubt when we examine movements in opinion polls over the course of the campaign that Fine Gael ran the most effective…
Eoin O’Malley (15 February, 2011) There’s is some degree of agreement in the opinion polls of all types (different companies, candidate based ballot paper questions and party questions, local polls and national polls) that over the course of the campaign Fine Gael has trended upwards and Labour downwards. As we can see from the Red…
neilardiff.com Eoin O’Malley (12 February 2011) The polls are making the Labour party’s ‘Gilmore for Taoiseach’ campaign strategy irrelevant. In any case is it sensible for the left to enter government with a centre right party again?
By Mel Farrell (Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) scholar, Department of History, NUI Maynooth Election 2011 carries the potential to realign Irish politics. As such, this electoral contest promises to take its place among the critical elections of Irish history in 1918, 1922 and 1932. Going on the opinion polls,…
By Michael Gallagher In essence there are two ways of trying to convert opinion poll findings regarding voting intentions into seat totals for the political parties. One, employed in the earlier post by Adrian Kavanagh (5 Feb, two posts below this one), is to assume uniform swing across the country; apply this to the party…
Eoin O’Malley (25 January 2011) Last night Fianna Fáil selected two candidates to run in the four seat Dublin Central constituency. Given that the party polled less than 13 percent of the vote in the 2009 by election, and there are no reasons to believe its vote will have increased since then, this is a…
Adrian Kavanagh, 23rd January 2011 Today’s Sunday Independent poll produced some interesting figures and were reflective no doubt of Fianna Fail and Brian Cowen’s recent travails : Fianna Fail 8%, Fine Gael 27%, Labour 29%, Sinn Fein 8%, Green Party 3%, Others 11% (doesn’t include Don’t Knows). As this poll was just based on 200 responses, it is not…
Irish Politics Forum 