All five of the Fine Gael/Labour budgets actually widened the gap between rich and poor. In Leo, their new biography of An Taoiseach, the INM Group Deputy Political Editor, Philip Ryan, and Government adviser, Niall O’Connor, tell the story of the Taoiseach advising a Fine Gael TD to ‘create anonymous accounts online to make positive

WHO I AM AND HOW YOU CAN CONTACT ME? Please take a few minutes to read over this notice.  Your privacy is important to me, Willie O’Dea TD.  This Privacy Notice sets out what may happen to any personal information you give me.  My constituency address is 2 Glenview Gardens, Farranshone, Limerick, and I have

Protecting those people most in need should be a priority for politicians in a compassionate society, writes Willie O’Dea In an extraordinarily blase series of remarks after a pre-Budget forum with NGOs, the Minister for Social Protection dropped the strongest hints yet that she was not prepared to fight for increases in welfare in the

Last week, a secret internal Fine Gael memo intended for limited circulation somehow managed to find its way into the public domain. It almost had echoes of Watergate. All that was missing was the darkened car park and a mysterious, shadowy source inside the administration determined to get the truth out there. Except, there was

Fianna Fáil is holding a public meeting on Housing on Monday, March 26th at 8pm in the Strand Hotel, Ennis Rd., Limerick. The meeting forms part of a series of regional events on the housing crisis we are currently engaged in.   Willie O’Dea TD said, “While the meetings are being held by Fianna Fáil,

Theresa May and her ministers are about to learn that the old saying ‘May you get what you wish for’ is meant as a curse, not a blessing. No sooner had the current Brexit talks started in Brussels than we saw a succession of Tories demanding that negotiations proceed as speedily as possible to Phase

The abject failure of Fine Gael’s health strategy was laid bare this week with new figures from the HSE showing that 1453 people over the age of 75 were kept waiting over 24 hours in University Hospital Limerick Emergency Department so far this year. The figures show that the situation in University Hospital Limerick Emergency

In 2012, I commented in the Sunday Independent on how ministers in the Fine Gael/Labour government fell into one of three categories: high-flyers, passengers or weak links. I suggested that the weak links, specifically O’Reilly, Shatter, Burton and Hogan, each had the potential to cause huge problems for that government. I was later proven right.

Around this time last year Minister Paschal Donohoe became very upset at me when I called for a €5 increase in the old-age pension. He was furious. He claimed that I wanted to “…create the kind of politics that has created the cost and difficulty that we want to put behind us as a country

For the past 12 months people have been asking my prediction as to who will win the Fine Gael leadership contest: Simon or Leo. I’ve been telling them all the same thing: Leo is a certainty. Firstly, Leo Varadkar has been actively campaigning for at least two years. Simon Coveney appears to have been campaigning for only