After a long prelude, the campaign is finally on

It’s on. After a long, seemingly endless, prelude, the general election campaign finally began this weekend with the dissolution of the 33rd Dáil by President Michael D Higgins. The three-week campaign will be intense and bitterly hard-fought, and its outcome – to be decided when Irish voters go to the polls on November 29th – will profoundly shape the country’s direction over the next five years.
Political parties spend years preparing for elections. For news publishers, too, these important moments in national life require a great deal of planning. Here at The Irish Times, we have been thinking hard about how we can provide our subscribers with the richest coverage of the election across all our platforms, whether through words on screen or on the page, in audio form or via our award-winning visual journalism.
We step back and ask ourselves how best we can reflect the state of Irish society as it faces this big decision about its future. We think about our tone of voice, about issues we should highlight, and about new ways to speak to and reflect a rapidly-changing country. Of course we think about practical questions: we allocate resources, we build new tech tools, we dream up new formats, we test for different scenarios, we commission copy in advance. We position ourselves to react quickly. And then we plan every last detail of count weekend, a logistically complex undertaking aimed at getting accurate results out as quickly as possible while providing the best real-time insights and analysis for our audience at home and across the world.
Some of the fruits of this work can already been seen on the site and the app. Our daily live story will keep you up to date with every twist and turn of the campaign, from early in the morning until late at night. Daily instalments of the Inside Politics podcast, presented by Hugh Linehan with members of our politics team, will appear in your feed every afternoon. Detailed profiles of all 43 constituencies – the candidates, the boundaries, the possible winners – are already available; take a look at this introduction by Political Correspondent Jennifer Bray. Look out for our new issue tracker and coalition-builder tools. We’ll have video explainers; on-the-canvass colour from Miriam Lord and other writers; opinion polls; focus groups; and a series of reflective pieces from our stable of opinion writers and some new voices. Refreshed homepage designs and results presentations will debut later in the campaign. At the heart of our coverage will be the work of our reporters across the country, who will tell you everything you need to know between now and the moment when the last of those 174 seats is filled.
On irishtimes.com this weekend, we have reports on candidates’ safety concerns, on the prospects for two ex-Fine Gael Independents running in Dublin, and on early tax-and-spend promises from the main parties. In a campaign in which the cost of living and wider economic issues will figure prominently, Cliff Taylor sets the scene, while Miriam Lord has written an obituary of the 33rd Dáil, spanning everything from the Covid pandemic and Golfgate to Brexit and the Dublin riots. In his essay marking the beginning of the campaign, Fintan O’Toole reflects on why, more than a century since Independence, “the nation still feels half-built.”
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
Friday night saw Ireland take on New Zealand on home turf in their Autumn Nations Series opener. Our sports writers have all of the latest reaction and analysis to the clash at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, including what we learned from the defeat and what the media said. You can read the full match report here.
In this week’s On the Money newsletter, Dominic Coyle is writing about mortgage relief, and the surprising revelation that tens of thousands of Irish homeowners are choosing not to seek up to €1,250 in tax relief that is sitting there waiting for them. Here’s everything you need to know. Sign up here to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox every Friday.
As always, there is much more on irishtimes.com, including rundowns of all the latest movies in our film reviews, tips for the best restaurants in our food section and all the latest in sport. There are plenty more articles exclusively available for Irish Times subscribers here.
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