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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
6 Nov/Dec 2016
News Miscellany
Villager
NEWS
Meaningful surnames
Villager’s ongoing quest to show that Darwin-
ism leads to surnames reflecting something
about their holders alights this month on the US
Presidential election.
The CEO of the salacious National Enquirer is
David J Pecker who has been friends, whatever
that means, with President-elect Trump for
many years. The tabloid endorsed Trump, pub-
lished columns by him, and ran many reports
attacking his rivals. The Trump campaign was
the source for the Ben Carson cover story in the
Enquirer: “Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left
Sponge in Patient’s Brain!”. The tabloid
reported that candidate Ted Cruz may have had
several affairs, and that his father was involved
in the JFK assassination. The only time it has
been right about anything was about former
Democrat Presidential candidate, the unctuous
John Edwards’s affair, conducted while his
delightful wife battled cancer. Anyway, the rag
paid a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal
$150,000 for the rights to the story of her affair
with Donald Trump a decade ago, when he was
married to Melania. We only learnt of this
alleged affair three days before the election
because unknown to the model, the naughty
National Enquirer wasn’t paying to run the
story, it was paying to kill it.
Elsewhere, Trump’s National Field Director
Stuart Jolly resigned his position on April 18,
2016, after the campaign hired the presumably
sharper Dick Wiley to be the national political
director. Hope Hicks was the Donald’s
Communications director and the sinister-
sounding Justin McConney, Director of media.
Tom Plank is the former Chair of Republicans
Abroad Ireland – no-one else in Ireland likes
Republicans.
On the other side, Marion Marshall was
Director of State Campaigns and Political
Engagement for Hillary and LaDavia Drane
served as Congressional Liaison. Anthony
Wiener nearly brought down Clinton's cam
-
paign because of his widely-sprayed penile
emails.
Dirtier Air and a planet
wrecked for humans
Trump has selected one of the best-known cli-
mate sceptics to lead his Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) transition team. Myron
Ebell, the Director of Global Warming and Inter
-
national Environmental Policy at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and chairman of the Cooler
Heads Coalition, is spearheading Trump’s tran
-
sition plans for the EPA. Of course in February
the Supreme Court surprised everyone by voting
5-4 to issue a stay and postpone implementation
of Obama's Clean Power Plan — which mandated
the EPA to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from
the electricity sector. The Court hasn't yet
decided on the rule's legality, but the stay sug-
gested that the five conservative justices
— Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy —
were inclined to strike it down. Analysts fretted
that doing so could, in turn, cause the interna
-
tional climate deal forged at Paris to unravel.
Everything changed with right-wing ideo-
logue Scalia's death earlier this year and the
Supreme Court split 4-4 between conservatives
and liberals. But Trump will appoint an EPA-
restrictive justice, and the major US
climate-change initiative will fall. In 100 years
it’s all they’ll remember about Trump.
Naïve
The New York Times editorialised the week
before the election that the US has seen worse
than Trump. But it’s never had a fascist in the
Oval Office.
Is paranoia sexist?
The difference between Trump and Clinton is
that we don’t know which of the characters
Trump has created he will bring to the Oval
Office. The trouble with Hillary Clinton was that
we did know: nobody gets less paranoid in the
White House.
Noraid connection?
Has Gerry Adams ever criticised Donald Trump?
Corporationalisation
One of Donald Trump’s top advisers has warned
a “flood of companies” will leave Ireland under
the president-elect’s new tax regime. Stephen
Moore, senior economic advisor to Trump, said
the “centerpiece” plan of the new administra
-
tion was wooing back multinationals with
radical business tax cuts. “We’re going to cut
our business tax rate from roughly 35 per cent
down to roughly 15 to 20 per cent - if you do that
you are going to see a flood of companies leav-
ing Ireland and Canada and Germany and
France and they are going to come back to the
United States,” he told a British radio
programme.
Peckers
Drane
Nov/Dec 2016 7
Tin ears
The Irish rugby team stayed in the Trump Hotel
and Tower in Chicago. Presumably too busy
being great at rugby to think about fascism.
Heritage shaffted
Talking of Trump-style walls, fresh from their
massive report on Dun Laoghaire’s Carlisle
Pier which failed properly to recognise the sig-
nificance of the Railway Station on the site,
proposed for demolition, Shaffrey and Associ-
ates, conservation architects, have produced
another doorstopper. This mega-tome impli
-
cates them in the Broadstone Station
retaining-wall foul-up which is destroying views
of the great former station from Constitution Hill
and the King’s Inns. Gráinne Shaffrey has essen-
tially endorsed the retaining wall and fussy
landscaping works. The wall rises above the
window sill level of the building, destroying a
sense of its elegance and proportions. A petition
is circulating (look it up!): “We, the undersigned,
call upon the Luas Cross City (LCC) project
to reduce in height, and finish in a style appro-
priate to the surroundings, the sheer and brutal
solid concrete wall that has been erected in front
of Broadstone Station, cutting off the lower part
of the facade of a building of architectural and
heritage significance.
The reasons cited by LCC for its excessive
height - the protection of a small number of park-
ing spaces for Bus Éireann staff - are wholly
unacceptable to our community. This site has
historically fallen foul of poor planning deci
-
sions, and it is intolerable to us to see this trend
perpetuated”.
The wall and landscaping are entirely inappro-
priate for the formal context of this symmetrical
Graeco-Egptian building, described by historian
Maurice Craig as “the last building in Dublin to
partake of the sublime”.
Toblerohno
Sometimes BBC viewers are quite as low-brow
as even Irish Times’ ones.
Pioneer
The countercultural polemicist and essayist Des-
mond Fennell has just dispatched his
autobiography to the publisher. The format is a
colourful memoir, some of which is a travelogue,
interspersed with philosophical ruminations. He
reckons he was one of the first Irish Catholics to
get a bug for travel. He travelled overland to the
Far East in 1957, while the others were at mass.
No ex-planation
The head of planning in Dublin City Council, Jim
Keoghan, is retiring. If you like the way Dublin
City is planned you’ll like Jim Keoghan.
ReLyon someone better
Professor Ronan Lyons told RTÉ’s 'News at One'
on 8 November that claims construction costs
are 40-45% higher in Ireland than in comparable
countries, but then admitted that there has
never been an independent or government audit
of the costs, and that he is relying on figures
from a developer. In fact though introduced,
uncorrected, as “Professor” that is in fact the
ambitious academic’s next step up. In general,
Villager doesn’t like Professors though everyone
else around here tends to servility for anything
over an M. Phil.
Ed’s cred
Dr Ed Walsh, steely former University of Limerick
President, drivelled on in the Sindo recently, with
persuasive but unscientific and inaccurate cli-
mate scepticisms: “Meeting the requirements of
the Paris Agreement could cost the country tens
of billions of euro” etc. Not one to promote any
-
thing too progressive, he is now a consultant in
energy projects and it would be interesting to
hear if he has any vested interests that might be
served by such columns.
Only askngi
The National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) has imposed
a new restriction on the provision of copies
of export licences on paintings to journalists,
citing “confidentiality”. This is disconcerting as
it used to release all the details, concerning such
licences until last year. The provision of export
licences is a Statutory function exercised by the
NGI under the 1997 Cultural Institutions Act, and
should be an open and transparent process. It
would be interesting to know if any of this has
anything to do with Tony O Reilly’s art collec-
tion, once housed in Castlemartin, County
Kildare. It included a Monet once worth €20m
and major Jack Yeats’ works. There was a some-
what ignominious auction of the contents of
Castlemartin last month, in a pub, and some art
was sold in England last year, but all the signifi
-
cant paintings have mysteriously disappeared.
The paintings were probably registered in the
name of a company and their whereabouts is a
concern for Ireland’s beleaguered art lovers.
Councillor in a coma
Bundoran Councillor Seán McEniff, chairman 26
times and a Fianna Fáil member of the Council for
over half a century, once said he thought Travel-
lers should be housed “in isolation” from wider
society. More recently he has been forced to
deny malicious comments that he used poitical
influence to prevent gardaí investigating the dis-
appearance of six-year-old Mary Boyle from her
grandparents’home in Ballyshannon, 39 years
ago. The McEniff family’s tacky Amusement
Arcades are what makes Bundoran so special
and was famously granted retention permission
no less than eight times for developments at
their Holyrood Hotel in the town. Now, sadly,
Seán is in trouble and the family is appealing to
people to stop contacting the clinic where the
unfortunate councillor remains in an induced
coma.
Ballyshannon District Court was recently
informed of McEniff’s condition because he had
been called to give evidence as a witness. Solici-
tor John Murray told the court that Councillor
McEniff was in an induced coma in a Spanish
hospital following an accident. The solicitor
handed in correspondence from the hospital
confirming this situation.
Trump's guests
Broadstone Station
BBC website
McEniff's Amusements,Bundoran
8 Nov/Dec 2016
NEWS
However, conflicting reports were already cir-
culating at that stage, including one in a national
newspaper which said the councillor had been
released from hospital.
The family released a statement to
clarify the councillor’s condition
and to ask public and press to
stop phoning the hospital.
The statement reads: “There
are a number of different sto-
ries circulating about the
health of Sean McEniff ranging
from him being perfectly healthy
and flying home to give testimony
in a court case to being at death's
door. His family would like to briefly clar-
ify that he is in an induced coma and in intensive
care in Clinica Roca in San Agustin, where he has
been, almost continuously, since his admission
on October 27th”. It proceeded:
“The priorities of the staff at the hospital is on
ensuring that Sean, and indeed all their patients,
get the best of medical care. Calls take up the
valuable time of hospital staff and translators.
In one instance, the VHI could not get the infor
-
mation they needed and had to rely on family
members to access doctors on their behalf".
The statement goes on to outline the circum
-
stances of the accident.
“Sean was having an afternoon walk in the
water at the beach in the resort of Puerto Rico.
He collapsed and lost consciousness, taking in
a lot of salt water and was close to drowning but
thanks to the alertness of other tourists he was
rescued and taken to the nearest hospital”.
Councillor McEniff suffered a collapsed lung,
pneumonia and fractured ribs.
According to the statement: “He is currently in
a stable condition and the family is hopeful that
his condition will slowly improve”.
The family said they were gratified by the con-
cern for Councillor McEniff and by the many kind
words, messages of support and prayers.
Railing on
While rail-obsessive Villager is on about it: there
is no longer any need to have tram wires in his-
toric city centres such as those being installed
along Dublin’s College Green and O’Connell
Street. Years ago Bordeaux first engineered for
trams to be boosted at stops in areas where
wires were to be avoided for civic-design rea
-
sons. Seville and others quickly followed suit.
Bitter and second-rate
National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI) wrapped
up a year or two back and reinvented itself as the
more spiffy NewsBrands Ireland which pro-
moted the recent Journalism Awards 2016.
Villager noted bitterly that the awards are in fact
not for journalists but for newspaper journalists,
and that NewsBrands Ireland does not represent
news brands but in fact only print-newspaper
news brands – not online journals or, say, maga-
zines. He’s checking the misnomers out
with the Advertising Standards
Authority and the Companies
Office.
The closest
Villager gets to a
Pulitzer
Village has now got into spon-
sorship, apparently. It is
co-sponsoring a conference on
“Investigative Journalism on the Digital Fron-
tier”, the weekend of 10 November in Dublin. The
conference will be addressed by Pulitzer Prize
winner Carol Leonnig who was part of a team of
national security reporters that revealed
the NSA's expanded spying on
Americans. Not that anyone in
the USA can legitimately care
about that sort of thing now.
DUPs and DOWNs
The DUP have declined to
comment on former leader
Peter Robinson's new role as a
consultant for a property devel-
oper who was one of Nama's biggest
debtors.
The sale of NAMA's northern portfolio to
American company Cerberus is still under inves-
tigation by the National Crime Agency as well as
the subject of separate investigations by the
Stormont finance committee and the Public
Accounts Committee in the south.
MRobinson has always denied allegations of
financial wrongdoing in relation to the property
sale. Robinson is now working as a consultant
for property developer Paddy Kearney's com-
pany Kilmona Properties.
Neil Adair, a former member of Kilmona's
board of directors, was one of the people recom-
mended by the DUP to sit on a NAMA advisory
panel.
Adair, who is a former Anglo Irish Bank offi-
cial, told the Irish News in June of this year that
he was "completely unaware" that the DUP had
nominated him to a committee advising NAMA.
He said he was only informed by the Depart
-
ment of Finance in December last year that his
name had been put forward in a November 2009
letter as a nominee of then minister Sammy
Wilson.
Adair, who resigned from Kilmona in 2013,
was not appointed to the advisory board, instead
Frank Cushnahan, who was also recommended
by the DUP, took the post.
Cushnahan is now subject to a police
investigation after allegations he was taking
money from a property developer who was in
debt to NAMA.
While there is no suggestion that there is any-
thing improper about the arrangement between
Mr Robinson and Kilmona, his appearance at a
recent planning meeting this to discuss a multi-
million pound development close to
Carrickfergus raised eyebrows so soon after his
retirement from politics and while the NAMA
sale is still under investigation.
Mr Kearney was one of NAMA'S biggest North-
ern Ireland debtors and later purchased his
loans back from Cerberus at a reduced rate.
Great
Actavo, a Denis O’Brien Company, has won the
contract to supply smart meters in Scotland.
This is a good thing for the environment and for
Denis O’Brien. So everybody wins.
Law society
Linda Kirwan Head of Com-
plaints and Client Relations
at the solicitors representa-
tive and regulatory body, the
Law Society, has reported to
the Bridewell Garda Station
with her Solicitor to make a
statement in relation to allega
-
tions of fraud by her and other Law
Society personnel. The claim by Kirwan that
solicitor Colm Murphy had breached an under
-
taking he had supposedly given to the President
of the High Court was instrumental in his strike
off as a solicitor. In an affidavit seen by Village,
Kirwan insisted that she had been in the High
Court on the day the undertaking was suppos-
edly given. It was only after Murphy was struck
off that she admitted, on affidavit and in a letter
to Murphy in 2010, that she was not in fact in the
court when the supposed undertaking was
made. No such undertaking is recorded in the
order from the court issued on the day in ques-
tion. And now all this.
Greater of two evils
Congratulations to Declan Kelly, Alpha-triple
brother of former Labour Party environment min-
ister, Alpha-double, Alan. His NY-based strategic
consultancy business is said to be eyeing a stock
market IPO, valued at up to $1bn. On one occa-
sion Declan Kelly, who is assertive, kept
Presidents Clinton and Bush waiting while he
delivered an oration to Teneo to consternation.
On another, Clinton exploded in anger after Kelly
suggested to the Global Irish Economic Forum in
Dublin that Teneo had brought the former Presi-
dent there. Of course that pleasure had been
Denis O’Brien’s.
Carol Leonnig
Peter Robinson
Nov/Dec 2016 9
Investigative Journalism
on the Digital Frontier
New sources, new tools,
new technologies, new audiences
16
th
CLERAUN MEDIA CONFERENCE
Friday 11
th
, Saturday 12
th
, Sunday 13
th
November 2016
Chartered Accountants House, 47-49 Pearse Street, Dublin 2
• Masterclass with 2015 Pulitzer Prize
Winner Carol Leonnig on investigative
journalism
• Masterclass with George Carey on
producing an investigative documentary
Full details at www.cleraunmedia.com
Follow at @Cleraunmedia
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