Irish Political News

PMQs this week saw the return of Groundhog Day – unfortunately, like most sequels, it was not as good as the original.
The storyline and plot were uninspired, merely a repeat of the first instalment with a slight twist on the original. We went from capital spending last time to total spending in this inferior plot and it […]

> Most men have thinning hair as they get older. For Lord Mandy Mandelbrot, it is his smokescreens that are becoming more transparent.

This week Lord Mandelbrot proclaimed that the reason why he was having to delay Post-Office Privatisation (again) was that there was insufficient Parliamentary time available:

The sale of a 30% stake in the Royal Mail was due to go to parliament before the summer recess but the business secretary said the legislation was being “jostled for space” and will happen “later”.

This is a smokescreen, and Lord Mandelbrot is losing his touch.

Gays have been part of the street protests in Iran - because they have everything to win and everything to lose

Many thanks to “An Interested Party” for the following…
While I was in Dublin on the 9th of May (staying with a relative), I decided to attend the Aubane Historical Society’s launch of the “Notes on Eire” book in the Teacher’s Club, out of curiosity. I’d heard about them on websites like Politics.ie and Indymedia-the […]

It’s interesting how a political viewpoint will stick, as it were, forcing the writer down particular conceptual paths. I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and I guess it’s not necessarily a bad thing, at least if it’s understood what the viewpoint is from the start. But it can lead to problems, a certain narrowness […]

*Communist Party of Ireland*
Issued
30th June 2009.
*Statement on the coup in Honduras. *
The coup d’état in Honduras shows that the old habits of the privileged oligarchies of Latin America have not gone away. Even the moderate proposals of President Zelaya for a consultation of the people towards a consideration of constitutional change were not acceptable to […]

There’s an annoying, and in my opinion rather uninformed, post over at the Online Journalism Blog, “Newspapers, turn off your RSS feeds“, where Malcolm Coles argues from Google Reader figures that newspapers should withdraw their reader-level RSS feeds and use them as an information provider for external service providers, switching their readers to Twitter.

I’ll address of few of his points.

The BMA annual conference dealt with a string of ethical issues this morning. The chair of their ethic committee was given the chance to speak just before each vote was taken, and each vote happened to take the same line as he did, which was interesting. Here are the motions:

It took just a few hours from my post yesterday about the upping of the ante by the Tories to perhaps it threatening to go a little too far.  As I said yesterday, the tone of the Tories is distinctly different at the moment. It is more aggressive and vicious.  All very […]

Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice… and by the way… what the hell has happened to political Unionism so that the supposedly blunt and honest voice of Ulster (or at least the dominant one) now has decided the only way to engage with the twenty-first century is through the most incredibly unwieldy of names and […]

How to make head or tail of the reportin the Irish Times about the numbers of state employees being up by 3,000.
Except…
More than 371,000 people were employed by the State in all of its operations in March 2009, up from 368,300 the year before, but 2,900 people have been let go or have not […]