I’ve been doing some heavy Twitter searches about the upcoming general election recently. I’ve been trying to narrow my results and I hit on the idea of using hashtags to focus my searches. In that process I’ve come up with a collection of the most popular general news and politics hashtags used in Ireland.

Got any more? If I’ve left any out, made any errors or if you’d like me to make other adjustments let me know in the comments below or tweet me at @ferguskelly

(For those of you who are wondering why every paragraph ends with a #, I’ve implemented WinerLinks on this blog. This is a way to make permalinks to each paragraph in an article and ends up confusing everybody whenever you come to write about hashtags. Sorry.)

General

#ge11 – ‘Official’ hashtag of General Election 2011

#se11 – ‘Official’ hashtag of the 2011 Seanad Election

#aras11 – ‘Official’ hashtag of the 2011 Presidential Election

Political parties

UPDATE Feb 8: They’ve stopped using it UPDATE Feb 3: @labour have started to use #getour for Eamon Gilmore’s campaign tour of Ireland

Televised leaders debates

#tv3ld – TV3′s leaders debate, the one with the empty chair for Enda Kenny

#rtedeb – RTE’s 5-way leaders debate

#tg4deb – TG4′s leaders debate, in Irish

RTÉ TV

#sixone – 6.1 evening news

#rtept – Prime Time evening current affairs programme (@RTE_PrimeTime) with @MiriamOCal

#rtefl – Frontline current affairs programme with Pat Kenny

#rte11 – Eleventh Hour election programme (@RTEeleventhhour) with Daire O’Brien, @keelinshanley presenting plus researcher @mark_coughlan, and producers @aoifstokes, @lukemcmanus

#twip – The Week in Politics with Sean O’Rourke

RTÉ Radio

#newsatone – The main RTÉ lunchtime radio news bulletin (@RTENewsAtOne) with Sean O’Rourke

#todayPK – Today with Pat Kenny, a mid-morning news and current affairs programme

#latedebate – The Late Debate, political debate and current affairs programme (@latedebateRTE) with @cebyrne

TV3

#vinb – Tonight with Vincent Browne, late night debate with @vincentbrowne

#tv3news – TV3′s news hashtag

TodayFM radio

#lastword, #mattc – The Last Word with Matt Cooper, a daily news, current affairs and general interest magazine programme with @cooper_m. #lastword is not unique so a search of this tag may produce some odd results

Newstalk radio

#ghook – The Right Hook, a daily news, current affairs and general interest magazine programme. The hashtag seems to be rarely used and may be used instead of @ghook’s Twitter handle

Search them all

If you want to search the mother lode, the Twitter search that includes them all is here

There are bound to be more. If I’ve left any out, made any errors or if you’d like me to make other adjustments let me know in the comments below or tweet me at @ferguskelly