Will copying Obama’s campaign tactics work in Ireland or not? Mulley does a pretty good job bringing together the reasons why the answer is no if you think that the tactics merely involved lots of bells and whistles courtesy of the Facebook.
Here’s the one stat you need to know to understand why Obama schooled McCain: [...]

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Ok, so you can’t really resist the temptation of the lates poll data on the presidential race? Nate Silver breaks down each of the 8 national tracking polls, and what time of day they’re released. It’s something special.
I’m still waiting to see the tightening, and Pollster’s average says maybe a little:

But the tastiest bit for [...]

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So, how is it exactly that a scheme initially budgeted for €19m a year has grown to €250 million a year?
Lest anyone think they are holier than thou on this issue, here’s Fine Gael in 2005:
Extension of medical card to over 70s/nursing home charges
The absence of financial controls and accountability for money spent on [...]

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I thought it was weird. When asked whether he’d shaken Ireland up, President Sarkozy feigned jabbing at Big Bri’s belly and said, “Have you seen the size of the Irish Taoiseach?” [How could le petit président shake up the big man] Tension-busting? Maybe. But not very polite. So what would have pushed him over the [...]

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This is the oped, as filed, in the 13 July 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday. The things I didn’t have space to get into in this column include thoughts on a slight gender split that will be a caveat, but it doesn’t affect the main point: the difference between conditions in Ireland and the rest [...]

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Front page comment from the Sunday Independent on the economy (13 July 2008):
“We are, it’s true, caught in the economic cataclysm that has hit the developed world, but this dreadful cycle will, in time, come to an end, though nobody can say when…
The onset of the recession was, however, eminently predictable. Mr Cowen and [...]

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This is something that I’d been wondering about. What, exactly, was in the Lisbon Treaty that so changed Ireland’s constitutional status quo that it required a referendum? Ruth Barrington wonders in today’s Irish Times:

Although the conventional wisdom holds that a referendum is required to ratify all EU treaties in Ireland, this is not the case. [...]

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Brendan Keenan muses melancholic on our gilded Götterdämmerung but with two big what-ifs. What if Brian Cowen (or Charlie McCreevey) had rejigged incentives to promote more fixed rate mortgages as a hedge against ECB rate volatility/rates out of sync with local conditions? What if the department of finance treated the boom-related property taxes like the [...]

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The number of voters who say, according to Pat Leahy in the Sunday Business Post, that they were canvassed by the Yes campaign. The news here, perhaps generously left downstory by Leahy so as not to embarass contacts, is that the vaunted GOTV efforts of the main parties failed because the local organisations just didn’t [...]

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Manuel Estimulo on Jim Corr’s secret role in defeating the Lisbon Treaty. His batshit Today FM intervention is explained to us in a voice (and syntax) creepily familiar to those who receive, and have not yet marked as spam, those emails from the 9/11 people:

But wait a minute . . .
Is not entirely beyond the [...]

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