Fine Gael’s tactics in tabling a vote of no confidence was to give the Government parties no respite, no breathing space, no time for contemplation and cogitation.
So once the Dáil kicks off today, it’s going to be all-action end-to-end stuff… well as close as it gets to that for anoraks. (more…)
I’m sitting at a table in the middle of the vast indoor auditorium at RDS Simmonscourt, after filing the latest copy on the Dublin euro constituency. In the distance George Hook is holding court at the Newstalk braodcasting stand watched by an audience of political hangers-on and anoraks. All of the Euro candidates are here.
Campaigns matter. I always cite the example of John Major running for re-election as British Prime Minister in 1992. Almost universally written-off, he famously got out his soapbox and went on the hustings in a successful fight to stay in power.
Well if they won’t have me in Leinster House, I’ll bloody go to Strasbourg (Photograph by Frank Miller) (more…)
Tomorrow will tell a tale when we get the opinion poll rankings for the European candidates in The Irish Times. But Fianna Fáil must have been downhearted by their showing in today’s overall party standings (click here).
Don’t do it Enda: your ship is coming in (Photograph by Frank Miller) (more…)
If you tune in to any post-match interview on the Sunday Game this year, you’ll find a manager or player coming out with the Socratean observation that the team came good despite the fact that the”the media wrote us off”.
It’s classic underdog psychology, and clichéd beyond existence in the GAA (and most sports in Ireland), thanks to the sycophantic soft-core sucky-ups and lickspittles who constitute some of the broadcast media. What really irks me is that more often than not the team that is saying it was “written off” was no such thing. We have heard that claptrap from the likes of Kerry, Tyrone, Tipp and Cork (hurlers).
Eleven days to go – only nine days’ canvassing – and the battle-lines are becoming clearer. I spent an hour at a Sinn Féin press conference in a remote location on the Quays (sorra fear they’d have it somewhere convenient for the hardpressed Leinster House ‘meeja’) where the main issue raised by the journoes, including yours truly, was whether or not Mary Lou McDonald was going to run in the general election.
As in 2004, Mary Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams will be keeping their fingers crossed again (Photograph by Brenda Fitzsimons)
The paper sent me to the George Lee “Town Hall Meeting” at the Goat Bar & Grill in, er, Goatstown, last night. Just as I was arriving at the place I realised I had no laptop with me and so turned the car around, headed home, dashed into house, picked up computer, raced back to the Goat. Dedication or wha’?
The Artane Boys Band (Photograph: Alan Betson) (more…)
The figures are dismal for Fianna Fáil. There is no gloss on it. The two byelections will be lost. They will lose at least one MEP in the European elections. They will realise that the nadir of the local elections in 2004 was not really a nadir. THIS is a nadir.
For a year we have looked at this administration as it has floated further and further out from shore and said; they are possibly waving. Really we should have been saying they are probably drowning. (more…)
Someone in the newsroom was doing a sample page for the election campaign. There was no content, just slabs of type. Instead of a headline he had written, “Yada yada yada yada yada.” I looked at it and said to myself: “How true those words are.”
Come on, try my little box of goody-num-nums (Photograph: Bryan O’Brien)
1. Statement issued by Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton this afternoon (first few paragraphs):
“Neither nationalisation nor NAMA – FG is only Party that will protect
taxpayers’ interests and get lending going again – Bruton
