Rats versus Sunken Ship
The Green party has just announced they will resign the whip, and Fianna Failed back benchers have replied by loudly calling for the head of Brian Cowen.
I have just 2 questions: why did they wait so long before acting to save their own mortally wounded political careers and does anyone know what kind of odds John Delaney is giving on what reasons Cowen will cite when he refuses to resign? My money say’s he will avow his undying patriotism, loyalty, and “steadfast dedication to completing the task”.
Go to: www.intrade.com
Ireland’s Financial woes made the front page of USA Today’s Money section this morning; while less salubrious than making the WSJ’s front pages, this accomplishment is also considerably more frightening as it proves the Irish economy is sickly enough to have attracted the attention of foreign sports fans with a love of colour photography and a fifth grade reading level. Yes, dear reader, our government has screwed-up so spectacularly that we’ve shown up on the radar of the mindless, the dormant, and the ill-informed; no small feat for a country of 4 million with an economy about the size of Los Angeles (or Birmingham).
Having been forced to bow to the inevitable reality of Irish finances, Brian D’oh! & Brian Dumb have reluctantly agreed to accept a 100 billion euro bailout, and you can rest assured that the figure was arrived at only after long careful and exhaustive analysis of the uniqueness of the Irish plight – as well as the fact that Greece took 110 billion in their bailout – and no way were we going to brand ourselves The Biggest Borrowers in the eurozone.
Thinking back over the last year, recalling how many times we heard Brian Cowen insisting that as former Minister for Finance he had seen no warning signs, and how now, as Taoiseach (PM), neither he nor his new Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan could be held in any way responsible for the complete melt-down of the national economy… I am not sure if we’re trapped in an episode of the Walking Dead or just the Fast Spin Cycle of Fianna Fáil’s political washing machine.
The Government’s own report on the banking crisis, published six months ago, in May, admitted that 80% of the Irish problem was home-grown. “Ireland’s banking crisis bears the clear imprint of global influences, yet it was in crucial ways ‘home-made’.”
Allowing that the government has very likely watered down that report (so as to draw attention away from their own failings), leaves us in the awkward position of either:
A) accepting that our leaders were/are completely ignorant (of the actual state of Irish national finances) – or else,
B) recognizing that they knew exactly how bad the hurricane was going to be, and they did everything they could to hold it at bay until it could be blamed on the first available global crisis. (Lords be praised for Lehman Brothers!)
Irish politicians want us to swallow the idea that they are so dim that they did not notice any inherent disconnect between the fact that Irish home ownership is the highest in Europe, versus the conflicting fact that the average cost of any home within commuting distance from a decent job had risen to over 12 times the average annual salary. (READ: every crack-house for sale was totally unaffordable by any stretch of imaginative accounting practices). Given the simple fact that the parliamentary majority is now smaller than the number of vacant seats in the Dáil, and the recent Supreme Court ruling that elections must be held, the case for total ignorance is strong….
However, I am inclined towards the view that leaders in Fianna Fáil knew they’d screwed up, but were simply unwilling to suffer the losses that (they and their property developing pals) would have occurred had the country changed tack earlier – say, for instance, in 2006, when the problems first became evident, or 2007, by which stage, a major (if not lethal) cut to property taxes was the only thing they could do to buoy the already falling Irish property market.
I have of late spent a great may hours talking with investors, and other people who understand finance in real terms, and in these conversations, the word “pivot” has come up a great deal. “Pivot” is shorthand for the idea that investors want companies they’ve put money into to remain nimble, stay awake, and be willing to shift gears in accord with changing market conditions. It is a very reasonable expectation, the advantages of which are well-illustrated by a plethora of anecdotes, like the one about the old laundry detergent company, Wrigley’s, that gave up selling soap in order to focus on growing consumer demand for the new chewing gum they’d begun giving away to promote their detergent.
With an economy the size of Birmingham, nimble should be the hallmark of the Irish economy, yet Ireland remains deeply and painfully mired in the national obsession with home ownership – at any cost.
Today, on the official government web site that gives information on the Irish State, the top two featured links are: Keeping Your Home & Losing Your Job – which is only slightly less depressing than the fact that on 26 May of this year, our Parliament’s legal affairs researchers published a riveting report on the still-thriving practice of debtor’s prison; a report that tells us that over 3.2% of Irish folks in prison since 2006 were put there for failing to pay their debts. Not taxes, mind you, this is about plain old ordinary debt – credit cards, home improvement loans, car loans, and mortgages. The money you probably borrowed when you thought you had a stable and secure job, like say, working for a bank, in Dublin.
“Over one hundred years after the practice of imprisoning debtors was abolished in Ireland, debtors unable to meet their financial obligations still face the risk of imprisonment where they default on a court instalment order. According to the Law Reform Commission an average of 200 persons per year (276 in 2008) are imprisoned in Ireland in connection with civil debt.”
If only Brian & Co. had taken notes at last week’s Smartcamp, instead of spending their time there giving speeches.
AIB never said we had to pay the loan back!
The quintessential defining moment of recent Irish economic history has just occurred; six family members are suing AIB on the grounds that the bank has no legal right to demand repayment of €25.3 Million these folks borrowed. Wow. This is a special moment.
Wouldn’t you love to get terms like that from your bankers? But before we all get too excited about what you or I might do with 25.3 million yo-yos, let’s stand back for a moment and think about it. Now, if you’re Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett, 25.3M might be just barely enough to get your attention, but for the rest of us, that’s a fair bit of dosh.
The Irish government recently cut a vaccination plan to save 12M from the national coffers, and that was headline news. Perhaps a 12M cut in government spending would not be major news in the UK, or the US, but we are small. We have an economy the size of Manchester, 25.3M is a LOT of money, in our national context. It’s enough to fund X-thousand much needed hospital beds — or the building of 84 brand new state-of-the-art schools — or 12 trade missions to China plus seed funding for a dozen new start-ups — or its enough money to once and for all develop a viable source for wave energy, which would make Ireland the major energy supplier for Western Europe.
Realising the many, much more socially relevant, uses to which that much money could have been put is exactly what makes this AIB loan fiasco so fascinating.
The bank loaned the money on — what for it! — yes, that’s right, a property development deal! A deal which has gone belly up, to the great surprise of no one, save perhaps a few AIB bank mangers, and 6 members of the Lynch family.
The music stopped, and AIB found itself 25.3M lighter, and holding a box full of tulip bulbs… oh, I meant, 86 acres of derelicts and dirt in Kilbarry, Waterford.
You don’t even know where Kilbarry is, do you? Don’t worry, the bankers who loaned the money probably don’t know either. But if you feel the need to get in on the action, relax, you can still pay twice the per acre price that the Lynch family negotiated — a single acre of Mixed Use & Opportunity Site situated on the Kilbarry Road adjacent to the City Council Landfill is on offer for €600,000! That’s right, ONE acre within smelling distance of the town dump can be got for a mere 600K. Wow. Just when you thought the bubble had pooped.
Political opinion polls are big news here today. For the first time in the history of the state, the majority of those surveyed expressed support for a Labour government led by Eamon Gilmore. The shocking news that our domestic economic woes are the result of bad government, toothless regulators, and greed was front-page banner-headline news yesterday, this of course contradicts the party line espoused by Cowen & Co., which is that we were merely sheep led to slaughter by the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Graphically confronted by the overwhelming evidence of his failures, which were splayed across yesterday’s front pages in a font large enough to be read from across the street, Cowen has finally climbed down far enough to admit that he might have got a few things wrong — just the same, the Taoiseach stubbornly refuses to yield the pitch.
That’s right, we’re going to have to drag him and his cronies out of Leinster House by force, and watch while they dig their fingernails into the wainscoting in the fevered search for purchase. Yes folks, the gloves are now going to come off. If politics is a spectator sport, then now is the time to pull up a chair, pour yourself a beer and get set for a killer title match.
Just because a few long overdue reports on the Irish banking crisis showed our Taoiseach was responsible for “spectacular and catastrophic failures,” well that’s no reason for him to quit — is it?
Maybe we can get 
Tim Roth in to have a look and tell us, what is Brian Cowen lying about now?
Part of what makes Jazz music great is that it grew out of the forced marriage between the circumstances of American slavery, and African traditions such as long-distance communication by talking drums, and the Glede dance that prizes poly-rhythmic percussion and a dancer’s ability to simultaneously hold and express multiple rhythms in different parts of the body.
What makes Irish writers who write in English unique is that fact that they are steeped in a language that was violently sutured across the face of another, earlier, and distinctly different language, Irish. Nowhere else do native English speakers take such fabulously colourful liberties with syntax, grammar, meaning and conjugation. Hiberno-English is absofeckinglutely inventive.
The reason this matters to me today is that I am stuck thinking about the origins of yet another colourful Irish expression, which is to describe someone as having a neck like a jockey’s bollox. I am told this comes from the observation that, as racing saddles lack padding, a jockey’s nethers must develop a steel-like resilience to withstand the tortures of the race. Perhaps this is why so many jockeys ride standing high in their stirrups? I can’t say.
What I can say is that Brian Cowen must have balls of steel, how else could he face the country today and insist that, in light of his over whelming 83% disapproval rating, and despite last night’s call for a lack of confidence vote, he intends to continue running, uh… did he mean ruining?… the country for the remainder of his elected term.
Are their political bonus points awarded for perseverance? At what point does one man’s absolute refusal to bow to consensus become the insane ranting of a megalomanic?
Fraud is the new black.
In the “oh-so-sweetly-recent” Irish past, money was stuff you insulated the dog’s house with. When parking spaces sell for more than most everyone earned last year, inevitably, some bright spark starts to think “Hey I may as well pull a few yo-yo’s out from that pile, which, after-all is JUST SO DAMNED BIG, that nobody will look too closely at where that extra bit of dosh really went.”
In March I learned that the man I thought was my lawyer is neither a lawyer, nor to be trusted. In fact, his former employers now say that he defrauded a sum so large they hesitate to actually specify how much it was that he stole. (Weirdly, instead of leaving the country, this guy has chosen to just keep telling ever-bigger lies, in the time-honoured tradition of all prime-time TV law shows, which clearly state that when you can’t blind them with the glaring truth, the only remaining legally sound course of action is to baffle everyone with as much bullshit as you can fling.)
The whole mess has got me humming the words to a pretty cool Randy Newman song – Big Hat, No Cattle – which, my partner pointed out is rather apropos, given that the crook in question is both a keen Randy Newman fan, and a member of the Irish Cattleman’s Association – or, at least, we think he is – but then, we also thought he was a qualified lawyer, so you might want to double check that… in any case, the song goes something like this:
“An honest man these days is hard to find.
I only know we’re living in an unforgiving land.
And a little lie can buy some real big piece of mind.
Oftimes I wondered what might I have become,
Had I but buckled down and really tried.
But when it came down to the wire
I called my family to my side
Stood up straight, threw my head back and I lied, lied, lied …
Big hat, no cattle
Big shoes, well you know…
Big hat, no cattle
Big head, no brain
Big snake, no rattle …
Big belly, no heart.”
So, me and my tale of woe have been to see no less than six new lawyers, each of whom has been charged with helping to clean up at least one of the many, overlapping, but clearly defined nasty little compartments that this kind gent thoughtfully sorted his fraudulent activities into.
But enough about me and my recurring nightmares – what is far, far, more interesting is the fact that every professional I have spoken to has expressed their profound sympathy – and then sighed, and confessed that mine is not the only such story they have heard of late.
In fact, it appears that in the good times, professional fraud was nearly as common as tooth decay. Is human nature just intrinsically bad – or is this something peculiar to the Irish condition?
Willie O’Dea lost his Ministerial post as a consequence of LIES he swore to in front of a judge – but, hey, I bet he’s still collecting his Ministerial pension!
And therein seems to lie the crux of the matter; we have no real appetite for actually punishing thieves, even when their crimes are so obvious we have to wear sunglasses to avoid being burnt by the glare.
Who’s Been Trashing the Art Motel?
Riding through the Irish midlands last week I was struck by the massive number of what are being called “Ghost Estates.” Half-built housing developments full of new houses in various states of incompletion – assemblages that might contain as many as three, or even four, finished and perhaps even occupied homes, along with a littering of marked out lots, house shaped outlines of block-work without windows, or plumbing, abandoned scaffolding, and a dense, fetid, air of pointless failure.
Current wisdom is that the Irish government intends bulldozing the more than 300,000 empty and unfinished “houses” scattered around the country, however, given the lack of anything that could be called a national economy here, I suspect this bulldozing will not be happening anytime too soon. The fact that some 70,000 poor are waiting on the public housing list is a can of worms we dare not open — because, what would happen to house prices if you paid a cool half million for your semi-detached dream, and the half next door was rented out to an under-educated unemployed family of twelve track-suit wearing Alco-pop chuggers for the grand sum of three euros a week? We shudder at the mere hint of the idea!
All of which reminds me powerfully of a mad and fantastic venture that existed in San Francisco, many, many years ago: The Billboard Café and Art Motel, which was next door to a performance venue called Club Nine. I would like to say I have vivid memories of these establishments, but the truth is that I frequented them while I was in university, and so my recollections are misty with the haze of excess caffeination, lingering teenage hormones, cheap beer, an unbalanced pseudo-vegetarian diet, and chronic sleep deprivation. All three establishments seemed to be attached to one another, a bit like Stickle-Bricks or Lego.
The Billboard Café, served pretty good food, in addition to hosting a massive advertising hording that displayed art from the “MASSIVE ROADSIDE SIGNAGE WITH BIG POLITICAL MESSAGES” school of art. Lyndon LaRouche was a recurring theme, as was his famous assertion that the transmission of AIDS by insect bite was “thoroughly established” (Yes, he really said that. “Strange Twists Mark Prop. 64 Campaign” Kevin Roderick, Los Angeles Times. October 30, 1986:25). The Billboard was big art you could enjoy from inside the bus as you rode by.
Club Nine was equally fantastic. I saw a band called Flesh for Lulu there – their big pop hits were “Baby Hurricane” and “Laundromat Cat.” I saw John Sex there; he was almost as tall as his hair. Club Nine was a wild and amazing venue.
But the best bit was that the whole vibrant pulsing swarm of creativity was further attached to an empty old motel, the rooms of which had been given over to invading hordes of installation artists; I’m not certain, but I suspect that an artist who wanted to show flat pictures inside of neat frames would have been drummed out the place. The Art Motel did art that enveloped you, you had to walk in and let it wrap itself around you. This was stuff you experienced, not something you hung on the wall because it matched the sofa.
I assume the café made money. I know I paid to eat there, and my best guess is that the nightclub did likewise since it was generally jammed full when I was there. I have no idea how the motel sold art – or if indeed it tried to. In fact, I rather suspect it didn’t.
And that is the whole point of this rant. Remembering the Art Motel, and thinking about all our over-priced half-built “homes” has really got me thinking about things like the value of a home, and the value of art. I’m wondering if perhaps we have spent too much time “investing” in things we should have treated with more care, perhaps thought of as having more meaning, and less like an extension of our bank accounts.
Art is supposed to mean something; and your Home is supposed to be where your heart is. Cliché, I know – but clichés become cliché because there’s the seed of truth in them.
We here stopped seeing our homes as homes; an Irish person’s home became that person’s “single largest investment” – and I’m afraid Irish Art has taken a similar hit. God Bless people like Amanda Coogan and Mannix Flynn who don’t make art a buyer can pay for, walk away with, and stick on the wall to watch it increase in value. I am tickled to tears by the fact that Mannix Flynn was elected Councillor for Dublin City last June. Talk about taking performance art to new levels.
I wish someone would find a way to open the Irish Art Motel – here and now: we sure could use a dose of feral creative Art for Art’s own sake!
Living in Eire…
When we bought our house, there was a public road that you could drive on to get to it. It was one lane, and in poor condition, but it existed. Sadly, that road was maintained by our local County Council, who they say they’re so broke, they can’t even send a grumpy old man to dump a bucket of tar and some paving chips into the massive voids we are forced to drive over.
That being said, there are so many massive potholes that nothing short of a week-long round-the-clock, 24/7, bucket-brigade parade of dumpy old men would make the mess passable – and only a complete reconstruction is going to make the disaster safe to drive on. Needless to say, this lack-of-a-road situation is not helping the area’s currently negative equity property values.
In the meantime, the County Council has kindly made us all aware that any individual who personally fills these potholes is personally liable to being sued by drivers who may have accidents on the repaired sections of road. Strangely, if we leave the roads as is and have an accident, the County Council says they are NOT liable for accident damages caused by the state of our supposed “roads”.
This has got me thinking about the many reasons why living in Ireland is different than living in other ostensibly “First World” nations. Aside from the lack of drivable roads, we also have some pretty serious issues with our unstable, overpriced, and inaccessible communications infrastructure.
Where I live (an hour south of Dublin), ordinary landline telephone service sometimes works… and sometimes doesn’t. We cancelled of our landline telephone service last year after waiting a month for our dead line to be repaired. Miraculously, once we’d cancelled it, the line was working again within the week – but predictably dead again by the following week. However, our service providers were so desperate to keep the account that they continued to leave the line operational (off and on) for a further six months until we finally refused to pay for it, and even then, they continued to bill us for a further six months.
Eircom, our mobile telephony provider tells us we have perfect coverage, but everyone who calls us spends half the conversation saying “you’re breaking up… what did you say?” My definition of “perfect coverage” is apparently different from Eircom Mobile’s definition of the phrase.
As for the digital realm, broadband Internet access is not available. Full stop. Vodafone, 3, O2, and Meteor all tried to sell us mobile dongles that got no signal anywhere near our house; Eircom offered to reinstall our landline, with absolutely NO guarantee that it would be able to carry a data signal; and the company we bought our satellite system from went out of business – leaving us with some very expensive and ugly satellite receivers up our roof.
The latest craze has been the National Broadband Scheme, or NBS, a government sponsored program that intends to make Internet access available to thousands of people who live outside of Dublin, Galway & Cork. It sounded good when we bought in. It cost the same as a regular telephony based service (meaning we didn’t have to pay for the satellite dish), and is supposed to allow us to download 10 gigs per month for a regular monthly fee that’s about equal to what we would pay if our phone company had an infrastructure capable of providing digital access. That’s the theory.
In reality, the service is shite. Anytime I allow my computer to download any sort of update, I lose my connection completely. As of today, it’s been dead for a week. The provider says we’ve exceeded our Fair Usage Limit – which is 10 gigs per month, 1.5 gigs per week, 560 Megs per day, 180 Megs per 4-hour period, or 90 Megs per hour. In other words, if I bought an album online I would automatically exceed my usage, which means my service would “slow down” – in other words, be shut off – for at least 24 hours, and possibly longer. The provider, 3, can’t tell us how much longer. This time, it has been a week.
Great fun when one is trying to run a business.
So, here we are…. Living an hour outside the nation’s capital, with no telephone landline, lousy mobile coverage, Internet access that gets shut down if we use it, and frozen roads so dangerous to navigate that we’re afraid to leave the house to buy wood for the fire. This doesn’t feel like life in First World country.
Having been there recently, I can honestly say that rural Mexico – three hours from their capital by plane – has better roads, better phone services, and better Internet access. It wasn’t so long ago that the radio here was telling us our government had multi-million euro budget surpluses. Yet, in less time than it takes to gestate an elephant – we’ve gone from surpluses to the brink of national bankruptcy.
The only question that remains is obvious – where did the Irish economy go?
Vocabulary Expansion
You know you’re in LA for the new year when you hear major ordnance going off within driving distance, or maybe, uh, walking distance? Not that I’m going to go out there to make sure.
A recent and sudden rash of strokes in the family has landed me here for the holidays, where, as my friend Greg puts it, I am engaged in an intense round of compressed care-giving. The good news is no one died. But you’d be amazed how exhausting it can be cleaning out kitchens for the newly-mobility-limited, and visiting nursing homes – especially when the relatives in question are just not interested in residing in said nursing homes, or acknowledging their new lack of mobility….
Do not go gently into that good night!
So, not to over-flog an already dead horse, but, really, you NOT dying from your sudden catastrophic illness shouldn’t be the worse thing that can happen to your family.
I like California. It’s a great place – except for three not small problems – Homelessness, Medical Bankruptcy, and the high high cost of Higher Education.
Realistically, I could probably extend that comment to cover the entire US (except for perhaps Mass., which I’m told has some kind of universal health care & reasonably good schools).
The weather in Ireland makes me sick. Literally. Having left home two weeks ago I am still recovering from my regular annual dose of Damp Irish Winter Lung Rot.
But my heart is sickened at the idea of Medical Bankruptcy – a term I just learned this week.
Apparently, hard working, productive citizens routinely lose their homes, their jobs & and their marriages over something as seemingly innocuous as a nasty mole that requires Chemotherapy.
Your illness needn’t be life-threatening to cost you your whole life – and if you really expected that savings account to pay for your kid’s education, well then, you should have worn a LOT more sun screen, and been born with better genes.
A friend who happens to be a Diagnostic Oncologist in LA tells me Medical Bankruptcy is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. How frightening is that?
Another friend who happens to be a consultant educator for Make Play Learn, as well as a very experienced & brilliant teacher, tells me her health insurance costs FIFTEEN THOUSAND dollars a year. That’s equally scary.
We Irish get all irritable at the notion of paying anything more than one thousand a year for very similar coverage – and hey, the truth is, we don’t even have to buy it, because we have universal health care. The waiting lists tend to be long, but being dying will usually get you bumped to the head of the list, and if you really just can’t wait, well, you do always have the option to just pay to be treated privately. The system is not perfect. Mistakes get made. But it’s a helluva lot more humane than signing over 20-40% of your gross pay on the gamble that you MIGHT get sick.
We Irish get sick and call our General Practitioner, who asks about our pet/kid/spouse/etc., and then charges us 50 euros to look at our tongues & write a prescription. Californians get sick and go to their HMO, where they might (or might not) be seen by a doctor who knows them. They still pay the same 50 bucks, but it’s only a co-payment, and their insurance picks up the extra 500. They get the same 15 minutes of attention, and probably a less effective drug (because the more effective drug is sooo much more expensive that the insurance company just won’t pay for it until the MD proves that the cheaper drug didn’t work).
Americans pay more for drugs than any other nation in the world. In other words, the exact same drug costs more in the US than it does in the UK, Ireland, Australia…. Why? Because health care is a major industry here.
As I understand it, there are two options being considered now. The Lower House wants to institute a plan where government is where the buck stops. In other words, Uncle Sam would cover all citizens who don’t already have health coverage. It’s not Universal Care, but it seems like the next best option.
The Senate seems to prefer a sort of free market approach, where citizens with no insurance must buy it from private insurance companies, but thru some sort of exchange. This of course brings in the ideas of regulation, deregulation, reasonable VS. justifiable costs, profit margins, and many more headaches that will doubtless suffice to ensure that universal healthcare is NOT a real option for Joe Public any time in this lifetime, and the lawyers have enough work to keep them gainfully employed for the rest of the century.
The Irish system isn’t perfect, and there are lots of things I dislike about Ireland – but hey, we don’t set the sick adrift on melting financial ice rafts and shove them off into the homeless abyss.
Universal health care won’t be cheap, but maybe the issue is how do you quantify having (or choosing not to have) a social sense of human decency?
If you could choose to pay an extra 10% in taxes and be reasonably assured that Medical Bankruptcy would mostly cease to exist, would you? Or would you rather keep your disposable income?
Occasionally, when reading discussions on LinkedIn, I’ve been known to remind a few folks in Silicone Valley (who claim to be all that plus a bag of chips), that while yes, we all envy their home-grown business culture, we simultaneously DON’T envy their rampant problem with homelessness. As I’ve said before, I’d actually rather that my taxes subsidise lazy lumps on the dole – so long as I can trust that those same lazy lumps won’t be sleeping in my doorway when I try to go home.
The questions really are that simple. Honestly.
PS: — in case this all sounds a wee bit too judgemental, I’d like to add that on the subject of insurance, it has been revealed publicly that the Irish catholic leadership actually bought insurance to cover themselves in the event that victims of clerical sexual abuse might win law suits against the church &/or it’s various orders.
Can you imagine the depravity of those actuarial tables? And yes, I am involved in taking action against the Irish Gov’t for their negligence & outright refusal to provide universal access to non-catholic schools for parents who are not catholics. Yes, really, some 97% of state-funded Irish schools are catholic; I think that’s unrealistic when (according to the church’s own polls) less than 48% of parents would choose to send their child to a catholic school, if given the choice.
I realise this is completely off the subject, but my New Year’s resolution is to tell more people about this, so if you want to know more, get in touch.
How Do We Grow a Blimp?
Last Tuesday I drove to Dublin at a perfectly unreasonable hour to listen to Micheál Martin say something insightful about Irish entrepreneurship in the European context; alas, poor Micheál must have got all confused, because he ended up delivering the dullest campaign speech in the history of politics.
Amazingly, he spent eight perfectly good lifetimes expounding on the need to vote yes on the Lisbon Treaty, without ever stopping to notice that, being a room full of business owners, we were quiet probably in favour of Lisbon before he’d invited us for coffee, rolls and some pre-work haranguing. The simple fact that he didn’t just ask for a show of hands, say “that’s great” and move on to discuss something of genuine interest, such as, oh, the continuous bank-bailing the government is so actively engaged in – or the recent legislation intended to bail out all those developers who (after driving up property prices with their unchecked speculation on green-field lands) are now stuck with development sites they can’t afford to build on. (Don’t worry, Dears, the government has just extended your planning permission rights for another five years.)
Micheál then managed to sneak away before the questions and answers segment of the event, which really was too bad, because I would have loved to ask him this question:
As three-quarters of Irish people work at small businesses which employ less than ten people, and as Ireland has a distinct absence of home-grown domestic businesses weighing in near or over the billion-euro turnover mark, how do we go about nurturing a few home grown international enterprises?
The best answer to my question came from Michael Shelly of the PM Group, who observed that Irish business owners tend to (as group) hold their babies a bit tight to the chest. Suffocatingly close, in fact.
Family owned businesses are the norm here, and it is not unusual to see a business close when the founder dies. Frighteningly, this is true, and it means we are not building an economy so much as banging out a weekly pay-cheque for ourselves. We are not building value. And much as I would enjoy blaming the government – this one just ain’t their fault.
Business owners need to accept that sustainable businesses need to be transferable, and that — to build a business that will survive our own demise requires input, insight, and drive that comes from outside the privacy of our own skulls. People other than the owner need to feel invested in keeping the company alive – because, if after you’re gone, no one knows how your business operates – it won’t.
Turn black into white
Clerical child abuse is a charged topic here since the Ryan Report was published last week. Most of the official commentary sounds like what it is – flapping attempts by government to sound sympathetic without saying anything that might, in hindsight, be construed as a commitment.
Yet, despite such careful spinning, much of what has been said still raises awkward questions.
Legally speaking, Irish schools are not owned by the Irish State. The question of who owns Irish schools has been a veritable romper-room for legal gymnasts of all stripes. Blink an eye, delete a comma, or shift a tense, translate a verb, and presto, change-o, the Irish state may (or may not!) be legally responsible for what goes on in Irish schools.
Personally, my favourite bit of hyperbolic gibberish was uttered in 2008, by Mr. Justice Hardiman who relied on the vagaries of translation to find that: ‘The distinction between “providing for” and “providing” lies at the heart of the distinction between a largely State funded but entirely clerically administered system of education on the one hand and a State system of education on the one hand.’ In other words, in the original Irish, our constitution can be understood to mean that the state is obliged to provide FOR education to happen, but not necessarily to provide actual schools, per say.
Read too many judgements and it is tempting to forget that some officers of the court live in the real world, which is why Solicitor James MacGuill’s remark that ‘the plaintiffs are accepted all around as being innocent victims of appalling abuse’ is so damned refreshing.
The ownership of Irish schools is a moveable feast; a semantic and rhetorical mine-field; and despite the fact that the government has been repeatedly instructed to clean the mess up by a host of national and international bodies – not the least of these being the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee – nothing’s changing anytime soon.
As it stands now, religious groups apply to be recognised as a school patron, they then provide a parcel of land (usually adjacent to a church, but sometimes donated by the local community), at which point the state pays for a school to be built on that land; the school that is thus built is then deemed to be ‘owned’ by the religious order – and it is vital to understand that this claim of ownership is absolute – while the ongoing maintenance is paid for by the state, which also pays capitation grants for each pupil, plus the salaries of all the school’s staff.
Should the order decide to sell their school and invest the profits in mushroom farms or overseas missions, they can do that. They own it, to do with as they please.
The religious orders have clung to this right of ownership with bull-dog tenacity in every instance – except where it comes to the issue of compensation for the victims of clerical abuse, in which case, 18 religious orders have made it very clear that they will not re-negotiate the indemnity they won from Bertie, an indemnity that leaves them liable for less than 10% (and perhaps less than 5%) of the total amount of compensations that will be paid.
To earn this indemnity, the orders committed to pay 128 Million Euros, or the equivalent in lands, but it is unclear how much has actually been paid. On reading the fine print, it turns out that many of the properties couldn’t be transferred, or sold; trusts owned by the orders cannot be used for compensation as they are legally committed to other uses, and lands are in trust for educational use. In plain English: they’ve left the state to pick up the whole tab.
Shortly put: we pay to build the schools, we pay to run the schools, and we pay to staff the schools, which are owned by religious orders, but when members of those orders commit crimes against students, those orders are not liable for the damage they have helped to perpetrate – and so, we pay that bill, too.
Or as Eibhlin Byrne, Mayor of Dublin and Fianna Fail Candidate for the European Parliament put it: “Ultimately under our constitution it is not religious orders who have responsibility for children outside of home, it is the state.” It seems Eiblin is in agreement with Batt (our current Minister on all things educational) who claims that: “The state was going to compensate these people in any event. There was no compunction on the clergy, the church, to make a compensation payment. Many of these schools were under the state’s jurisdiction, we owed a duty of care as a state to these children, that duty was not exercised in full.” (Batt O’Keeffe, Fianna Fáil TD, and Minister for Education and Science)
But it all goes very pear-shaped when we throw in last December’s Supreme Court decision in the Louise O’Keeffe case. The state has a duty of care, yes, but, somehow, that duty of care did not extend to Louise O’Keeffe – or at least not according to the Supreme Court ruling which found the state was not responsible for the fact that Louise was sexually abused in her local school. The court held that, in Louise’s case, this duty of care did not rest with the state.
Not to put too fine a point on it – but whoever is scripting the talking points for Fianna Fáil had best get their story straight. Somebody owns our schools, and whoever does ought to be held responsible, step up, and foot the bill when things go wrong. If the state owns the schools, then the bill is ours; and if the religious own the schools, then hand them the tab.
There’s much babble a-foot now about the notion of setting up a trust to help the victims of clerical abuse, which sounds all very nice and friendly, but is decidedly round of the mark. Setting up a new quasi-governmental-religious institution is not the answer, and I suspect the victims have had their fill of those sorts of institutions, thank you.
Strangely, no-one is mentioning the most obvious solution; let the religious orders surrender their “ownership” of our schools to the state. This would allow the state to take responsibility for our schools, as it should do – and allow the religious to make a tangible and relatively painless financial contribution to help redress the problems they created.
Without meaning to speak out of turn, I suspect that many, if not most, of the victims of clerical abuse would be to some degree satisfied by the simple fact of knowing that the religious orders that tortured them as children will never again have that kind of authority over children in our schools.
Think about it – if this had happened to you – which would you rather have, 30 or 60 thousand euro? Or the sure knowledge that the organisations that hurt you were now stripped of their authority over children? The money will be gone in a year, or two. But the satisfaction of knowing that the problem has been dealt with at the root – that may just last a good deal longer.
One of the excuses most-often cited is that clerical child abuse is only a segment of the overall volume of child abuse, and while I’m sure that is likely true, it is equally true that the clergy is by thier own mandate, duty-bound to provide refuge and respite from the evils of the world; if there was one group we should have been able to trust with the care of our children, it should have been them. Viewed in this light, the depth of betrayal documented in last week’s report is staggering.
Why the Garden of Ireland isn’t growing Jobs
Besides being “the garden of Ireland” Wicklow County is also a no-go zone for business, a minor point which those of us who live here are rather hoping the next crop of local councillors might find some time to address.
Outside the towns (and sometimes IN the towns) land-line phone service is unreliable, internet access is unavailable &/or over-priced, and mobile phone service is spotty, on top of which, our stylishly privatised national phone company (Eircom) could not care less. They are focused on their bottom line; hence they’ve no interest in providing any service that will not generate substantial revenue for them. Improving rural communications is not a part of their business strategy.
Once you get over the idea that it will occasionally be impossible to actually talk to (or email) anyone you might want to do business with, then all you have left to contend with are the facts that the roads are poor, land is expensive, planning permission is nearly impossible to get, and supports for business are almost non-existent. Finally, just to make the problem of operating a business in Wicklow worse, Enterprise Ireland defines Wicklow as a part of Dublin, for budgeting purposes, which may be fair, but also severely limits what can be supported here.
Meanwhile, just in case you thought you might like to live here and keep your job in town, you should know that Wicklow is not set up to support commuters either.
There is not one good reason why, but we do not operate a proper commuter train service to/from Dublin. There should be at least 4 morning trains from Arklow, and as many in the evening, and there should be tax incentives for people to leave their cars at home and use those trains. Instead, unlike most major modern first-world societies around the globe (wherein commuter trains are the norm) we’ve made trains expensive, unreliable, and inconvenient.
In short, almost any action on the part of Wicklow County Council will constitute improvement in the current circumstances.
But contrary to this logic, County Enterprise Boards across Ireland are in the process of discontinuing their Feasibility Study Grant, which is the only incubator/development stage funding currently available at the county level. The reason they give is that too many feasibility studies have resulted in no new business being established, and so the program should be discontinued. Contrast this to the attitude of the folks behind YCombinator – and then answer this question: how can we expect local businesses to create jobs if we don’t support the creation of local businesses? My view is that if granting a potential business owner 5k in matching funds saves that person from spending 10 to 15k to establish and then fold a non-viable business, then I think the 5k was well-spent.
Being a wee bit on the belligerent side, I started my business in Wicklow anyway, despite all of the above complaints. I made calls while standing under the one tree that offered both mobile phone coverage and a bit of shelter from the rain, and then I got in my car and drove ten miles to use the WiFi in the nearest village, because my landline was not stable enough to carry a conversation, let alone an email. I would not do it again – not for all the tea in China!
Entrepreneurs are risk-takers. Sometimes we win; and sometimes we lose; but if government wants to get involved in supporting job creation, there are only two options – create tax incentives for multi-nationals, and hope they stay put – or else – support entrepreneurs, and do that with the full knowledge that some ventures will succeed and many more will fail.
But again, contrary to accepted logic, Wicklow County Council recently offered commercial plots for sale under terms and conditions so egregious that I actually laughed out loud at the woman who phoned me to ask if I was interested. Have a read and see what you think, bearing in mind that this offer was made around the same time that house prices were falling and unemployment was on the rise:
“Wicklow County Council’s vision for the development of the lands at Rathdrum is the provision of a high quality business and enterprise park with a strong focus on job creation and employment potential. In this regard the Council is currently working with Consultants in the preparation of a design scheme to facilitate the development of infrastructural work to service the lands.
The purchase price of the land will be between €300,000 and €360,000 per acre (depending on where the site is located within the development). It would also be the intention of the Council to dispose of the sites by way of 999 year lease, which is currently being prepared by the Council’s Law Agent, and which you will be furnished with shortly.”
So, if you are absolutely determined to employ the people of Wicklow, our Council will facilitate you by offering to lease you a bit of land without planning permission, and for more than the cost of buying an acre of land with a building already on it, but you can only qualify for the offer if you can prove to the Council that you will create jobs in Wicklow.
Need I say more?
Banking on Fianna Fáil
Have you spoken to a banker lately? Mine recently told me it would take five business days to clear a bank draft.
Now, my understanding is that a bank draft is the issuing bank’s own cheque – and we pay premium fees for a draft because other banks treat a draft as cash – the idea being that while I might write you a rubber cheque, banks do not bounce cheques to other banks. A simple concept, but what do I know?
I asked my banker to please put the reason for the delay in writing, as I intended to take her letter straight to my local parliamentarian – at which point the manager told me that she was not authorised to put her policy in writing – and so an hour later, well after closing time on a Friday evening, she cleared my funds, and I left her office.
A friend of mine happens to be a mortgage broker. Nice man. Cheerful, upbeat, and determined to stay in business, no matter how many times a day the news declares that we’re all dead men walking. Yesterday he told me banks have stopped making decisions, let alone issuing mortgages. He said when he can get a decision, 98% of the time, the answer is ‘no’. His most recent no was got for a client with over 40k in cash savings, who has been regularly paying her interest-only mortgage for several years, and now wants to start making principle payments on her 150k loan. Unfortunately, taking more of her money would require the writing of a new mortgage, and so, the answer was no. The bank suggested she apply again in 6 months.
Another man I know has had his cash accounts frozen by his bank, because, even though he has always paid his mortgages, they’ve decided to hold his cash as a security, just in case he stops making payments on the loans. Apparently their right to foreclose on the mortgaged properties is no longer offering the bank a sufficient sense of security.
Clearly, Institutional Paranoia is spreading a lot faster than swine flu among Irish bankers, bringing a whole new meaning to the term “IP”.
The trouble is, that despite the publication of their outrageous frauds and overall corporate malfeasance, we are still afraid of our bankers – and with good reason. We owe them money, and we’ve entrusted them with our savings; but the real bother is the insane promises they have extracted from us in exchange for their services.
If your business accounts and your personal accounts are with different branches of the same bank, you probably already know that your bankers look at all of your accounts when they talk to you about anything – so, if your business account is looking less than robust, and you go looking for help, you may well find your unrelated personal overdraft slashed as a result.
If you have ever signed a personal guarantee for your business, beware that the paper you signed is transferrable. If, six years later, having sold the first business, you were to look for a loan for your new business, the bank could hold you to the terms of your six-year old guarantee, and if that was signed with a business partner, or if the one looking for a new loan is your disgruntled ex-business partner – well, suffice to say that a guarantee is not something to be left lying around in the bank’s old files. You might forget about it, but your bankers won’t.
Having a mortgage with the same bank where your current, or savings accounts are, is another frightening scenario, should you ever miss a payment on the mortgage, the bank maintains the legal right to promptly grab the money from any (and all) of your other accounts.
Loan terms nearly all contain a clause permitting the bank to demand full payment from you, on very short notice, and with little or no provocation. Try missing a mortgage payment and consider yourself lucky if they don’t revoke your personal overdraft, and then call in your business loans. Miss two payments, and you could quickly find yourself on the receiving end of demands for you to clear the entire balance of all loans you hold with the bank.
Judges recognise the concept of standard business practices; which loosely translated, means that if this is the way most banks do business, then, provided the practice isn’t strictly speaking illegal, a judge will uphold a bank’s right to behave in ways that are similar to the ways that other banks behave. So, if most banks take 5 business days to clear a bank draft, then, all banks can take the same five days to process the same transaction. Right now, the only thing regulating the banks is our willingness – or unwillingness – to accept their terms.
All of this adds up in ways that make it very difficult for anyone in their right mind to lodge a complaint against their bank – how can you complain when complaining runs the risk of prompting the bank to demand you clear all of your debts in ten days?
The trouble is that our culture needs banks. No one saves up for purchases. Imagine how your life would change if common social practice was that one saved up to buy a house? A car? If we saved up for our cars, very few new cars would be sold, and overnight, thousands of auto workers would lose their jobs. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you will very quickly find yourself living in a feudal society. Banks are the basis of our economy.
In the meantime, our fearless leaders, the Brians Cowen and Lenihan, (better known in some circles as Two Brians No Brains) have decided to spend the last few months waffling about in semantics like a couple of spotty 15 year olds who’ve just discovered Proust. Their proposal for the formation of a National Assets Management Agency (NAMA, aka: Never Admit Mistakes Aloud) beggars belief. To begin with, they’ve spent our dosh to buy a rather expensive report from a renowned economist, which no one outside their playgroup has seen, then they chewed up the report, issued their own summary of it, and are now vainly trying to sell us the idea that everything they want to do is supported by this mysterious report that no one has read, except them. Sorry to be blunt, but I simply can’t entrust my child’s future livelihood to Fianna Fáil’s supposedly unfailing mastery of the principles of global and corporate finance.
George Lee was debating this point on the radio a few days ago, and I admit that I’m not 100 % satisfied that it wouldn’t help things to have a few folks like George look at the original report. Alas, the debate was a bit of a shambles. George was arguing national fiscal policy, while fortunate son, Shay Brennan harped on about how well he will look after the concerns of his South Dublin constituents. Shay’s posters remind me of the face one of my nephews used to make when he wanted a favour, and I’m not wild about his platform of garbage reform for South Dublin. Strangely, listening to them made Alex White sound like the sound choice – experienced, articulate, and able for the job.
Feeling very politically motivated, I did a bit of canvassing for Labour’s Ivana Bacik over the weekend. She’s so tirelessly hardworking I feel lazy every time I look at her, plus I’m repulsed by the idea that anyone would vote for Maurice Ahern without knowing if he plans to give back his old-age pension and over-70-medical card, if elected. Knocking on strangers doors was a first for me, and I discovered a timidity I never knew I had. But the most interesting part of the experience was listening to people – all sorts of people – tell me how angry they are with our current Fianna Fáil government.
Garret Fitzgerald has been lobbying for a much-needed reform of our Dáil electoral system, and one of the most frightening of the points he makes is that “during the past half-century two-thirds of defeated Fianna Fáil TDs lost their seats to members of their own party rather than to the Opposition.” I would love to close with a pithy remark, but I’m afraid the best I can do is to ask you to read that last line over again, and really, seriously, consider it when time comes to cast your vote.
Remember that Einstein’s definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
One of the most savage conflicts in modern history, both in terms of the numbers killed and the manner in which they died (mostly from gangrene or sepsis resulting from unsanitary surgeries), the American Civil War was fought while the duly elected President of the southern half of the country wrote, re-wrote and endlessly debated the implications of various finer points of law under the recently devised confederate constitution.
Davis failed to complete his six-year term only because Lincoln’s armies succeeded in looting and burning every southern city, town, village, farm, and tool shed before Davis could get his priorities right.
Despite failing to finish a single term of office, Davis’ dedication to his task was mind-boggling; it takes a certain kind of man to plough on with debates about to be rendered unequivocally moot by the burning roof physically crashing down on his head as he runs for his life; current evidence clearly indicates that, Dermot Ahern is precisely that kind of man.
Never mind our economic problems, and don’t be bothering Dermot about the impossibly over-inflated Irish property bubble; Dermot sees no urgent need to work on reforming the laws that allowed property developers to go bust, create new companies and buy their own assets from themselves for a peppercorn; Dermot feels no burning desire to get stuck into the job of regulating our cowboy bankers. No, no, what’s most vital right now is to make damned sure blasphemy is outlawed.
Historians say Nero didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burned, but the analogy is so painfully apt I may go apoplectic if I don’t mention it.
Cultural Anthropologists assert that societies evolve in predictable patterns. We hunt and gather, then we settle and farm, and when we’ve got enough food and shelter, we begin to trade. This is when we start on the fun stuff: art, culture, government, ethics, and philosophy – all these things exist only in societies with a surplus. Seeing as we just lost our surplus – in fact, we’re on the brink of needing a dig out from the Chinese or the world bank, or the nearest set of deep pockets – I’m not sure our elected leaders should be quite so focused on blasphemy, unless of course Dermot sees this as a way to raise revenue. Maybe the next time ITV airs Life of Brian, or Father Ted, Dermot will have them (and the programmers from Sky) strung up in shackles, I mean court.
Why not? Let’s bar the broadcasters who won’t respect our piety. While we’re at it, lets shut down the ports as well, no sense letting them heathens in at all. Who needs foreigners, with their foreign ideas? Okay, maybe we will have to let in the foreign bankers we need to borrow from, but that’s it.
Does the phrase ‘unclear on the concept’ come to mind yet?
What are we at here?
I am stunned by Mr Cowen’s recent assertion that he has a mandate to rule, I mean govern, for three more years – and therefore he will not call for a full election this year. As I recall, Bertie was the man in charge of Fianna Fáil during the last election, Bertie was the one on who’s coat tails that party partied merrily into government, and if any man could rightfully claim a mandate, then that man must be Bartholomew.
We expected Bertie. Brian was foisted on us, after the fact. You can bang on all you like about parliamentary models and coalition government, but be honest in the privacy of your own skull – if you had known the leadership was being contested between Brian Cowen, Pat Rabbitte and Enda Kenny, how would that have changed your vote?
I want to roll on the floor laughing when I see Cowen struggling to prevent the voters of Dublin South and Central from being permitted to replace their deceased TDs this June. Had Bart Simpson ever invented smell-o-vision I do believe we could all smell the hot waves of sweaty fear oozing off of Brian Cowen. You know things are looking bleak when preventing people from voting looks like your best shot at staying in office.
Praise be to George Lee for having the sagacity to stick his neck into the fray at this late stage. And the same goes for Ivana Bacik. Both George and Ivana are insightful, engaged, and astute human beings who will, in the words of Senator Norris: “strengthen the gene pool in the other house, which seems to be made up principally of widows, orphans, elder sons, and local sporting heroes”.
And in case you thought Norris was being cruel, just bear in mind that in Dublin South, the Fianna Fáil nomination was contested by the son of the recently deceased Deputy, and another party member who felt her time was due. Both of these individuals appear to be laughably, insanely, unclear on the concept of democracy.
For the record, Fianna Fáil is actually offering us Shay Brennan (son of late Cabinet minister Seamus Brennan) in Dublin South, and Maurice Ahern (Bertie and Noel’s older, septuagenarian, brother) in Dublin Central.
I realise that Fianna Fáil has long clung to its self-appointed entitlement to power, but really, has it occurred to anyone that in the current economic climate, and given Lee’s substantial economic credentials, and Bacik’s experience as both a Senator and Reid Professor of Law – Lee and Bacik are actually better qualified – and perhaps National interests should supersede feelings of entitlement?
Let it go, we know your father promised to leave you his seat, but we’d respect you more if you just admitted when you’re outclassed.
Jimmy O’Dea for Taoiseach?
Enda Kenny reminds me of my sixth grade science teacher – a tall thin man with a peculiar air about him, Mr Kestler had that certain X-Factor. I don’t know what it was, but something about the man brought out insubordination in his students as surely as bleach draws out stains. Maybe it was the fact that he carried a small box filled with 3”x5” index cards detailing our every misdemeanour in his briefcase, or maybe, thirty years later I’m just trying to excuse the fact that we tortured the poor man.
When we found out where he lived, sending deliveries to his home became a school-wide obsession. Pizzas, newspapers, magazines, and mountains of cloth diapers from the Tidy-Diaper Delivery Service, turned up on his doorstep at all hours. Had he ever made the connection, I expect he would have exploded in a furious rage of index card shuffling, with black marks for all of us.
Being an adult, I know now that what we did was wrong. He was just a geeky fella, in over his head and stuck with a job he was clearly not able for. Why Enda Kenny reminds me so powerfully of the man is difficult to put my finger on exactly – my best guess is it has something to do with the finger waggling.
Didn’t Enda’s mother ever tell him it is rude to point? Granted, all the talking heads have their own quirks. Lip-licking. Shoe-banging. But the finger waggling is just plain hard to take. It puts me in the mind of the skinny kid who is about to go tell your mother on you for something petty that your mother will have to pretend to be bothered over.
Despite the degree to which the waggling disturbs me, I make it a point to watch Enda, because he is the current leader of our second largest party, and seeing as the big dogs have made a dog’s dinner of our national government, it stands to reason that party number two could soon end up leading our next government, so I try to watch Enda. But then eighty seconds into his speech, he gets going with the finger waggling, which is likely to give me a migraine, and I’m a 12 year old, dying to send him eight plumbers and a dozen pizzas.
No one runs for national office in a parliamentary system. Instead, we draw a few lines on some maps, tell the people within each set of boundaries that they have shared (if not identical) interests, and ask them to elect someone to represent those interests. Strictly speaking, what we elect is a government for our nation, but not a national government. It’s like the difference between an intranet and the internet. The first is what we set up to communicate amongst ourselves – and the second is what we present to the world at large.
Like electoral colleges and kings and queens, this is a political idiosyncrasy, invented in eras very different to the times we live in now. When kings ruled nations with autocratic responsibility for foreign affairs, it made sense that people would elect parliamentarians to argue for their regional concerns. They had no say in the international stuff anyway.
Nowadays, our focus has changed. Farmers in Louth or North Carolina have more in common with one another than they do with their urbanite neighbours in Dublin and Charlotte. And nations are far more engaged in international policy crafting than they were in the pre-industrial age.
We as individuals are now more likely to care more about the country’s credit rating, and how it may affect our national budget, than whether or not Ballygobackwards gets an airport, or a tax allowance, or a LUAS stop, or is simply sawed off and shoved out to drift in the Irish Sea.
We need national government to represent us, as a nation; but we elect regional government to represent Dingle, and Kerry, and Dublin South and Ballygobackwards; then, once that regional government is elected, we leave them locked in a room (albeit, a very nice room) and tell them to not come out until they’ve formed us a good, sound, National Government.
Until a few years ago, the French were forever banging on about the virtues of their electoral system, wherein anyone could come from behind to challenge the incumbent. Then they met La Pen, and overnight, they stopped bragging. No political system is perfect. The Romans used to physically round up their voters, and keep them in pens until they voted their way out, not exactly ideal either.
I’m sure the folks in Mayo have a high opinion of Enda, and that the kids he taught there have nothing but fond memories of him – but honestly, is he the man we want to send to DC, to sit across from Obama, mano-a-mano? How about Germany? How would Enda do standing up to Angela Merkel?
It’s a question I’ve not stopped thinking about since the last Fine Gael party conference. I couldn’t help but notice that a week before, at the Labour conference, Labour’s supporters had gathered at the feet of their leader chanting “Gilmore for Taoiseach” – but when Enda’s time came, the Fine Gael supporters issued public calls for Enda to stand down as their party leader.
Public opinion is now so set against our incumbents in government, that it is fair to wonder why anyone in their right mind would stand as a Fianna Fáil candidate. The news cites rumours of Fianna Fáil candidates being physically chased out of housing estates when they turn up to campaign for re-election. So what are our options?
On 14 June 2007, Enda Kenny was nominated for Taoiseach by Fine Gael deputy-leader Richard Bruton and then-Labour leader Pat Rabbitte. Everyone admires Richard Bruton’s keen mind; and I personally like Pat Rabitte, who has the rare ability to make his points simultaneously intelligible to a wide range of listeners, a skill I admire in the very best playwrights and orators. Doubtless Richard and Pat counted their numbers before making the nomination, so one can only surmise that the reason Bertie ended up in charge, yet again, was that the Independents in Dáil Éireann took a long look at Enda, and decided they’d rather stick with Bartholomew. Picture them thinking: okay he’s got some dodgy banking to answer for, but Bertie’s not going to embarrass us on the international stage. In other words: thanks Enda, but no, thanks.
Eamon Gilmore has thrown his hat in the ring, a bold move, given Labour’s third place position in terms of party size. And if the next election is decided in terms of who will best represent the interests of Ballygobackwards, Gilmore hasn’t a hope. But maybe, just maybe, the time is ripe for the people of Ballygobackwards to start thinking about electing a national government, and not a room full of regional representatives. It’s a thought.
Aside from the rain, Ireland is basically a nice place to live. We complain bitterly about our broken public health care system, and we all agree it could be improved – or at least it shouldn’t employ one administrator for every other nurse/doctor – and yet our crippled system still turns Americans green with envy.
When a well-known Irish-American comedian was recently diagnosed with cancer, his family in the US reacted to the news by re-mortgaging their house, because that’s what Americans do when they fall ill. Quickly, you flog your house, and anything else of value and if you haven’t got anything worth flogging, you die, because not dying is genuinely the less attractive option. US hospitals routinely transfer patients who can’t pay for treatment, which means you have to be actively dying before they’ll treat you without sneaking a peak at your balance sheet. The punch line here is that the final bill for our cancer survivor was all of €65. Beating cancer for under a hundred euro is not bad in the greater scheme of things.
Granted Americans don’t set the sick adrift on ice flows, but losing your home, your job, and your credit rating, before, eventually, dying because the potentially life saving treatment was deemed experimental, and therefore, not approved by your insurance company, is all pretty routine.
The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical bills, and insurance premiums for a healthy 30 year old cost around 300 a month. In short: the average American would kill to join a four month waiting list for free medical treatment.
Governmental attitudes to housing are another thing that distinguishes us. Ask for help to pay for your prescriptions and the HSE will pay for everything your household needs once the cost exceeds €90 a month, in contrast, social services across the pond will tell you to sell your home, and anything else you own; if you come back after you’ve spent all the proceeds, they may consider helping you. If you’ve ever wondered why America has so many homeless people, all you need to know is that they treat a house as an asset, and not a basic human need.
Ireland is the more enlightened society in many ways, and yet, here we are in May 2009 and Dermot Ahearn, our current Minister for Justice Equality and Law Reform, has just proposed to outlaw blasphemy. Seriously, insulting someone’s ideas about religion will soon be punishable by a fine up to €100,000. How can we not see this as a bit of comic relief?
Mr Ahern claims it is his legal duty to enact this laugh so as to give teeth to a particular constitutional point that many people feel ought to be removed altogether. He makes the point that just because previous Ministers for Justice Equality and Law Reform have ignored their duty to enact blasphemy laws – that is no justification for him to do the same. In other words – the fact that his forerunners shirked this duty does not excuse him from failing to act to protect this allegedly vital constitutional issue.
In the first instance I find it hard to believe that anyone would imply former Minister Michael McDowell was soft on legal issues, constitutional or otherwise. When McDowell was Minister for Justice Equality and Law Reform, whispered opinion was that he stood slightly to the right of Attila the Hun on questions of law enforcement. In a country where exceptions have long been granted on the basis of who you know, McDowell inspired terror. You didn’t dare ask him to resolve your little problem for fear he’d go out of his way to make sure you were prosecuted as fully as possible. Simply put, leniency was not a word in the man’s vocabulary. I for one was shocked to learn that while extending jail terms and narrowing the definitions of Irish citizenship, Michael was simultaneously shirking his duty to protect laws and rights enshrined in our constitution. We might also wonder about the political implications of including Brian Lenihan in the list of those who failed to uphold and protect this vital bit of law, granted Brian only held the post for a year, but surely that was long enough for him to have corrected such an important omission in our laws?
In his recent article published in The Irish Times, Mr Ahern writes: “Those who argue that where the Constitution has ordained an offence, that a minister should simply ignore it to suit his ideological positions, seem to me to be arguing for a clear constitutional provision to be wilfully ignored. This would be to undermine the Constitution and its protection”. Ahearn’s impetus for the new legislation lies in the 1999 Corway vs. Independent Newspapers case, which found it impossible to define the offence of blasphemy. To get at the root of the issue here, it is important to understand that the Corway case dealt with a carpenter from Harolds Cross who sued the Sunday Indo over a political cartoon, claiming: “I have suffered offence and outrage by reason of the insult, ridicule and contempt shown towards the sacrament of the Eucharist as a result of the publication of the matter complained of…”. The cartoon depicted three politicians turning away from a priest with the caption, “Hello progress – bye bye Father” followed by a question mark.
Three years before he published Paradise Lost, John Milton gave us Areopagitica, his vintage 1644 polemic on the evils of censorship. If censorship was wrong for the 15th century religionist, what makes it right for us in modern times? Perhaps Ahern feels Milton’s Protestant views hold no sway in our Catholic state – except, wait, Ireland is not a Catholic state – or is it? Technically, no – it’s just that it can be hard to remember Ireland purports to support freedom of religion when we look at the judicial activism of our courts in recent times.
With so many judges motivated to protect the rights of the religious, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to not award costs against Louise O’Keeffe after she lost her case to hold the state liable for the molestation she suffered at the hand of a state-employed school principal, comes as a welcome surprise. It galls that the state was able to evade responsibility in the first place, but at least Louise O’Keeffe won’t be held liable for the state’s legal bills. Hers is a very minor victory for common sense. The judges referred to O’Keeffe’s matter as “a substantive test case” which is another way of saying they are not giving the green light for others to sue the state on similar grounds. The remaining 200-odd litigants who have been awaiting this outcome with baited breath may now proceed, albeit at their own peril, for while Louise was not held liable, whoever dares next may well be.
In the aftermath of this decision, the organisation One in Four, called on Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe to assume legal responsibility for the conduct of teachers in our schools, but Batt’s office remains mysteriously silent on the matter. Perhaps we should call on Mr Ahern to give Batt a nice talking to about the nature of ministerial responsibility?
