Search Results for 'General Election'

There was a feisty and interesting exchange in the Dáil last week that caught the attention of the national media and woke some of the sleeping deputies in the unparliamentary surroundings of the convention centre.

There is no doubt that we live in extraordinary and unpredictable times. Covid-19 has proven just how quickly life as we know it can change. Few would have predicted our current situation only a short time ago, just as few would have predicted that the issue of Irish Unity would be pushed to the forefront of political debate and become an increasingly likely eventuality in the near future. Unity, once thought of as a remote and distant prospect, is no longer a question of if, but when.

Looking back 12 months at Insider’s preview of 2020, the danger of making even short-term predictions is starkly illustrated! The upcoming General Election, a post-Brexit trade deal, and the ongoing housing crisis were cited as the issues likely to dominate the political year; as it turned out, all featured but there was not one word about the issue that dominated the year - Covid-19.

Galway East Sinn Féin’s Louis O’Hara has criticised the recently published EY Report for being ‘too narrow in its appraisal of the Western Rail Corridor.’

Heritage towns such as Athenry will be hampered from their ability to attract tourists in a post Covid-19 environment as Transport Infrastructure Ireland policy does not include signage promoting such towns on the national road network.

Insider heard it said recently that anyone who was in the predictions business at the outset of 2020 would have found themselves out of work before too long.

This is a vastly informative and humorous book by Shane Ross, 'In Bed with the Blueshirts'.

The next General Election is an eternity away, or is it? As things stand today, Insider believes it is at least a couple of years away, maybe more.

A total of 4,840 learner drivers County Galway are waiting for a test - 1,104 of them in Galway City - according to figures released by the Road Safety Authority.

One recent evening Insider watched the 1967 Jean-Luc Godard film La Chinoise in which a small group of French students sit around their apartment, located in what is described as a “workers’ district”, and engage in theatrical discussions about how they must overthrow the bourgeoise and, in particular, the hierarchal French university system which saw students as passive receivers of knowledge handed down by their god-like professors, rather than participants in a dialectical exchange in which both students and teachers learn from each other and grow as a result. No one, with the exception of chairman Mao, is radical enough for most of these students. The French Communist Party which, to draw an Irish parallel, would have been more or less the political equivalent of present day Sinn Féin, is condemned as hopelessly “revisionist”. The Soviet Union, in particular its then president, the now largely forgotten Mr Kosygin, is convicted by the students at their kitchen table discussions of failing to do enough to support the Vietnamese in their war against Lyndon Johnson. And the French working class, with whom said kitchen table debaters absolutely sympathise, are seen as hopelessly passive. In a mix of desperation, madness, and idealism, the students decide to mount a campaign of terrorism, which will involve them doing something they have singularly failed to do for most of the film; getting up from that kitchen table and going outside. They plan to kill the visiting Soviet minister for culture who has been invited by President de Gaulle’s own culture minister, the novelist and decayed Stalinist intellectual Andre Malraux, to open a new wing of the university. After that, they hope to bomb the Sorbonne in the belief that this will spark a revolution. Insider is against blowing up universities. Partly because he knows such actions more often provoke backlash than revolution. But also because Insider happens to teach at a university and coming out in favour of blowing up universities might lead to an awkward email from one’s department head.