Search Results for 'Progressive Democrats'

“The only valid poll is on election day!” is the guff politicians huff and bluster with when the latest round of opinion polls turn out badly for them. Yet fear not reader, Insider can assure you all politicians, regardless of what they say publicly, take opinion poll findings very seriously.

The first meetings of the new Galway City Council have been marked by tension and sniping between Fianna Fáil members and their counterparts in the ruling group of Fine Gael, Labour, and centre-right Independents.

If there was ever a constituency which defined the term ‘boringly predictable’ it was certainly Galway East, a place even more beholden to repeating patterns and traditions than its sister electoral area Galway West.

While the flurry of autumn polls have been consistent in showing meltdown for Fianna Fáil and the election of a FG/Labour coalition, the most recent Red C poll in the Irish Sun showed a new dynamic entering the race.

Local Independent TD Noel Grealish came in for blistering criticism this week from a number of politicians who accused him of engaging in “political opportunism” over his threat to withdraw his support for the Government if further cuts to frontline health services in the west go ahead.

A recently constructed report on the state of the Fianna Fáil organisation in urban areas throughout Ireland told party members something many already knew - cumann are largely inactive or non-existent in cities and large towns.

Labour councillor Derek Nolan has rubbished claims that certain party colleagues have made offers to Fianna Fáil and councillor Hildegarde Naughton of forming a new pact in City Hall.

This time next year all the hullabaloo of the Local and European elections will be over and a new city council and mayor will have been elected. In the meantime, the big question is, how will the current economic climate and cutbacks affect the members of the council in their bids to be re-elected?

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

New strategies must be adopted on both the economy and in next year’s local elections as “the status quo position” and the old methods are no longer acceptable in the current climate. This was the message Taoiseach Brian Cowen delivered this week at his press conference in Galway.