Monthly Archives: February 2016

Leap Year Day: Lartigue monorail opened 128 years ago

It’s Leap Year Day, and the 128th anniversary of the opening of the Listowel & Ballybunion Railway in 1888. (Or is it only the 32nd anniversary?)

The line was also known as the Lartigue monorail, after its French inventor, Charles Lartigue.

Here’s my story about Kerry’s unique railway from the August/September 2009 issue of History Magazine. Enjoy.

The Lartigue monorail in Kerry opened on Leap Year Day in 1888. The line closed in 1924.

The Lartigue monorail in Kerry opened on Leap Year Day in 1888. The line closed in 1924.

Healy-Rae brothers top Kerry polling; Deenihan, Spring ousted

Independent brothers Michael and Danny Healy-Rae have taken the top two of five seats in the redrawn Kerry constituency. Their late father Jackie Healy-Rae also was in independent TD from Kerry from 1997-2011.

The polling ousted Fine Gael Minister of Diaspora Jimmy Deenihan from the Dáil, as well as Labour’s Arthur J Spring, nephew of former party leader Dick Spring.

Brendan Griffin of Fine Gael and Martin Ferris of Sinn Féin retained their seats. Newcomer John Brassil of Fianna Fáil took the fifth seat. The constituency for this election was merged from two, three-seat districts: Kerry South and Kerry North-Limerick West.

Full Kerry results here.

Deenihan told The Irish Independent that he believes a new election will be called soon, but he stopped short of saying whether he would run again.

First elected to the Dáil in 1987, Deenihan won re-election five times. He blamed his defeat on being targeted by people who were not happy with the Government, and on a feeling that got out that he was “safe.”

(I first met Deenihan at the Lartigue Monorail and Museum in Listowel in 2012; then again at an Irish Network DC event in 2015.)

With 94 percent of seats decided by late 28 February, independents had won 20 seats. Like Kerry, independents also won the top two places in Roscommon-Galway and Tipperary constituencies.

TheJournal.ie has a story about the Healy-Rae brothers joining a “long line of siblings” who have represented Irish constituencies in the Dáil, and before independence. But their list misses Irish nationalist MPs Edward and Timothy Harrington in the 1880s.

Developing Irish election results: “weird & fractured”

As of 3 p.m. Irish time/ 10 a.m. U.S. Eastern time, here’s what we know about the outcome of the 26 February election result:

  • With 27 of 40 constituencies complete, and 120 of 158 seats filled, it is clear that the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the last five years will not be returned to power.
  • Fine Gael has picked up 36 seats and 25.52 percent of the first preference vote. Fianna Fáil is a close second, with 34 seats and 24.35 percent of first preference votes. There is much talk of a ‘grand coalition’  between the two rivals.
  • Sinn Féin and independent candidates each picked up 17 seats; Labour only six seats.
  • National turnout was 65 percent.
  • Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said he will not resign despite his government suffering a resounding defeat. He acknowledged the emerging election results were a bitter blow to his party.

Irish Times columnist Una Mullally gives this overview of the outcome.

This weird, fractured, all-over-the-place result, which took a wrecking ball to a government and then wondered what rubble could be cobbled together. It will come as a shock to some media commentators and international observers and people in big houses, that the Irish people really did not like their government. Or maybe any government. So this happened, whatever this is. …

… It’s clear that the Irish people wanted change. But a captive audience assembled and no one came on stage. So the audience booed, they heckled. Some asked for their money back, others wondered what else was on, others just went home. They dispersed, returning to familiar haunts or gave something new a shot. With no new headliner, the support acts won.

It’s Election Day in Ireland

Voting is underway in Ireland’s general election. I’ll be posting updates through the day. Email subscribers only get one notice, so be sure to check back. Most recent items appear at the top. MH

_88465599_kenny.jpg (624×351)

Taoiseach Enda Kenny of Fine Gael casts his vote. RTÉ image

  • The Coalition parties have fallen far short of the majority to be returned to government, according to an exit poll conducted for The Irish Times by Ipsos, MRBI. The data show Fine Gael off 10 percentage point from the 2011 election at 26.1 percent; while Labour has dropped more than 11 percentage points to 7.8 percent.
  • Polling has closed and turnout was uneven, The Irish Times says, “with many politicians claiming a significant number of people remained undecided up to the last moment.”
  • Snow and icy weather conditions prevail in parts of Kerry, Cork and Waterford during the final hours of voting.
  • Voting was completed a day early on 12 small islands off the Irish coast.
  • Polling opened at 7 a.m. local time and continues through 10 p.m. More than 3.2 million people are eligible to vote in 40 constituencies being contested by 552 candidates. The Irish Times described early turnout as “brisk.”

Polling and pundits forecast historic election outcome

Ireland appears to be careening toward an historic election outcome Friday. The question is: Historic in what way?

If the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the last five years can hold, it would be the first time a Fine Gael leader is re-elected as Taoiseach for a successive term since the party was founded in 1933, The Economist notes. County Mayo native Enda Kenny leads the centre-right FG party in the role of prime minister.

But Fine Gael is treading water in the polls, and Labour is sinking. Opposition Fianna Fáil, which had a near monopoly on power in Ireland during most of the 20th century, is rebounding after being punished in the 2011 election for the country’s economic collapse. That has some pundits suggesting the once unthinkable possibility of a grand coalition between Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, which each evolved from the bitter split of Irish nationalists during the country’s civil war in the early 1920s.

In public, party leaders say this isn’t practical. They are still focused on winning Friday’s count. But if the results suggest such a coalition is the only way to move forward with a government, you can bet that private negotiations will begin immediately, even as public posturing continues.

Writing in The Irish Times, columnist Fintan O’Toole suggests that “it’s surely been clear to any objective observer that the logic of the fragmentation of Irish politics (now about 10 parties) leads, at least in the medium term, in only one direction: Fianna Gael.” He continues:

When there were two big centre-right parties carving up anything from two-thirds to three-quarters of the vote between them, it made complete sense for those parties to exaggerate their tribal differences in order to generate the sense that something huge was at stake in their tribal competition. But the space they jointly occupy has shrunk; … they now have one comfortable majority between them. If they don’t occupy that space together, it becomes a power vacuum. One can never rule out the ability of petulance, tribalism and vanity to overpower logic, but office is a great magnet.

This suggests another possibility: a “hung Dáil,” or a stalemate due to the failure of any party or bloc of parties to form a majority of newly elected TDs in government, The Irish Times explains. This could mean months of gridlock, and eventually calls for new elections.

For a super-detailed looked at the last polling before the election, see the blog of Dr. Adrian Kavanagh, Maynooth University, FF-FG or Voting Again?

Europol’s Pat Byrne on migration, policing & JFK

Ireland, with its long history of emigration, can play a leading role in international migration issues, said Patrick Byrne, senior Europol representative in the U.S. Europe is being overwhelmed with refugees from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia; and the issue also is roiling the U.S. presidential election.

“Ireland is in a better place to have a practical and kind approach to migration,” Byrne told the 18 February gathering of Irish Network DC. “This could be our finest hour if we resist right-wing nationalism that we see in other parts of Europe.”

Patrick Byrne, senior Europol representative in the U.S. and RTE's Washington correspondent Caitriona Perry.

Patrick Byrne, senior Europol representative in the U.S., and RTE’s Washington correspondent Caitriona Perry.

In 2012, Byrne became the first Irish person appointed to the Europol post with the European delegation in the U.S. His job is to help increase strategic and operational cooperation between the E.U. and U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement agencies on issues such as terrorism, cyber crime, organised crime and drug trafficking.

Interviewed by RTÉ Washington correspondent Caitriona Perry, Byrne said information sharing between the E.U. and U.S. has increased 63 percent in recent years. In 2013, he wrote about “Increased Globalization of Organized Crime and Terrorism: Europol and the EU Perspective” for The Police Chief magazine.

Byrne said that Ireland’s top contributions to international law enforcement have come in the areas of peacekeeping, with more than 56,000 missions around the world; conflict resolution, including Northern Ireland; and financial crime. Twenty years ago, he helped establish the Criminal Assets Bureau at An Garda Síochána.

A native of Rialto in Dublin, Byrne said he was at Islandbridge to watch President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade through the city 23 June 1963. Then a lad of about three, he joked of being told that the U.S. leader “waved right at me.”

I asked the career cop if he has looked at the 1915-1916 “Movement of Extremists” reports of the Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Department, which the Irish National Archives last year began making available online. He said he had not.

Fact-checking Irish (and U.S.) elections

UPDATE: A day after our post, below, Poynter.org published a story about TheJournal.ie’s political fact-checking operation, and the Duke Reporter’s Lab also updated their global list to reflect the effort in Ireland.

ORIGINAL POST:

It’s campaign season in Ireland. Voters are bombarded by bold statements about:

In the heated run to Ireland’s 26 February general election, the rhetoric about such issues can create more confusion than clarity, especially when delivered by office-seeking politicians. Who can sort it out?

TheJournal.ie is “testing the truth of claims made by candidates and parties on the campaign trail” by deploying fact-check or accountability journalism; described by a recent U.S. study as “news organizations producing content that is branded under a special title and rates or judges the accuracy of claims by politicians and government officials.”

As-featured-in-the-journal.ie-2.jpg (374×282)

Political fact-checking organizations in America include PolitiFact.com*, FactCheck.org, and the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker. They are busy with the 2016 presidential primary.

TheJournal.ie was not among 75 active fact-checking services around the world in an October update by the Duke Reporters’ Lab, though the Dublin-based website appears to have been doing such reporting since at least in 2014. Wikipedia describes the 6-year-old online-only news service as “a mixture of original and aggregated content in a manner similar to The Huffington Post.” 

(Fact Check Northern Ireland, a fledgling effort on Twitter at @FactCheckNI, does not have an active website.)

Of course, there’s also plenty of conventional and social media coverage of the Irish elections. The Irish Times is pumping out stories and analysis, plus the Inside Politics podcasts. The Irish Independent has pages of campaign reporting, including constituency profiles and a “social media wall” with tweets from @EndaKennyTD@GerryAdamsSF and other political leaders. RTÉ also offers podcasts, polls and features. And others.

Irish voters, like those in America who have to slog through a much, much longer election cycle, have no excuse for being uninformed when they go to the polls. Political fact checkers are helping sort out the truth.

*Disclosure: My lovely wife is editor of PolitiFact.com.

Unionists and Nationalists failed to consider relations

The 1912-1914 armed mobilization of a volunteer force pledged to oppose Home Rule, at least in Ireland’s northern counties, failed to consider the implications for unionist-nationalist relationships within Ulster, Dr. Seán Farren writes in The Irish Times.

Likewise, nationalists gave little consideration to the likely effects their rebellion would have on relationships with unionists, particularly those in the North pledged to violently oppose self-government for Ireland.

“…The 1916 Rising took place against the background of an Ireland already on the threshold of actual partition, with no likelihood of any Irish or British attempt to prevent it becoming a constitutional reality being successful. Given unionist reaction to the rebellion, the slide towards a bitter division of the country was only strengthened.”

Irish elections set for 26 February

UPDATE: Irish Central‘s Sheila Langan notes “the stark differences between how elections play out in Ireland and the US cannot be neatly chalked off to population size and type of democracy.”

ORIGINAL POST: A national election in Ireland has been set for 26 February, “one of the shortest election campaigns in the history of the State,” RTÉ reported. Certainly quicker than the U.S.

“Bookmakers, political scientists and election number crunchers,” predict that Taoiseach Enda Kenny will become the first Fine Gael leader to win back-to-back general elections,” The Guardian said. The turnaround of the Irish economy since the last general election in 2011 is certainly in his favor.

But Fine Gael support is at 28 percent, down two points from November, in the latest Irish Times poll. Fianna Fáil, ousted from leadership in the last general election of 2011, is up 2 points at 21 percent. Full poll here, and more discussion on this Times‘ “Inside Politics” podcast:

 

The election date falls on a Friday, the same as in 2011, which drew 62 percent turnout. Having voters go to the polls at week’s end is thought to help with the youth turnout.

The new Irish government will resume operations on 10 March.

The compact election calendar in Ireland is a stark contrast to the long grind of the U.S. presidential campaign. Only four of 50 states will have held primary or caucus elections for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees before 26 February. Remaining primaries and caucuses are scheduled through June.

The winning nominees will not be officially named until party conventions in July. The fall general election campaign concludes with the vote on 8 November. The new president and Congress do not take office until January 2017.

Popular broadcaster Terry Wogan dies at 77

Sir Terry Wogan, a Limerick-born star of the British Broadcasting Corporation, died 31 January after a short bout with cancer. He was 77. Read the BBC’s obituary.

Terry-Wogan-008.jpg (460×276)

In The Guardian, Martin Kettle writes that Wogan rarely drew explicit attention to his Irishness.

And yet, although he lived, worked and died in Britain, was knighted by the Queen, and was never reluctant to wave the union jack when the needs of the BBC required it, his Irishness was there whenever he opened his mouth. For more than 40 years he was probably the most prominent Irish person, and certainly the most familiar Irish voice, in Britain, rivaled for fame only by [footballer] George Best and Bono, neither of whom could match Wogan’s length of time in the spotlight.

…Whether he liked it or not, Wogan was a significant Irish presence in Britain right through the era of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley. To some Irish nationalist eyes that may perhaps brand him as someone who made dubious accommodations with Britishness at a sensitive time. To his British listeners, however, and possibly to many of his Irish ones too, Wogan was a reminder that there was also much more to the British-Irish relationship than nationalist and loyalist politics, and that people on both sides of the Irish Sea have more in common than some of them sometimes like to pretend.

Irish Times columnist Martin Doyle wrote that “Ireland has had no finer ambassador to Britain.” Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny said Wogan “acted in no small way as a bridge between Ireland and Britain.”