Irish Election - Coverage of Irish Politics, News and Current Affairs

Simon McGarr’s post raised the issue of state agency rationalisation. It is an issue we may well not care much for at the moment, as we’re ‘too busy’ with the recession. Yet we should be concerned that some the agencies being tied together and taken back into departments are those ones with a nasty habit of rocking the boat. Agencies who might discuss the uncomfortable issues of inequality, rights and disabilities and government contravention of national and international conventions on the rights of many citizens.

Those agencies represent areas where the government and legislators agreed with best practice and fairness and guaranteeing the independence of the actions of the agencies. Indeed the Equality Tribunal was established as an imparital and quasi-judicial body with legally binding judgements on cases concerning the Equal Status Act and the Employment Equality Act. The Irish Human Rights Commission is included in the Good Friday Agreement and is a statutory body whose powers and mandate are outlined in the Human Rights Commission Act 2000.

Continue reading ‘Is Merging the NDA and Equality Authority raising questions for Angela Kerins?’ »

A tiny autonomous archipelago off Finland could soon add to the EU’s Lisbon Treaty woes…BBC

That isnt the kind of thing you expect to read everyday on the BBC website - or perhaps it is. Anyway it seems that not alone can the Irish do damage to the treaty by effectively killing it. A small island off Finland with 27,000 inhabitants is likely to hammer a nail into the treaty.

Continue reading ‘Islands of Aland to Join Ireland in Rejecting Lisbon Treaty?’ »

The government has announced that it intends to save some money by merging and closing various state agencies. So far the common thread linking all the named agencies for the chop is that in some way they have opposed or embarrassed the executive during their existence.

However, I’d like to use this as an opportunity to address a favourite unreported topic. I’d like to discuss the explosion of new logos and rebrands of state agencies in the late 1990s-early 2000s. Many of these logos may be soon consigned to the history books so we ought to have a little chat about their collective significance while they still have one.

I can now exclusively reveal for the first time the key to successfully pitching for the lucrative job of designing the logo for a state body.

Continue reading ‘State Logos: A Dot and Two Swirls’ »

Here we go again with another round of debate on third level fees. And again we all climb back into our ideological boxes. Free fees are fair because education should be free to all, scream the egalitarian idealists, or at least those who made a politicial stroke out of free fees. Too right, scream the rich and upper middle class, who happen to benefit most from the largesse. We already pay our taxes, they continue, and higher taxes than the poor. No, cry those for whom individual responsibility is the supreme virtue, we should all have to pay, if we pay the price, we know the value. In the end, the politicians look at the voting numbers and decide to leave it all as it is.

Continue reading ‘The Free Fees Fantasy’ »

It has been called “unhelpful” and “unwise” however I am not sure what the reasoning for that is. Dick Roche suggested that we may well have a second referendum on Lisbon as a means to keep us at the heart of Europe.

A SECOND referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would “ultimately” be required and ratifying key elements by legislation was not a viable option, Minister of State for European Affairs Dick Roche said at the weekend.

Continue reading ‘Dick Roche Suggests a Second Referendum on Lisbon’ »

Source: Ballyer.net/Sundayworld

It would be remiss of us here not to congratulate Kenneth Egan on his excellent performance in the semi-final of the Olympics light-heavyweight boxing. Class and poise, well done and best of luck.

Truly, a tale of two economic cities. First, the Irish Times heads an article ‘Wage Increases Higher than EU Average in 2007‘. Citing a recent European Industrial Relations Observatory survey it stated:

‘Irish workers enjoyed higher wage increases than their counterparts across Europe in 2007 . . ‘

Well, actually we didn’t. The report has it in black and white: All countries (EU 27 and Norway) - 6.9 percent; Ireland - 4.8 percent. You can either bang your head against the wall or accept that some journalism has difficulty with reading reports and looking at numbers.

Continue reading ‘August 22nd Morning: The Recession Diaries’ »

Today’s Humbert Summer schools has the opposition berating Cowen and attempting to frame the narrative for the upcoming election run-in. In her speech (wonderfully titled Brian Cowen and the Riddle of Cleopatra’s Nose)

Then, Brian Cowen enjoyed huge public and media approval and was received in his home county as a conquering hero. That has all now turned to ashes. From a height of public confidence and the adulation of his own Party he has sunk to nearly the lowest point, hero to zero in just 100 days.

Continue reading ‘Cowen Under Attack from the Opposition’ »

As Bertie Ahern does his screen-test for a future job on The Sunday Game or Late Late, he was quick to defend his handling of the economic downturn. Unemployment now at 5.1% and construction workers falling like flies - and little re-training to give them a hand up.

The Dublin Central TD, who quit office in April, joked that he would have dug the economy out of the downturn sooner if he had been in charge.

“People say that I caused it, don’t they. But that’s wrong. I would have dug us out of it. It takes you a while to do it.”

Typical Bertie-speak or hints of a critique of his successor’s performance? I know a few readers would take issue with the proposition that Bertie Ahern would be ideal to get us back on an economic even-keel anyway….

In a week dominated by harrowing scenes of civilian suffering in the ongoing Russian-Georgian conflict over the separatist region of South Ossetia. There are shades of the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, when Hitler, on the pretext of defending a ‘persecuted’ German minority in that region of Czechoslovakia, was appeased and allowed to annex it, followed by the conquest of the entire country 6 months later. Russia is seeking Anschluss with Russocentric regions in its former Soviet empire. While the Russian state-owned broadcast media such as Russia Today continue to bleat out false claims of “genocide” against South Ossetians, the Western media report that Russia has reduced by 90% its supposed South Ossetian death-toll from the Georgian offensive. As an Irish nationalist, I have mixed feelings on the matter of self-determination for Georgia’s separatist regions. While anxious that Russia must not be appeased, I instinctively sympathise with nationalities seeking to go their own way in an historic homeland. Even so, I think the merits of their independence-bids are not universally clear to those with a knowledge of the history of the South Ossettian and Abkhazian conflicts which have led to 2 Russian puppet-states on internationally-recognised Georgian soil.

Continue reading ‘Appeasing Russia will not work’ »

The subject of David McWilliams column today is how the GAA transfer index shows a growing trend of emigration from Ireland.

According to the GCTI, emigration is on the increase from all over Ireland and it is recurring in precisely the age group that we need most — our young, fit people. What makes the change in the index all the more startling, is the dramatic turnaround in fortunes between the beginning of the year and now. In January, not one club player transferred to a club outside Ireland. This month, over one third of all transfers involved lads leaving the country and signing up for clubs in New York and London.

Ok, so I decided to look at the figures.

As you can see, January is usually very quiet and the summer months quiet busy. Jan 2004, Jan 2007 and Jan 2008 are all quiet low; indeed Jan 2004, when we would be in the middle of the boom, was busiest. The reason, I guess, has a lot to do with young people going abroad for the summer and playing in a GAA club in New York, London or Oz. Suggesting that the difference between Jan 2008 and summer 2008 is plain silly and a abuse of statistics. It is simply following the trend of Summer being more busy then January. Indeed in absolute terms Jun and july 2007 saw 235 people move abroad while Jun and July 2008 saw 223 people move. Basically, there is nothing statistically significant in these figures to show an increase in immigration.

The Prime Ministers of France and Spain pull their cabinets out of their August holidays for emergency meetings about the economy. Gordon Brown is back on the job while high profile ministers deal with messy dossiers. Even Belfast’s politicians are managing signals of their presence — if only to get involved in disputes about interpretations of the weather, advancement of their own profiles, and comment on embarrassing flooding of expensive underpasses. But has anyone seen an Irish minister in the last few days? Apparently John Gormley was in Carlow and Martin Cullen is presumably keeping his head down in Beijing until Ireland win a medal. But reports of other sightings are few and far between. Maybe the right press releases weren’t ready to go.

UPDATE: They still haven’t changed the voicemail message at the office of the Taoiseach.  It refers callers to St Luke’s!

I wrote this on my own blog this morning, but I thought I would share it here too…

I have written about this before and I will say it again.  One of the worst things to ever happen to education in Ireland was when Niamh Breathnach as minister for education abolished fees.

Ostensibly, this was to benefit the lower paid, but the lower paid were already in receipt of government grants.  It did nothing for Irish education other than allow the children of millionaires to go to college for free, to weaken the 3rd level sector as a whole, to inflate class sizes as a result and to make the universities increase the registration fees from less than 100 pounds to its current level of about 800 Euro.

What is the result?  Well, 800 Euro registration fee is paid by everybody - wealthy and poor.  This wasn’t the case.  This is very difficult for the low-paid.

As a staff member who began lecturing in 1999, I now have double the number of lectures every year than I used to have.  This reduces the amount of time I can spend on research, developing intellectual property (which the university would own), etc.  Fine, if that is what we want to do, but it is not the best use of my time.

Some universities (which I won’t name) have a policy of NOT putting this extra teaching burden on their staff, but rather, they emphasise courses where students can be taught in bulk - class sizes of 500 students are now commonplace for some courses.  I don’t know if this is really a good thing.

The lower-paid in society are not much better off as a result.  In Maynooth, we have the largest proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but some universities (or at least one) has only 1% of its students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.  This can hardly be said to be a ringing endorsement for a policy that was touted as one that would change everything.

Bat O’Keeffe is right.  Apply fees to everybody and then families on low incomes can apply for grants.  We have 33,000 millionaires in Ireland, not including the value of their homes.  These, at least, could pay for their children’s education without blinking an eye.  I saw Rosanna Davidson being interviewed in the paper a couple of weekends ago and she said that “everyone should leave the doom and gloom of Ireland and go somewhere sunny”.  Well, she got free education in UCD - the privileged daughter of a multimillionaire.

If you go visit the south inner city in Dublin, you will find that a lot of teenagers there have about as much chance of going to college as they have of flying to the moon.  The ‘free fees (that include 800 euro registration fee)’ hasn’t made a blind bit of difference.

Here is how it should be:

The registration fee is to be incorporated into the fee/grant.

Right now the  situation is that regardless of your income, you get a ‘full grant’.  This is what it should be called “full grant for all”.

It is morally wrong for the children of millionaires to have access to college for what they would consider to be a pittance, when the children of lower-paid workers simply cannot go.  The current policy is bad for the lower-paid, bad for the universities and bad for our society.

Sarkozy is a genius. See people think he is for the Lisbon Treaty but is in fact against it. Yes Irish Election can reveal that he is purposely trying to destroy the EU. Take his latest idea.

The president of France, the current holder of the European Union’s rotating presidency, has floated the scheme as a way of cutting the number of Commissioners, currently at 27, one for each member state.

“Countries which share a common cultural heritage, such as Germany and Austria, Great Britain and Ireland or the Benelux countries could share a common Commissioner,” German newspaper Die Welt said, quoting high-level French sources.

Now the last Austria and Germany shared a representative to my knowledge it was under the terms of the anschluss and did not go well. We fought the British for about 700 years on and off to not have the same representative. I also note that he does not suggest the French share. As Tuathal of my blog stated when he saw the article. feck off sarkozy.

Seriously this must be a joke. must en it?

If you see Charlie McCreevey walking down the street, dining in a fashionable café, or panhandling outside Government Buildings – arrest him. You have the power – the common law citizen’s arrest. The charge? Crimes against the economy. Is that an offence? Yes, it dates back to Saxon times, judicated on by courts that looked after the orphans, the foolish and the dead (which pretty much sums up our current state). But be warned: he may be armed. His weapon of choice is the slash-hook with which he mutilated the economy. And once you have apprehended him, detain him until the economic yeomanry arrive.

Continue reading ‘August 6 Lunchtime: The Recession Diaries’ »

Stephen Collins writes for the Irish Times so you would expect some sort of intelligent thinking. I mean it is his job after all. He is not a Kevin Myres columnist who is there to provoke, he does not need to be deeply incisive it is about filling the letters page. Stephen Collins is there to analysis. But reading todays column I really have to wonder if he just wants to be Kevin Myres just button pushing fuckwittagy. Continue reading ‘Is xenophobia and ignoring the people the way to win the Second Lisbon Vote?’ »