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April/May VILLAGE
Grumpy old men. And Frank Connolly.
Villager went to the launch of ‘Tom Gilmartin’,
by Frank Connolly, not to ‘A Life Worth Living’
by Michael Smurfit the same night, partly
because – unlike Michael Lowry – he wasn’t
invited. Though Smurfit unusually actually
gave his paean-to-self away to invitees it was
not much value as it had been covered jack-
et-crease to jacket-crease by the newspapers
already from a position just north of the paper
man’s duodenum. Meanwhile across the city,
Thomas Gilmartin – Luton-reared son of Tom,
the set-upon developer who gave evidence at the
Mahon Tribunal that he gave Pee Flynn a cheque
for £, for Fianna Fáil but which the party
never received – was revealing the trauma that
giving evidence had visited on the family, and
overall regretted his advice to his father to settle
the record. Surprisingly few mainstream media
worthies pitched up, but Eamon Dunphy, Tim
Pat Coogan, Vincent Browne and Damien Kiberd
gave compensatory ballast, in a manly, been-
around sort of way. Connolly revealed that his
feisty octogenarian mother Madeleine had that
week, after years of pointed wondering, stopped
asking him when his book was out.
Incompetent law reporting
Village had a satisfactory outing in the Circuit
Court, settling its action with Green Party
Councillor Mark Dearey without conceding that
the false statement – that Dearey had voted for a
particular zoning – was defamatory, or paying
any of the Councillor’s legal costs. Ray Managh
again misreported the matter for the Examiner
and Irish Times, failing to note that the only
controversy in the action was whether the state-
ment was defamatory.
Managh’s report on the matter in October
contained seven errors, including implying that
the statement was defamatory. The latest report
implied Village was apologising for defamation.
The Irish Times has corrected three of the first
report’s errors, but it is all the object of a Press
Ombudsman complaint. As, apparently, will be
Managh’s latest round of weird ineptitude.
The Councillor and Village’s editor vouched
for each other’s good faith in court, shook hands
and went home for a quiet cry.
She really Kers
Village was ‘in receipt of legal correspondence’
from PAC-bound Rehab resignee, Angela Kerins,
some years ago over an article about her igno-
minious role, as chairman, in accepting cutbacks
at the Equality Authority. The editor claims he
met her later at a do and she said “ooh, you’re
a lot younger than I expected”. After that they
too seemed to have settled their differences, on
an agreed ticket of vanity. Meanwhile the Mail
reports Kerins and unctuous Frank Flannery
enjoyed a “decade-long spree of five-star busi-
ness trips including to Japan, New Zealand, the
USA, Norway, Greece, Taiwan and Finland, with
champagne social events, private boat tours
and golf”. The intrepid tabloid includes pho-
tos of the pair “clutching flutes of champagne
as they survey a buffet of smoked salmon and
caviar canapés”. They don’t look happy, though.
Talking of PAC, is Rhona Mahoney ever going to
tell us whether she got ‘top-up’ payments to her
salary as master of Holles St maternity hospi-
tal, beyond what she earned from her private
practice?
Artistic fact
Journalist Pat Leahy’s less-critical-than-it-is-
polite-to-remember biography of Fianna Fail,
‘Showtime’, has benefited from tax exemption
intended to benefit artists and writers, after
he appealed a Revenue Commissioners’ ruling.
He complained it was inconsistent that Bertie
Ahern’s autobiography obtained the benefit.
And we had all presumed it was because Bertie’s
was fiction.
You’ve gone too far this time, provost
TCD pro-chancellor Prof John Scattergood wins
this edition’s prize for appositeness of name.
Villager
Rare Christy Moore endorsement: launching Frank
Connolly’s biography of Tom Gilmartin
Danny
FF are back
VILLAGEApril/May
VILLAGER
Dispelling all the beneficence that that ancient
smug institution brought to changing the closed
bible in its ancient shield to an open book, he
told TCD provost Patrick Prendergast he had
“simply botched it” by trying to combine both
university and college shields in the new design.
By creating a hybrid logo with “anaemic” blue
and white, the two shields have been “wrecked”,
he declaimed with new and concentrated bad-
ness. When not going around madly changing
things, the provost is a great believer in con-
sultants, having doubled fees to them since he
ascended to office – to €. million, in .
Tweedle Fael
FF/FG are neck and neck at the top of the polls at
% according to the Irish Times/Ipsos/MRBI.
FF could already be the biggest party in the state,
again. In . Villager took to the fields with a
golden retriever and a grab of vallium.
Father and son
Micheál Martin and Paul Murphy are political
disparates but visual deadringers. They both
have ‘take me to see the Bambi matinee,’ post-
first-Communion, eyes.
Fluff, caps and combovers
Councillor Danny Healy Rae has defended pay-
ments of close to €, by Kerry County
Council to his family’s plant hire company, say-
ing “contractors are not stealing the money but
working very hard for it”. The Kilgarvan com-
pany has earned almost €. million from the
local authority since as part of the Healy
Rae family’s ongoing effort to top the Kingdom
in tarmac and its every male face with a soggy
alien excrescence.
Sister Act
An Una Mullally article in the Irish Times of
March inaccurately reported FF’s gender equal-
ity policy as being a requirement that “up to”
a third of its candidates at the local elections
would be women. She went on to assail the party
for having “up to one third women TDs”, the joke
being that it has none, “up to’ one third of its
councillors (in fact %) etc. Obviously even FF
couldn’t have a policy of “up to” any quotient
of women as it would be a limitation not a tar-
get. Ms Mullally was wrong. The strange thing is
that FF did not complain publicly or seek a cor-
rection, merely putting Averil Power forward to
slag off their performance generally in an article
of April. This may reflect the phenomenon
described by Sean Duignan, Albert Reynolds’
Press Secretary, of Fianna Fáil’s reaction when
something goes wrong – to assume they did it
(could this be the only difference left between
FF and FG?). Meanwhile Mullally’s article was
quietly amended but remains on the Irish Times’
website but the jokes about “up to” ring hollow as
the quote is no longer seen to reflect any docu-
mentation that ever emanated from the Party.
Porking
Village’s editor was once involved with an ini-
tiative that involved dispatching a student to
deliver a po-faced discourse on the rights of
Southside helicopter owners to a barrister-
filled oral hearing on the desirability of Dublin
airport’s T, before buzzing around the oral
hearing like a plane and exiting to consternation
via the window. The allegedly ironical effort was
to highlight the comprehensive lack of interest
of either the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) or
An Bord Pleanála in carbon emissions. In keep-
ing with its failure to learn anything the DAA
has been granted permission to continue using
, long-term surface car parking spaces
- even though the retention of these spaces is
completely incompatible with the Government’s
Smarter Travel policy. They should plaster pic-
tures of the spaces along the corridors of their
airport instead of the pointless snaps of Enda
Kenny and Theo Dorgan.
You Cost Us
Man of the People businessman Harry Crosbie
is resisting a bid by the National Assets
Management Agency (NAMA) to get € million
in judgment orders against him, arising from
personal loans and his personal guarantees of
the liabilities of two companies.
The agency, which in took over AIB loans
of Mr Crosbie and his companies, is not seeking
judgment against Mr Crosbie for other sums due
under a separate € million facility for devel-
opment of the Point Village, though it has put
the € million Grand Canal Theatre, for which
Crosbie holds a -year lease, up for sale.
NAMA alleges it initially refrained from
enforcement action over the debts of Mr Crosbie
and connected companies, working in good faith
to help him complete the Point Village and deal
with the debts.
However, it alleged, there was a failure by Mr
Crosbie to make full and frank disclosure con-
cerning his assets and liabilities obliging it to
terminate its cosy arrangement with him in
August . NAMA will have been ticked off
with Crosbie when in , on ‘The Saturday
Show’, he unapologetically gave the develop-
ment community’s game away by revealing the
indulgent NAMA was looking to be repaid only
the discounted price it had paid for his loans,
not the face value.
Crosbie’s co-proprietor in the now-bankrupt
Spencer Dock (remember when?) Development
Company Johnny Ronan, is reported to be close
to raising € million to fund a “major come-
back on Irish and UK markets” as he seeks to
bring investors back into the “higher-risk
development sector”. The Sunday Independent
reported the story without even mentioning
that Mr Ronan’s company Treasury Holdings,
had gone bust owing €. billion, including
€ billion to NAMA, the taxpayer. The article
appeared under the co-byline of Niamh Horan
who had previously included him in that news-
paper’s execrable ‘Rich List’ under the ‘Tycoons
that make you Swoon’ section, even though he
didn’t qualify in terms of his er wealth. Villager
loves a pirate with a two-tone beard as much as
the next man but frankly Mr Ronan, via his com-
pany, was a ligger off the taxpayer and sexually
we’d even prefer a Healy Rae.
Os
The editor has been sequestered with John
Waters for weeks but Villager isn’t convinced
there isn’t another um position on all this.
In Waters was interviewed in the UCD
College Tribune. He posed the following ques-
tion: “Well you know if two brothers applied to
adopt a child, they’d be laughed out of court but
the fact that they’re buggering each other would
make a difference, would it?”; and the follow-
ing apocalyptic prognosis: “there was a massive
flood there last year, why? Because they tried to
divert the river to build a shopping centre, right?
The gay lobby are trying to divert human nature.
The same consequences will ensue”. What does
it mean all this stuff about “illiberalism” on
the editor’s cover. Villager thought we’d seen
the last of John Waters when Vincent imploded
Village, though he vaguely recalls two -page
– or so it seemed – pieces, one on a Bob Dylan
song; the other a debate with Niall Crowley on
men’s rights. The editor was last heard mut-
tering something about Village being left, not
Liberal, anyway. •
A consultant
Murphy and Martin, in the same choir
