Kelly's Corner
by Kelly FinchamRSS 
Recent Posts
- So-called 'experts' need to pay for their mistakes on Irish economy
- So-called 'experts' need to pay for their mistakes on Irish economy
- Bargain apartments for sale in Ireland as banks start sell-offs
- Obama marks Cinco de Mayo with immigration reform remarks at White House
- Immigation reform (or lack of) set to dominate mid-term elections
Archives
Talking on RTE Thursday, Professor Frances Ruane says the agency "could have done better."
She says a "lack of expertise" in macro-economics, particularly banking, impaired the ESRI's ability to forecast the banking crisis.
I'm flabbergasted at the admission from the Economic and Social Research Institute that they could have done a better job on forecasting the Irish collapse.
I'm flabbergasted at the admission from the Economic and Social Research Institute that they could have done a better job on forecasting the Irish collapse.
Talking on RTE Thursday, Professor Frances Ruane says the agency "could have done better."
She says a "lack of expertise" in macro-economics, particularly banking, impaired the ESRI's ability to forecast the banking crisis.
Brand new luxury apartments are being sold off in Dublin in a fire sale as the Irish banks try to recoup some of the billions of dollars lost in the great property crash.
Carrickmines Green (see spec bathroom above) was once planned as a high-end development with four-bedroom houses expected to fetch upwards of €770,000 ($930,000).
Of course, that was in 2006, when the sky was the limit and bandits ran the Irish property market.
The legislative car crash that is the Arizona immigration bill has sparked a renewed effort at the federal level to work on immigration reform.
The legislative car crash that is the Arizona immigration bill has sparked a renewed effort at the federal level to work on immigration reform.
President Barack Obama was expected to address the issue at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House Wednesday.
But White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs cautioned that "immigration is a very hard issue that Congress might not finish this year."
It's unlikely that either party wanted the mid-terms to be about immigration but their combined failure to act on the issue has now blown up in their faces.
The anger over the Arizona law has moved immigration right off the back-burner where politicians like to park it.
Neither party has really taken a lead on the issue for fear of setting off the right-wing noise machine that doomed earlier efforts.
It's unlikely that either party wanted the mid-terms to be about immigration but their combined failure to act on the issue has now blown up in their faces.
It's unlikely that either party wanted the mid-terms to be about immigration but their combined failure to act on the issue has now blown up in their faces.
The anger over the Arizona law has moved immigration right off the back-burner where politicians like to park it.
Neither party has really taken a lead on the issue for fear of setting off the right-wing noise machine that doomed earlier efforts.
It's the end of an era in Ireland with the sad news that Irish broadcaster Gerry Ryan (above) has died.
Ryan breathed new life into the staid national broadcaster RTE with his irreverent brand of humor which served him well in his early years.
Oh well. There'll be no Grand Canyon for this legal immigrant as long as Arizona stays a police state.
As Linda Greenhouse says in today's New York Times the new law is the same as the internal passports systems which were so despised in apartheid South Africa and the former Soviet Union.
How are the police in Arizona going to decide who they think should be holding these internal passports?
Talk about trying to shoot the messenger!
The New York Times is being attacked from all sides over its coverage of the sex abuse scanadals in the Catholic Church.
The federal government would appear to be on a collision course with the state of Arizona after Gov. Jan Brewer signed the controversial bill into law.
What's going on with Glenn Beck's ratings?
Looks like his viewers are dropping off like the proverbial flies.
Figures from Nielsen show that the TV host has lost some 795,562 viewers since January.
So this is what passes for considered thought these days.
Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher (above) gets an ovation from Tea Party people attending a convention in Cincinnati.
"We're not giving up on immigration reform," vowed Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) as he addressed an event hosted by the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform.
Schumer was a surprise speaker at the packed immigration meeting which was held at the community services center in Sunnyside Thursday night.
He outlined the challenges facing the Senate bill which he has co-authored with South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham.
A staggering 100,000 people will leave Ireland between this year and next year according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
A staggering 100,000 people will leave Ireland between this year and next year according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
The ESRI says this exodus is the biggest element in helping keep the jobless figures down.
But where on earth is everyone going?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Senate will begin work on immigration reform when members return from recess this week.
"We need to do this this year," he told an immigration rally in Las Vegas Saturday. "We cannot wait."
His speech has stirred hopes in the hearts of many who were let down in the collapse of the 2007 "grand bargain," negotiated by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
We can expect Ryanair to announce that there will be two tiers of fee-for-pee if they go ahead with their ludicrous plan to charge passengers to use on-board toilets.
Just this week, the penny-pinching Irish airline blamed women for the new baggage fees which are rippling through the industry.
One in five Irish home-owners is now under water.
The anti-immigrant group Alipac is making a nasty effort to frighten undocumented immigrants from filling out the census forms.
The anti-immigrant group Alipac is making a nasty effort to frighten undocumented immigrants from filling out the census forms.
At least that's the only conclusion I can draw from their calls for Census data to be used to detect and deport undocumented immigrants.
This flies in the face of eveything the Census is intended to achieve.
Maureen Dowd has singled out Irish Archbishop Diarmuid Martin as a "hero" in an Easter week which has seen very few heroes emerge from the Vatican.
She'll probably get in more trouble for also recommending that a "sexorcist" be called in to the Church.
But there is something rotten in the State of Catholicism.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan was supposed to be a breath of fresh air for New York Catholics after the creaking moribund reign by Cardinal Edward Egan.
But it's clearly back to business as usual with the Catholic Church as Dolan has joined a long line of senior clergy defending Pope Benedict XVI.
Incredibly, Dolan says Benedict is like Jesus and needs to be defended by his flock.
They have banned all advertising - including the new iPad which launches on April 3 - from the Fox network.
It remains to be seen how Rupert Murdoch, who is a businessman first and foremost, will react to this.
A stunning new documentary on HBO paints a grim picture of why immigration reform went down in flames in 2007, the summer that we all learned what "cloture" meant.
Sarah Palin has finally snagged a TV show after weeks of rumors and gossip.
And CNN says she'll be getting a cool $1 million for each episode.
The show, "Sarah Palin's Alaska," will air on the Discovery Channel and will obviously focus on her home state.
The bowler hats are at it again!
The Orange Order in Ireland has called on its members to protest the Pope's upcoming visit to England.
You can take the man out of Ireland (Joe Biden) but you can't take Ireland out of the man.
You can take the man out of Ireland (Joe Biden) but you can't take Ireland out of the man.
Like many an Irish person has been heard to proclaim (especially when we are beating England at anything) sometimes things really are "a big ****ing deal."
Vice President Biden was caught making the comment in the East Room of the White House today as President Barack Obama signed the health care reform bill into law.
Biden gave a good solid Biden speech praising Obama for his "clarity of purpose" and "perserverance" and then said with a big smile, "This is a big f****** deal!"
A new HBO movie shows the late Senator Ted Kennedy fighting for one of the key political causes of his life; immigration reform.
The documentary airs just days after the House voted in favor of health care reform.
Widow Vicki Kennedy says Kennedy would have been thrilled at Congress passing health care.
I've always wondered what happens to the shamrock that the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen will present to President Barack Obama at the White House today.
According to a report in CNN today, it goes straight to the crusher.
Uhuh. That little bowl of shamrock, the "enduring symbol" of the relationship between Ireland and the U.S. is destroyed after making the long trip from Ireland.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of sanity.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is urging the Republican party to rethink its attitude on immigration reform.
"Handle it with some sense of compassion and some sense of civility," he said Monday at he National Press Club.
"Thanks for helping us keep drunk drivers off the road."
So says Joanna Newton of the AAA South which, with Budweiser, is running its "Tow to Go" program again this year for St Patrick's Day.
Triple A will come pick you up and tow your car if you've drowned too many shamrocks. But you have to live in Florida, Georgia, selected areas in Tennessee, Arizona and Oklahoma.
Well there's a question that bedeviled me during my youth.
I never felt as if I could join in the more "Irish" events at school, oh, you know, the singing and the dancing, because, as I would hear repeatedly through secondary school; "You're not really Irish."
Being Irish, in Drogheda in the early 1980s meant being born there.
The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform has set up home on Facebook.
I am the pro bono communications liaison for the ILIR and we've been inundated with queries lately about what's going on with the ILIR and, more importantly, with immigration reform.
So, I'm trying out the Facebook platform as an alternative to editing the existing Web site by hand.
Good news and bad news from Ireland today.
The unemployment numbers dropped by 2,300 in February but not because people are finding jobs.
The Central Statistics Office says that the most likely reason for the fall in jobless claims is because people are leaving.
Sarah Palin says she's on a crusade to bring the truth back to media.
(We didn't even know it had gone away.)
Speaking on the Jay Leno show last night she said it was time for Americans to be able to trust their media.
Ireland threw money away like a drunk in a bar room during the economic boom, according to a new survey.
Okay, that's not quite what they said, but they should have.
Want to come to the U.S. from Ireland soon? That'll be an extra $10 please.
A new bill on its way to President Obama's desk will create a national tourism agency partially funded by the $10 fee which will only be levied on visitors from countries in the visa waiver program.
Which includes Ireland.
ESPN has done the right thing by putting Tony Kornheiser off the air for two weeks after his ugly remarks about colleague Hannah Storm.
However, they might think about sending him off on some passive-aggression training course before letting him back on again.
Pigs are big in Ireland. So big in fact that applications to keep pigs have risen by 360 percent over the past two years.
That's a lot of pigs; 687 in fact. All being kept in back gardens across the country.
And what Sharry is reading adds up to a big flashing red danger sign for the beleagured Democrats.
Sharry says the Dems are in danger of losing seats in 11 key states because of the lack of progress on comprehensive immigration reform.
The sidewalks outside our office are crowded with Catholics leaving the nearby St Francis Church bearing the Ash Wednesday ashes on their forehead.
They've been dispensing ashes from St Francis on 31st street since 7.30 this morning and will be doing so continuously until 7 p.m.
St Francis is my favorite church in New York not surprisingly really when St Francis was my favorite saint for so many years. (At least he was until I realized my hopeless causes needed St Jude's intervention!)
A firestorm of criticism has broken out over anti-Irish "jokes" on a Daily Telegraph blog in Britain.
More than 70 so-called jokes have been posted on a blog by Douglas Murray (who runs an organization called "The Center for Social Cohesion,") after he wrote a piece lambasting a recent compensation payout.
The comment was fair game. Turns out that a union rep successfully sued a Conservative councilor for discrimination after said Tory told a so-called Irish joke.
It seems to me as if Pope Benedict has squandered an opportunity to inspire Irish Catholics.
The pope today described the decades of child sex abuse in the Irish church as a "heinous crime," but failed to take action on calls for top bishops to resign.
Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the pope "shares the outrage" over the abuse and said Benedict pope had "already expressed profound regret."
If you pay careful attention to the stories coming out of the Vatican you can just about make out a sound in the background.
It's the sound of ancient shutters being forced open. It's the sound of secrets being pushed out of dark rooms where they've been hidden for decades.
Finally, the Vatican might just admit that the entire foundations of the Irish church need to be dug out and started again.
The Vatican has been exceedingly slow to act on the Irish child sex abuse scandal.
Did you hear the one about the two Northern Irish police officers who failed to notice a dead body?
Not once, but twice!
Immigration minister Chris Evans says the country has too many hairdressers and cooks and not enough doctors and engineers.
"We were taking hairdressers from overseas in front of doctors and nurses - it didn't make any sense," Evans said.
Rare footage of the Irish leader Michael Collins has been unearthed by Pathe News.
The footage, which was shot in 1922, shows Collins campaigning up and down the country and shows the sheer size of the throngs who turned out to hear him.
It won't be any time soon for the "Traditional Unionist Voice," which dismissed the devolution deal Friday with a petulant hissy fit.
The TUV opposes any coalition with Sinn Fein (which makes any grown-up negotiations kinda difficult don't ya think boys?) and says the DUP has sold out.
Good news for those of us who are paid in dollars and keep getting fleeced by the euro exchange rate.
Bank of Ireland is forecasting another dip in the exchange rate - down to $1.35 from $1.40 through the end of March.
The exchange rate is currently around $1.39.
Apparently the 61-year-old woman was haring down the HOV lane when she was pulled over by a keen-eyed cop.
The police officer thought it was just a tad suspicious that the "passenger" was wearing glasses and had the visor down even though the day was cloudy and grey.
Immigration reform advocates are stuck on the sidelines as Congress continues to do nothing about much.
In the interim, the University of Denver has weighed into the fray with a thoughtful and constructive report which would grant "provisional legal status" to current so-called illegal immigrants.
The university gathered some 20 citizens on to a panel which spent 2009 hearing from pro and anti-reform advocates.
The 60-year-old reporter says he has failed to make a single friend during his time here.
"Whatever that says about me, I've decided really that I'm a home bird rather than a Washington person...I won't be here this time next Christmas," he said in the second part of "Charlie Bird's American Year," which was broadcast on RTE in Ireland Monday night
