Archive for the ‘Electoral politics’ Category

Labour Leadership Race

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

There seems to be quite a bit of momentum building behind Eamon Gilmore's bid to win the Labour Party leadership. Interestingly, several distinct blocks within the party are supporting him - Higgins and Stagg who are traditionally seen as the core of the left of the party came out in ...

Brendan Ryan loses seat

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Unfortunate news for Brendan Ryan, who I mentioned in yesterday's post, as he narrowly missed out on retaining his Seanad seat today. The other two incumbents - teacher union leader Joe O'Toole and businessman Fergal Quinn - kept their seats, but Ryan - who has a strong record on social ...

Following the Seanad elections

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Fascinating stuff for anyone interested in following the Seanad elections at the moment. The people counting the vocational panels - those 43 seats elected by public representatives - are posting regular Excel sheets with updates of each round of counting. Not regular enough for some of the contributors at politics.ie ...

Instant run-off voting gaining ground in United States

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

A New America Foundation press release points to the recent successes of movements for instant runoff voting across the US:In California, where San Francisco became the state's first Instant Runoff Voting city in 2004, voters in the cities of Oakland and Davis approved the idea, which would allow voters to ...

Intergenerational justice in Ireland

Friday, February 10th, 2006

The Irish Labour Party has published what sounds like an interesting proposed constitutional referendum, relating to protection of cultural heritage:The Labour Party has published a Bill, introduced into the Dáil by Party President Michael D Higgins, which will protect cultural heritage and also place an ...

Robots.txt and irlgov.ie

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

Over at Gavin's Blog there's an interesting observation about the robots.txt file at www.irlgov.ie. Now, robots.txt files are not something I'm given to browsing on an ongoing basis, but there do seem to be some strange items on the ignore list - specifically, several documents that no longer appear on ...

Move to revamp electoral register in Ireland.

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

The Irish Labour Party has launched a new bill - it actually got its first reading today - to totally revamp the manner in which the electoral register is compiled and maintained.Apart from creating an Election Registration Commissioner,the Bill provides for access by registration authorities to information held by third ...

Complaint to Party still in progress

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Earlier this year I provided a brief report of my complaint to the Irish Labour Party. It's been a long and eventful summer since then. On 16th September, after a round or two of correspondence, I reconfirmed my complaint and made another formal submission by email. This morning, 4th October, I ...

This is why he lost

Monday, October 3rd, 2005

Just recently I'd been reading about, and telling others about, the use of the phrase and a pony, when making wish lists. And then I come across this piece, about a documentary on the inside story of Kerry's presidential campaign:It is marked with bizarre moments such as when Loftus rants ...

Fine Gael’s cynical move on cafe bars

Monday, June 13th, 2005

The world of politics is a cynical one, one where you take advantage where you can get it. There's something troubling though about news of a Fine Gael motion to be debated next week. The Irish minister for justice recently announced two different plans that have run into opposition from ...