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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
April 2017 5
News Miscellany
Villager
Dogs, sushi etc
We start this month with some cheap visual
jokes about a couple of easy targets.
Timed Out
So farewell, Kevin O’Sullivan, editor of the Irish
Times - you seemed decent but a bit lacking in
passion and drive. You always appeared deter
-
mined that the words ‘Village magazine’ should
not darken your pages; and now you are gone.
Back to journalism. There is one thing about
Village, its editors never resign.
Unshaggy judicial-dog story
Villager moves on this month with the most
tedious and vested-interest-serving story he
could find, inevitably served up by the Irish
Times under the ‘old’ regime - with its pedes-
trian approach to the cartels which presumably
put food on the table for most of its dwindling
band of purchasers.
In a speech in March in the Seanad, jurispru
-
dential factotum Michael McDowell, echoing a
refrain in correspondence from the Chief Justice
in 2014, had said the quality of our judges had
declined in recent years due to “economic
factors”.
Ace new reporter, Conor Gallager formerly
editor of CCC nuacht – a court news agency -
burst into our Irish Times feeds with the
opening gambit: “There is a story lawyers love
to tell each other about a colleague who found
himself appointed to the High Court bench in
recent years. He received a card from a friend
congratulating him on his new role. On the front
of the card was a picture of the Four Courts. On
the inside was a set of directions for how to get
there”.
How they must have laughed up on Church
Street at such cleverness. Hoo, HOO. Phnar. But
what could it mean?
Judges on breadline
Gallagher’s report is headed: ‘Lawyers say
salary cuts devalue position of judges’. The
judges’ salaries noted in the article range from
€110,000 to €227,000, depending on the court
and the appointment date - following a referen
-
dum and cuts to the salary of High Court and
Circuit Court judges by a third in 2014. For
example, the annual salary of a High Court
judge is €191,306 for those who were appointed
NEWS
6 April 2017
NEWS
before January 1st, 2012, and €172,710 for those
appointed after that date. This means that the
take-home pay of a High Court judge appointed
before 2012 is 38 per cent down on that paid in
2008, though, DV, it will revert to pre-2012 rates
in due course. For new entrants, the reduction
was 50 per cent.
Recent Council of Europe and European Com
-
mission surveys show that Irish judges are the
rarefied fifth best-paid in Europe. Nevertheless,
sure enough, many down the Law Library have
taken to sniggering at the calibre of some recent
appointments, some even did so on the record
for Gallagher. Villager would say, like the myth
of sunny summers in one’s youth, the quality
was actually never supereminent. We need only
look for example to the poor quality of judicial
tribunals, most of which simply failed to get to
grips with the facts, down the years.
Of course the central issue is that if “big hit
-
ters” did not earn so much in the first then
elevation to the bench wouldn’t disappoint them
so.
Judges besieged
While McDowell won’t have endeared himself to
any recent judicial appointments he’s usually a
safe pare of political hands for the judiciary. He
told the Seanad in January that the Republic was
the only state in the common law world in which
a government had ever proposed having a lay
majority on a judicial advisory board.
“It is of some significance that such a change
has not been proposed in America or anywhere
else with a common law system”, he said. Now
Villager would put it the other way: no jurisdic
-
tion he can think of has a majority of lawyers on
a judicial advisory board. The US Senate Judici
-
ary committee of course is political.
Judges betrayed
Meanwhile the Village editor is serving as a
‘judge’ [sic] on the ‘Law Awards’ again this year,
for some reason, one of which certainly cannot
be that the organisers ever read the vitriol
poured out on his pages about the legal profes-
sion on which he notably made no professional
mark.
On the record (mostly not about
judges)
Why is Shane Ross so unpopular with the media
who’re usually forgiving of the colourful in a
world of the drab? Diarmaid Ferriter in the Irish
Times even described him as “dossing” on the
job. Villager was dwelling guiltily on his weak
-
ness for Ross who in the end has squeezed the
establishment-fetishising Fine Gael party to get
a lay majority and chair on the new Judicial
Appointments Commission (now gratifyingly
supported by the Law Society), and who has
been dutifully obstreperous on drink-driving.
But then he was reminded of Doss’s laurels for
Irish Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy: a "bril
-
liant minister in the boom years"; his paeans for
Anglo’s Seanie Fitz who he felt should have been
interviewed for the top position in Bank of Ire-
land: "far too dynamic"; and for Sean Quinn: this
genius... [who] has combined being a champion
of the customer with making a mint”.
Worst of all, in an interview with the Evening
Herald in August 1983, the then bumptious
young senator stated that the “presumption of
the innocence of the Birmingham Six has been
taken for granted for too long” and that Irish
people should “cease their persistent criticisms
of the workings of British courts whenever Irish
-
men are on trial”. Too often, he said, Irish people
complained about the Birmingham Six, Guild
-
ford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Winchester
Three from positions of “ignorance and emo-
tion… I would like to put on record that I do not
believe for one moment that all these people
– leaving out the Winchester Three for the
moment – are automatically innocent. It seems
that all you have to be is an Irish person in Brit
-
ain charged with a terrorist crime for politicians
on all sides here to throw up their hands and call
'foul'. This is completely wrong”. The Birming-
ham Six, Maguire Seven, Guildford Four and
Winchester Three were all exonerated after
being wrongly jailed for years.
RIP, David Slattery
Villager was sad to hear of the death of David
Slattery, Conservation Architect, a charming and
gregarious character. Best known for his sensi-
tive supervision of the restoration of the Custom
House in the early 1990s, when he worked for
the OPW, he soon went into private practice and
the lucrative market in giving expert advice
about how a particular, inconvenient historic
structure was “a poor example of the type” and
should be demolished. Once described by the
Irish Times' Frank McDonald as Ireland’s leading
conservation architect (an epithet that inflamed
the OPW’s Freddie O’Dwyer whose erudition and
role better equipped him for the accolade) in an
article titled ‘Keeper of the Past’, he wrote off
buildings from the Westin on College St to most
of what was ultimately made a wide-ranging
national monument on Moore St, to 88 Thomas
St, to Liberty Hall, to the façade of O’Connell St’s
Carlton Cinema whose ‘moving’ he supported.
Though sniffy about ‘facadism’ (demolition
behind retained façade) and often fastidious
about treatment of first-rate buildings, where
required he was biddable in the service of high-
paying developers who needed a report to justify
a demolition to An Bord Pleanála or to disdain a
Local Authority’s proposed ‘listing’.
He was also involved in conservation works
on major schemes including the Bank of Ireland
and Dublin’s GPO, where the quality of work
tended to be excellent.
Shane Ross: unpopular
Birmingham Six
April 2017 7
Ethics issues for a lot of people
called Loughlin
The Chief Executive and Cathaoirleach have
informed Councillor Fiona McLoughlin-Healy
that they are arranging for a report on her com-
plaint to Kildare County Council about a recent
failure of Councillor Fiona O’Loughlin, now a
Fianna Fáil TD, to declare her interest in a grant
that the Council awarded, in breach of ethics
legislation.
Last year, as part of the Easter Rising Com-
memorations, a €600 grant was approved for
the “Bluebells and Buskers” cultural subgroup
of the Rathangan Community Association to
highlight work by Rathangan-born poet William
A Byrne, who replaced Thomas McDonagh as
UCG English Lecturer following his execution in
1916.
The application sought support towards esti
-
mated costs of €2, 300 for catering, printing, etc
for the upcoming event. Mr Brian O’Loughlin, the
brother of then-chair of the committee, former
Councillor O’Loughlin, was listed as the “Contact
Person” on the application form. He stated that
the grant was transferred directly to the bank
account of the Rathangan Community Associa-
tion Limited, a charitable company limited by
guarantee and with published audited accounts.
A statement from Councillor Pádraig McEvoy,
Chair of the Council’s Commemorations Commit-
tee to a Council meeting last year explains the
attitude of the Council to the ethics connotations
of the practice just described:
“Considering the Local Government Act 2001-
2014, Section 176, Mr Brian O’Loughlin had no
beneficial interest in the context of the grant
decision by Kildare County Council. By exten
-
sion, former Councillor O’Loughlin was not a
connected person and hence, there was no “con-
flict of interest” to be declared as part of the
process”.
Later the minutes of that meeting record that
Councillor McEvoy was “thanked” for “clarifying
the legal issue”. It therefore appears the Council
believed Councillor McEvoy was stating the legal
position. This, according to McLoughlin-Healy’s
complaint is gravely problematic. “Cllr McEvoy
had misstated it. Councillor McEvoy’s synopsis
is clearly wrong about the correlation or ‘exten
-
sion’ between a Councillor’s sibling having a
beneficial interest in something and the Council-
lor being a connected person. A 'beneficial
interest' includes an interest in respect of which
a connected person is a member of a company
which has a beneficial interest in such matter”.
Meanwhile Concillor McLoughlin-Healy remains
suspended by Fine Gael, primarily because of a
motion of no confidence she sponsored in her
then party colleague, the Mayor, for not pursu-
ing the ethics issue. You might think she’d have
been elevated because of it.
No reality, O’Reilly
Bill O’Reilly, 67, the abrasive and regressive pre-
senter of the weekday US Fox TV alt-crapshoot,
'The O’Reilly Factor', faces calls to resign after a
New York Times front-page article reported that
he paid $13m in settlements to five women who
accused him of sexual harassment.
A deluge of companies - including Mercedes-
Benz, Hyundai, BMW and GlaxoSmithKline
- withdrew advertisements from his show.
In May 2015, court transcripts from O’Reilly's
custody trial with ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy
revealed signs of domestic violence within his
household - O’Reilly's daughter testified that she
witnessed O’Reilly choking McPhilmy and drag-
ging her down the stairs of their home by her
neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was
watching. In light of the allegation, O’Reilly
issued a statement through his attorney describ-
ing the account as "100% false" and declined to
comment further.
Less physical though no less untrue, writing
in his 2013 book Keep it Pithy, O'Reilly, a man not
coincidentally of Trumpesque grandeur-delu-
sions and mendacity stated: "I've seen soldiers
gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America,
Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens
in Belfast with bombs." In 2005 O'Reilly claimed
to have "seen guys gun down nuns in El Salva
-
dor" and in 2012 said "I saw nuns get shot in the
back of the head". O'Reilly and Fox News clarified
that he had been shown images of the murdered
nuns and Irish bombings but was not an eyewit-
ness in either case.
Just when you thought the
problem was the ‘Royal’ bit
The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland
(RIAI) seems to be increasingly reluctant to
pursue its prosecutions of non-architects, who
are not members of the RIAI, but who use the title
‘Architect’ professionally. It withdrew a recent
case ‘on the steps of the courthouse’. A decade
ago the RIAI received legal advice that it could
be in trouble in pursuing prosecutions as it had
called itself “the Royal Institute of Architects of
Ireland” in much of its official documentation
including the stuff giving it the right to prosecute
lowly sub-Architects. Its real name of course is
“the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland”.
Could it be that it fears such recalcitrants will
plead its own legal advice against it?
Councillor Fiona McLoughlin-Healy, ex Fine Gael
8 April 2017
NEWS
Another worthy register in a
world of cowboys
Speaking at the CIF Cork Construction Annual
Dinner in early April, the Minister for Housing,
Planning Community and Local Government,
said that he expected legislation to introduce a
mandatory Construction Industry Register man
-
datory to be placed before the cabinet within
weeks.
Trumping Trump
China plans to build new city nearly three times
the size of New York in the Xiongan New Area,
100km southwest of Beijing In a joint statement
two of China’s most powerful political bodies,
the central committee and state council,
described the new city, as “a strategy crucial
for a millennium to come”. President Xi Jinping
said the city would be “a demonstration area for
innovative development ... [which] should priori-
tise ecological protection [and] improve people’s
well-being.”
Bargain hunters reacted immediately to the
hyperbole, flocking to the region in their droves
to hoover up homes they hoped to resell for huge
profits.
Lanigan’s Ball
We have had 21 Garda Commissioners since the
foundation of the state. At least seven have had
to leave out of time.
New city here
