Search Results for 'Seanad'

Within the next two weeks, Galway will have three new councillors, with co-options on to the Galway city and county councils to take place following the election to the Dáil of councillors Catherine Connolly, Sean Canney, and Anne Rabbitte.

Seismic! Earthquake! Meltdown! Some of the words being used to describe the outcome of last week’s General Election. With the results still being digested, it is too early to go into a detailed analysis – Insider hopes to return to that once the various tallies, results, and exit polls have been parsed – but the headline outcomes are quite stark.

For many candidates, tomorrow (Monday) brings a new reality. They will wake up facing new challenges in their lives. On Friday, they had a future in politics. Now that has all changed. But changing career and adjusting to life after politics is never easy, especially if youv’e made a name for yourself in the old profession.

Galwaywoman Alice-Mary Higgins is to run as an Independent candidate in the Seanad elections.Ms Higgins, daughter of President Michael D and his wife Sabina, has taken an unpaid leave of absence from the National Women’s Council of Ireland, where she works as a policy co-ordinator, to run as a civil society candidate on the NUI panel.

WITH 10 days to polling day, Galway West has become something it has never been before - unpredictable. For years it returned two FF and one each for FG, Labour, and a PD/Independent. Even the electoral upheaval of 2011 almost bypassed the constituency, with FG the party to take two, as opposed to FF.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael/Labour governments are known quantities. The civil service really runs the State, using elected politicians as spokesmen - and it is usually men - and change comes at a snail’s pace. As soon as one of the parties get too big for its boots, we switch to the other, and the cycle continues.

Could it be possible that after the General Election Galway city would have no political representation in the Dail? Yes, it is, and it would appear to Insider that three of the main political parties – Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, and Sinn Féin – intend it to be that way.

Poor Irish women. The journey from Peig Sayers to Miriam O’ Callaghan has not been an easy one, and for many women simply unattainable. While in that time, men have found new confidence in the worlds of business, science, sport, teaching and the professions (even having the confidence to wreck the country in a spectacular fashion, as they did some years ago), women, in a patriarchal society, are still struggling to find their own expression, to escape the dominance of the Catholic Church, and, in the views of author Emma Comerford, ‘to control the tendency towards alcohol abuse and other manifestations of low self-esteem’.

For the last 12 to 18 months, Labour Galway West TD Derek Nolan has been regarded by pundits and political anoraks as the constituency's 'dead man walking', not so much 'the lad most likely to...' but rather the 'absolute certainty' to lose his seat.