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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

David Cameron has done it again. New Labour last night had one of the worst by-election results in history. Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty left an open seat in deep-blue Oxfordshire, and Labour wasn’t expected to do better than third in losing the contest in Henley. But coming in FIFTH, behind the British National Party? Labour [...]

[Read more →]

Cian at Irish Election picks up the thread. Conor at Dublin Opinion got there Tuesday morning, as did we. Mick Fealty also picks up the story at Slugger.
A little crowdsourcing today - formerly known as asking around - reveals that a lot of inquiries to Eurobarometer received the following, identical, reply…the last one provided [...]

[Read more →]

So while Irish voters are getting called a bunch of ingrates in the European Parliament (not least by Irish MEPs), I’m just wondering, surely the best counterargument to questions about Ireland’s commitment to Europe is that 500 Irish soldiers make up a good chunk of the EU force in Chad, protecting refugees from inside Chad [...]

[Read more →]