Adrian Kavanagh, 23 September 2010 Today’s Millward-Browne Lansdowne TV3 poll offers a sobering analysis for the government parties, with Fianna Fail support estimated to stand at 22% and Green Party support at 2%. But it perhaps also offers disappointing results for two of the opposition parties; Fine Gael (30%) whose poll position as most popular…
David Farrell (September 22 2010) With so many of our citizens fleeing the country — many of them against their will — and so many of them ending up disenfranchised residents in foreign lands, why should we add insult to injury be denying them a say over affairs at home? The scourge of mass emigration…
Some of the political correspondents writing over the last week are reading a great deal into every government minister’s’ utterance. Micheál Martin made an extremely banal comment when asked on Newstalk about the Cowen incident; “I think we all have to reflect in terms of how the conference was organised, in terms of communications issues and so on like…
Michael Gallagher (6th September, 2010) Concerns are raised from time to time, not just in this country, that geographical representation in parliament creates behaviour among legislators that is not consistent with the national interest. Legislators elected, under whatever electoral system, from geographical constituencies have an obvious incentive to put the interests of their constituents first…
Eoin O’Malley, 3 September 2010 The Poolbeg controversy rumbles on with claims that Dublin’s local authorities have a get out clause which will allow them break their contract with Covanta; a contract which many have argued is uncompetitive. Whether this is true or not could be given to the courts to decide, but in claiming…
Eoin O’Malley, 25 August, 2010 Fionnan Sheehan this morning on RTÉ repeated a complaint he made in yesterday’s Irish Independent about the inability of Brian Cowen to sack the Senators that were nominated by a Taoiseach (in this case by his predecessor). He thinks that ‘the notion of the Taoiseach of the day being able…
By Gary Murphy 23 August, MMX It may be the silly season but the front page article in the Irish Daily Mail on Sunday suggested that a number of disaffected Fine Gael politicians were secretly discussing a type of merger with Fianna Fail after the next election as they do not want to go into…
1.8 million Australian voters used the ‘early voting’ facility provided by the Australian electoral commission in the three weeks before today’s election to cast their votes, a record number. The Australians also have facilities for voting if a citizen happens to be outside of the electoral district in which they are registered on the day of the election.…
Sarah Carey’s article in today’s Irish Times is the latest contribution in the debate on whether we should consider adopting party-level gender quotas for the nomination of candidates. This article appears to me to be a particularly striking example of the combative rhetorical strategies that both sides of the debate have employed. Several opinion pieces on this topic have followed the…
David Farrell (August 11, 2010) On Saturday Sept 18, UCC are hosting a one-day conference on women’s participation in politics. The draft programme can be downloaded here. Conference Programme-6
Irish Politics Forum 