The junior partners may have negotiated new ethical measures in their talks, but they are missing the big picture Elaine Byrne in The IRISH TIMES October 13, 2009

SOMETIMES I feel sorry for the Greens. Late on Friday night after the negotiations for the revised programme for government were concluded after more than a week of talks, Senator Dan Boyle had a few drinks with some party members around the corner from Government Buildings. He was tired but excited and looking forward to the Green Party convention the next day.

Elaine Byrne in IRISH TIMES October 6, 2009

How can we accept Ceann Comhairle’s moral authority when he defends behaviour only on legal grounds?

‘POLITICAL CULTURE is the set of values within which a system operates,” read my first lecture slide to my first Irish politics class last week. Over the next year, I will be teaching 100 or so Trinity College Dublin students about Irish political parties, the electoral system, the role of the Dáil, policy-making and so forth. But right now I teach them about Irish political culture.

The Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, the body tasked to reform the expenses of deputies and Senators, meets tomorrow, about two minutes’ walk from our lecture theatre.

John O’Donoghue, chairman of that same commission, is very welcome to address my class of 20-year-olds and explain to them his definition of values that justified a political culture awash with five-star hotels, chauffeur-driven cars on stand-by, Michelin-starred restaurants and official trips with his wife that coincided with prestigious race meetings at Longchamp, Chantilly and Sandown.

Fás and O’Donoghue are the latest examples of unethical behaviour deeply entrenched within our system, writes ELAINE BYRNE in THE IRISH TIMES September 15, 2009

POLITICAL LANGUAGE is a curious animal. The Dáil record shows that debate on corruption was least when it was almost certainly happening the most.

Although the beef, McCracken, Mahon and Moriarty tribunals revealed the extraordinary extent of political favouritism, conflict of interest and corruption that took place during the 1970s and 1980s, Dáil discussion on such issues was less than previous or subsequent decades.