Sinn Fein’s last minute pull out from cross party ‘St Pats For All’ video

Controversy in the Republic last night over an old problem for Sinn Fein, the St Patricks Day celebrations in the US, where they do things a little lot differently than they do at home. It concerns this cross parliamentary video supporting the St Pat’s For All parade in NYC… In the US, New York and Boston have continued to ban the participation of LGBT groups. In the case of Boston there’s been substantial progress towards change, but in NYC the …

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Seanad Eireann and an emerging consensus for functional reform?

So Seanad Reform? It hasn’t gone away you know!  Leaving aside the practical consideration of how progress is to be made in discussions of future reforms, on the table are five ‘live’ documents: Senator John Crowne’s Seanad Electoral Reform Bill 2013 (March 2013) Senators Zappone and Quinn’s Seanad Bill 2013 (published on behalf of Democracy Matters) Fianna Fáil’s A Seanad for the People (2013) The Green Party, Seanad Reform Policy (September 2013) Seanad Committee on Procedures and Privileges, Sub-committee on Seanad Reform …

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Abortion legislation: Enda Kenny has much to learn about party management when in government…

One of the tricks of remaining in government under the STV PR system (only used in Ireland and Malta national parliaments) is not a applying the party whip too hard across the board… ‘Gene pool Fianna Fail’ is a term that once rolled off the RTE tongue to describe those who’d lost the party whip but who rowed generally in the same direction… One of the shocking effects of seeing what happened in Fianna Fail when unburdened by the party whip was …

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The fragile balancing act of the “Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill”

Right now the Dail is sitting on the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. To say it has been controversial is an understatement. On Tuesday in a powerful essay (it sounded more like an address to the nation [MP3]), Olivia O’Leary called it “a distorted law” under which men and women would be far from equal. To accomodate the X case (Wikipedia), there is to be no time limit on when an abortion can take place. As Brian noted earlier: …

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#Magdalene: “When the dark midnight is over, watch for the breaking of day”

Enda Kenny may not be the most whip smart of politicians. He was for the longest time a whipping boy for the ward boss Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern… Most of the comment afterwards was unmanned, literally, by what is a very direct communication with the women themselves… he welcomes them to your parliament, your Dail Eireann… What Enda lacks in intelligence, he more than makes up for in emotional intelligence. It may be something he has to use more than just …

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IBRC: “This bill when finally enacted will bring to an end…. erm..”

So what happened last night? Well, not the end of history, as the Tanaiste part billed it), but what’s left of Anglo Irish Bank (IRBC) was wound up. That required a piece of primary legislation to close it down and transfer its assets (and, more importantly, liabilities) to NAMA. Why? Because IBRC’s debt was being paid through the Promissory Note costing a fortune (3.1 billion pa for tens year). The ‘advantage’ of a PN is that it can be unbundled …

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Who needs the Oireachtas to read your bills when you have a fireproof majority?

So, what else is happening in the world? Well, at risk of breaching copyright of the Irish Times, I’m going to presume their tolerance and quote a chunk of Fintan O’Toole’s column today which measures just how much of a role the opposition played in getting through the bill that will enable the Household Charge to be enacted: The Bill to bring it in was not scrutinised – at all – by either of the relevant parliamentary committees, the select …

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Head of the Orange Order addresses the upper house in Dublin…

So two paint attacks on Orange Halls, and a bit of post parade clashing down near the Short Strand might be considered fairly mild compared to how the Orange marching season has been ‘celebrated’ in past years. But today the head of the Orange Drew Nelson is in Dublin to address that most gentile of parliamentary houses Seanad Eireann. His address will consist of responses by the main party groups, including Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour and a two …

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#VinB on hypocrisy of parliamentarians who seek (for once) to enforce the law…

Had to do a double take on this one this morning… Vincent Browne points to a number of cases that have passed unnoticed under the gaze of Dublin’s parliamentarians (not least Ireland’s wealthiest media tycoon, Denis O’Brien).. While Vincent is not arguing that Mick the Builder (from Wexford) is not deserving of censure, …in a normal, decent society, he would be deserving of censure and of the appropriate criminal sanctions. …he does, however, muddy the waters somewhat by getting in …

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Does SIPO consider a ‘donation in kind’ an exception to the legislation?

The specific legislation concerned is in Section 24 of the Electoral Act of 1997 (which is well worth going through to test the argument below for loopholes). Sitting snugly under Faduda’s story on Martin McGuinness there is another one which details a prima facae case that Senator David Cullinane may be breach of the donation rules. And it looks as though other Sinn Fein members of the Oireachtas may be using a similar rationale for not making a full declaration of …

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“Sinn Féin are increasingly looking acceptable and palatable”

Nice piece of analysis from Cormac O’Cuilan at politico.ie on Sinn Fein’s progress in the southern polity: In the soup that is the 31st Dáil; Sinn Féin are increasingly looking acceptable and palatable. Side by side with Fianna Fáil and the Independents, their credibility as opposition (and future government) parliamentarians, is on the rise. As an organised, coherent and legitimate voice of protest in the face of the economic turmoil they threaten the well that both Fianna Fáil and Labour …

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Uachtarán na hÉireann – SF within a whisker of nominating a Presidential candidate?

With 14 TDs and now 3 Senators elect, SF are a mere 3 Oireachtas votes away from the magically twenty that permits nomination to the 26 county Presidential election. I have no idea if SF would want to face a heavily tipped David Norris but two things do stand out; -just how much some of those close run Dail contests SF missed out on can really matter (also losing former members like Thomas Pringle TD) -just how far they’ve come …

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Seanad 2011

This election to the Seanad is bound to take some time, feel free to update via comments The five-seat Cultural and Educational panel is the first to return – FF drop one seat and Lab Gain. FG – Deidre Clune FF – Labhrás Ó Murchú FF – Thomas Byrne Labour – John Gilroy Fine Gael – Michael Mullins The Agricultural Panel is next, notably Martin Manseragh had a disasterous first count while Trevor Ó Clochartaigh of SF returned a real …

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19 Independents meet to form a technical group.

Fascinating little scenario developing here. You can only have one technical group (which affords speaking rights) amongst otherwise unaffliated groups and individual TDs in Dail Eireann. So all 19 Independents are meeting this evening to see if they can agree to form one. It’s thought that as many as 16 or as few as 11 could form a single group. If it was the upper figure it would almost certainly incorporate individuals with some pretty sharply divergent beliefs, that would have …

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Getting beyond the likely ‘gridlock’ of future reforms…

There’s a canny piece from John Rogers, Labour’s former Attorney General from 1984-87 in the Irish Times today on the subject of political reform in the Republic. He starts by usefully restating the bleedin’ obvious on why the much researched and much debated Seanad reforms never happened: The truth probably is that none of the political parties wanted real reform of the Seanad because real reform inevitably would mean Seanad electoral reform. Of course there could not be such reform …

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McAleese and ECB worried about legality of hastily assembled Bank Bill

It seems the Credit Institutions (Stabilisation) Bill is in trouble. Not only does the President think it could be constitutionally questionable, the ECB is expressing the same concern. The key clause is in section 53 of the bill: The provisions of this Act, and any order made under this Act, have effect notwithstanding anything in— (a) the Companies Acts, the Building Societies Act 1989, the Credit Union Act 1997 or any other enactment, (b) any other rule of law or …

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Power now lies in hands of Lowry and Healy-Rae…

There is a part you that has to admire the cool with with Biffo and the boys of Fianna Fail take their knocks. Having your whole fiscal policy dictated by a virtual committee of the ECB and the IMF and fronting the toughest budget in many generations takes some doing. But as Miriam Lord notes in today’s Irish Times, the loss of Jim McDaid was already priced in by his erstwhile party colleagues. With the Greens keeping their nerve and …

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Ireland’s colonial legacy: “A parliament collapsed into a government”

Re-Reading the history of Irish Republicanism through the prism of Martin Frampton’s latest book, Legion of the Rearguard I’m struck mostly by its pervasively inchoate character. That’s an impression substantiated not just by the strong historical tradition of dissent, but even by apparently random action of that most constitutionalist of Taoisigh, John A Costello who it appears (according to John Bowman) broke Ireland’s link with the Commonwealth on foot of a question from the Canadian press. Fintan O’Toole is not …

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FitzGerald: How a single Dail debate lanced a bloody boil of war…

I’ve no doubt we will hear more about the way we need to handle the past in the wake of the publication of last week’s publication of the Saville report. But I was struck by Garrett FitzGerald’s piece in Saturday’s Irish Times which subtly highlights the difference – at the time of the shootings – between having a functional democratic parliamentary assembly (ie the Oireachtas), and having a supremely dysfunctional one (ie, contemporary Stormont) in this personal anecdote, first on …

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