A year of reckoning for the coalition

Throughout its term in office, the Coalition has dropped the ball, picked it back up again, made promises, then backtracked. Can they make it across the election 2015 finish line? Mary Regan reports

THE political mantra that it’s all about “the economy, stupid” has been much used by analysts and advisers to describe what will shape the course of Irish politics in the year ahead.

The country’s slow emergence from a long, painful period of austerity, and how parties respond to this recovery, will most likely determine the outcome of the next general election.