By Nuala Haughey Almost fifteen years after the idea was first proposed in a Labour Party private members’ Bill, Ireland is due to get a mandatory lobbying register. The online database will capture information about the efforts of interest groups and professional lobbyists alike to influence policy and legislation. The database is provided for in…
By Iain McMenamin (30 March, 2011) The Moriarty Tribunal’s report details an exchange between a politician and businessman, the like of which cannot easily be targeted by political reforms. Politicians have a demand for cash and can supply lucrative private goods to business, such as a mobile phone licence. The political demand for cash in…
The editors and contributors behind polticalreform.ie have teamed with a large volunteer team of project managers, web designers and others to produce ReformCard a measurement tool to rank each party based on the quality of their policies on political reform. We hope this will prove a critical instrument in informing the election 2011 debate. It…
by Gary Murphy (July 29 2010) It seems that the Minister for the Environment John Gormley is ready to move on implementing a register of lobbyists. Speaking at a meeting of Green Party members in Limerick last weekend, he said that he intended to change the way politics was funded and to curb the influence…
There is a practice for UK prime ministers to be asked in the Commons about their engagements that day before the supplementary questions would come in and start asking them what really was meant to happen. It always seemed to me to be an odd tradition and I couldn’t find or see the logic to…
By Gary Murphy Harry McGee the political correspondent of the Irish Times had a very interesting article in Saturday’s paper Irish political lobbying: who’s who and how does it work In it he notes that despite the current government pledging in its revised programme for government to introduce a register for lobbyists, so far there…
Irish Politics Forum 