Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan

Ellen Coyne and Jack Horgan-Jones join Hugh Linehan to look back on the week in politics:

It was becoming clear towards the end of last week that protests over the price of fuel were coming. But the scale of what has unfolded seems to have caught the Government by surprise. Then there were missteps in the handling of the situation throughout the week. Now the battle lines have been drawn and positions have been given time and space to harden. Has the State’s authority been undermined?

Jack and Ellen take us inside a week of crisis for the country and the coalition.

Some opposition politicians showed enthusiastic support for the protests in their early stages, but the mood has become much more cautious as the scale of the impact on daily life has become clear.

Donald Trump has claimed the two-week Iran war ceasefire as a victory for the US. In reality, the outcome is anything but.

Plus the panel pick their favourite Irish Times articles of the week, including the nuances of court reporting, Paris’s anti-Emily in Paris movement and the childlike wonder inspired by the Artemis mission to the Moon.
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In the final instalment of our series on Labour’s time in government from 2011 to 2016, things get darker as it becomes clear economic progress will not be enough for voters to forgive the party for its role in austerity.

Labour’s poor showing in the 2014 local and European elections leads to a change at the top. But Joan Burton’s leadership does not revive Labour’s fortunes.

Then, when the disenchanted take to the streets to oppose water charges, the scale of public anger becomes clear - and much of it is still directed at Labour.

To wrap up the story, Pat and Hugh talk about the roads not travelled. Could Labour have avoided its 2016 general election wipeout, a political setback it has struggled to recover from ever since?
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Inside Politics is coming to Galway in May for a live recording. Get your tickets here.

In part two of this three-part series on Labour's harrowing experience in government from 2011 to 2016, Pat Leahy and Hugh Linehan follow the story of the first three years of that austerity-delivering coalition.

As punishing budget after punishing budget was delivered, Labour struggled to retain its political identity and principles while working with Fine Gael to present a united front to a world that saw Ireland as an economic basket case. Successes - exiting the EU-IMF bailout programme, securing legislation on abortion - are completely overshadowed by the harshness of austerity. For Labour and its party leader Eamon Gilmore, the political damage mounts.

Listen to part one here.

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Inside Politics is coming to Galway in May for a live recording. Get your tickets here.

When Labour came to power in 2011 Ireland was in the depths of an economic crisis that had several more years to run. Their coalition with Fine Gael spent the next five years struggling to fix the economy while satisfying the EU and the IMF, who had bailed us out.

But it was Labour, led by Eamon Gilmore to its greatest ever number of seats in that election, who bore the brunt of voter frustration over the deep cutsLinehanx increases that the government then imposed. The party was decimated in the next election and voters, particularly of the working class, never fully trusted the party again.

So why did Labour get the blame? Could Gilmore and Joan Burton, who succeeded him in 2014, have done things differently? In this series Pat Leahy and Hugh Linehan relive the fateful events and decisions of that era and, a decade on, take a fresh look back at Labour’s collapse.

In episode one they look at Eamon Gilmore, how Labour fought the 2011 election, the formation of the coalition with Fine Gael, how one of Labour’s key promises to voters was abandoned without a fight, and how the seeds of future trouble were sown with Labour's top brass taking on some of the trickiest ministries.
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Oliver Sears, founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland, joins Hugh to talk about his growing alarm at the rise of anti-Semitism in Ireland and what he sees as the failure to take it seriously. They discuss whether the political response to Israel's actions since October 7th 2023 has complicated that debate.

The conversation covers questions such as where legitimate criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins, whether anti-Zionism can be distinguished from antisemitism, and what Ireland's institutions should be doing differently.
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