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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
14May 2015
I
INTERVIEWED Catherine
Murphy, Independent TD for Kil-
dare North, in a sunny Dáil coffee
shop on May th. She was accom-
panied by her advisor Anne
Marie McNally. They were both friendly,
informed and irreverent. Though she
was due on the Ray D’Arcy show Cather-
ine Murphy appeared relaxed. She used
the term “we” a lot, rarely “I”.
I asked her how she would describe
her political philosophy. “I’m in the
centre, which has shifted, a social dem-
ocratic. I believe in a more equal
society, good public services. I’m pas-
sionate about good-quality institutions.
We’ve never been good at institution-
building. I’m an admirer of [Aneurin]
Bevan [who spearheaded Britain’s post-
war National Health System]. He said:
“the whole point of power is to give it
away”. You’d be picking up bits of
Chomsky”.
So how important is equality and
what does she mean by it? “It’s equality
of outcome very definitely. Great levels
of inequality preceded all the great
crashes. I’m not saying things should be
perfectly equal”. I push her as to how
much inequality is acceptable and she
says that’s a harder question than she
can answer. “The idea of bankers not
getting out of bed for half a million a
year is on the Richter scale end of it. In
Switzerland they’d a referendum to ban
anyone earning thirteen times anyone
else. I’d go lower”. She won’t say how
much lower. “It can’t be in the begrudg-
ery area if someone has spent a lot of
money and a long time and become
expert. But the returns can’t be so great
as to be offensive”.
What’s the first thing she’d do if she
were Taoiseach? “Who said I wanted to
be Taoiseach? I so don’t. My political
priorities are widespread. For example,
on this island we’ve got to deepen
democracy, put institutions in place
based on subsidiarity. Regional govern-
ment is a must”. But national
development priorities can’t be scatter-
gun or ‘one for everyone in the
audience’. “We need three cities outside,
and as a counterbalance to Dublin:
Cork, Galway and to some extent Limer-
ick – competing. They need to attain a
critical mass for public services and
transport etc”. She says she has strong
ideas on planning, transport, transpar-
ency, institutional reform and
technolog y.
Why did she go into politics? “My
motivation was to change things. I’d
been moaning to the editor etc. There’s
no point moaning unless you’re willing
to step up to the plate and do some-
thing. The first time I was elected was
after the water charges campaign in the
early s. It can be both frustrating
and rewarding, probably more frustrat-
ing. I can be quite solitary. I like to do
my own research before I open my
mouth and that can be an asset – but it
can also be bad: You can do % of the
work and someone else gets % of the
credit. I’m at my best when I’m angry
but containing it”.
What does she think of the Labour
Party and its performance in govern-
ment? “I don’t notice them. I wish I did.
It looks like a Fine Gael government. A
huge disappointment. I was in them
[Labour] but it wasn’t a happy
experience”.
How has she fared in the technical
group (she’s its whip)? “We exploit it to
the maximum – private members time,
committees, speaking time. It critically
opens up the diversity in the group.
People may have expected more of a
coalition but we’re too diverse for that
ever to have been possible”.
Is she interested in a new political
party? “I don’t dismiss that though I
value and am comfortable with my inde-
pendence. I wouldn’t like to be
controlled by a press office. The person
you elect should be who you see in Par-
liament. Put it this way I am talking to
people, though nothing conclusive. A
number of things are happening. What’s
happening with the unions the other
day [a Mayday gathering of politi-
cal, trade-union and community
activists organised by the Communica-
tions Workers Union in Dublin] is
particularly interesting. I was inter-
ested in the Podemos guy from Spain
there. You have to look at where the
people are, though you have to give
some leadership within that and have
an idea of what you want to achieve. I’ve
always seen the positive. I think this is a
great country, despite the political and
administrative institutions!”.
What was the alternative to austerity?
“I’m angry about the debt. Admittedly
She’s strong
ideas on
planning,
transport,
transparency,
institutional
reform and
technology
“
INTERVIEW Catherine Murphy, TD
Channelling anger
into questions,
and vision
Michael Smith interviews Catherine Murphy TD.
The country’s currently most popular TD is involved in
talks about a new political party on the Left
May 2015 15
the tax base collapsed because of the
change in the take from the building
sector. We had to balance the books but
we were sold out on the debt. I’m partic-
ularly angry about the promissory notes
being turned into a sovereign debt and
the amount of money thrown at unse-
cured bondholders. We’re spending the
same servicing the national debt as on
the education system.
We need a debt conference. There are
debt problems all over Europe not just in
the programme countries. We need to
see where we need physical expansion
and in particular deal with climate
change”. She doesn’t accept that most
important reason for the increased debt
and tax burden was the collapse in con-
struction-driven taxes, rather than the
banking implosions and bailout. “Some
of the things we did were stupid. We had
cuts instead of reform. We didn’t look at
who was leaving the civil service”. She
thinks benchmarking when compari-
sons are made with other countries is
good especially with similar European
countries but it’s more expensive to
deliver services when you’ve a dispersed
population. She’s sceptical about its
value if the comparison is within
Ireland.
What are priorities in her constit-
uency? “Housing. We need a rental
model that’s attractive to people across
the income divide and funds are avail-
able for this from the European
Investment Bank. Planning. We’ve been
quite good in Kildare because some of
us have been a thorn in the side. I’m not
against development if it can be linked
to services and decent public transport,
if it can provide local jobs, but we’re
doing it backwards: not co-ordinating
services. And you have to prioritise and
not be all things to everyone”.
Meath, Wicklow and Kildare have
done poorly in terms of distribution of
services but she doesn’t agree that
there’s been too much sprawl into the
hinterland of Dublin. Surprisingly she
agrees, she says, with IBEC that we need
to double the population. Kildare itself
has the lowest ratio of police to popula-
tion, high class sizes in schools,
disability services are not distributed
fairly around the country based on
demographics or any evidence. She
won’t say if she thinks North Kildare is
well represented by its TDs. That’s for
the election to sort out.
What are her biggest achievements in
politics? “There’s a park in Leixlip
which was going to be housing estates,
that we saved. It’s called St Catherine’s
Park! People walk through it oblivious
to how it was saved, by politics”. As to
national politics she’s very proud of a
document she’s produced on genealogy
as rapporteur through the Joint Oire-
achtas culture committee. She’d a piece
of legislation on climate change, “a huge
issue”, and energy security. I note since
it wasn’t passed by the Oireachtas it
wasn’t an achievement, and she says just
publishing it was the achievement. She
thinks the current Climate Bill is so
weak it will cause problems. “We don’t
have a great national ambition and the
sectoral emission plans will be weak
and scattergun”. It’s a favourite word
for her.
Does she think water and property
taxes are a good idea? “In principle yes
but it depends on how they’re con-
structed”. But she’s not embarrassed to
oppose them. She hasn’t said don’t pay
water taxes. Irish Water could have been
more modest and on a regional level.
Some leaks can easily be dealt with. In
Kildare there are few of the Victorian
pipes which generate most of the prob-
lems. Water charges should have been
centred on conservation and an amount
of free water allocated based on inter-
national norms. She’d no objection to
charges for waste. If people had realised
how much the local government fund
had been depleted as part of the Prop-
erty Tax process they’d have been
angry. The property tax should have
given people a return, something new,
if it was going to get accepted.
She’d have focused the taxes that
were needed after the collapse on the
corporate sector – she’d change not the
.% rate but the effective rate. She
thinks we’ve relied far too much on FDI.
We should develop an indigenous indus-
trial base. Even Intel and Hewlett
Packard which are in her constituency
and which she welcomes suffer for want
of raw material in terms of education.
So it’s shortsighted even for them to
have low taxes. She likes the idea of ded-
icated taxes. She thinks taxes on fuels
for example should be about retrofit-
ting homes. She accepts that there
should be a move away from taxes on
labour though she doesn’t get into it.
PRSI is not too onerous in international
Put it this way
I am talking to
people though
nothing
conclusive
[about a new
political
party]. What’s
happening
with the
unions the
other day is
particularly
interesting
“
Catherine Murphy, TD
16May 2015
terms. As to wealth taxes, at the
moment taxing property is often taxing
the gross value rather than the (nega-
tive) equity. People paying property tax
on a debt should get relief and pay only
on the value net of debt.
I move on to Siteserv the focus on
which is probably her biggest achieve-
ment in politics and which brings
together many of things she claims are
deficient in the political process: trans-
parency, institutional weakness etc. It
has made her one of the most talked
about politicians of the year. What does
think of how she’s been treated by Min-
ister for Finance, Michael Noonan, and
Siteserv?
Siteserv put out a statement saying
they were sick of her questions and que-
rying her motivation but she’s there to
serve her constituents. She wasn’t
impressed by Michael Noonan’s distinc-
tion between a parliamentary reply and
Freedom of Information (FoI), which he
felt required more detail. Parliamentary
replies come back with privilege. FoIs
do not. She accepts that they’re appro-
priate for background information. But
it’s important there’s maximum infor-
mation. “We always felt we were right to
be asking these questions, even though
they were obviously not being answered
by Minister Noonan. We need to know
more about some of the processes. How
was €m paid to shareholders?”.
There may have been an illegality in
trading in Siteserv shares in the run up
to the announcement that shareholders
would benefit, and she’s written to the
stock exchange asking it to explain the
process between it and the ODCE etc,
though the stock exchange is saying
nothing. She’s obviously got damning
information about the share trading,
but she significantly doesn’t think the
rest was necessarily illegal. There’s a lot
that hasn’t been answered, she thinks,
but she’s asking more and more ques-
tions. She thinks KPMG are conflicted
“all over the place”. Unless they come
back with an adverse finding no-one
will believe them. KPMG accountants
Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richard-
son, the special liquidators of IBRC are
investigating transactions where IBRC
made big capital losses. We’re only an
hour from London and Dublin is a small
town, she notes knowingly. “There are a
lot of Davy linkages”. The terms of ref-
erence allows the KPMG investigators
to select which cases to look at – a Get
out of Jail for them, she considers. It’s
also not clear if the €m threshold for
capital losses which may be investi-
gated is before any discount is applied,
or after. She goes on about the extraor-
dinary litany of strange conduct. The
relationship between the minister and
his officials needs scrutiny, she feels.
Turning the promissory notes into sov-
ereign debt and the liquidation of IBRC
may have been done in a suspicious
rush as a consequence of some of what
was going on between the Department
and IBRC. Noonan misled when he
implied in answer to her questions that
relations between his department and
Mike Aynsley, boss of IBRC, were good.
FoI shows they were not. Noonan said
he relied on Dukes’ belief that every-
thing was above board. But his officials
were advising an independent review
was needed. They should have asked for
more information. The officials come
out okay from the FoI except that Min-
ister Simon Harris says there was a
two-day meeting in August
between John Moran, then head of the
Department of Finance, and IBRC, for
which there are no minutes but at which
Siteserv was discussed. Aynsley and
Dukes are contradicting him saying
Siteserv wasn’t even discussed.
If it wasn’t discussed it gives the lie to
the Minister’s claim that he dealt with
the matter by delegating his senior civil
servant to engage with IBRC over it.
Once the bidders were narrowed down
to around bids they submitted
-page due diligence but Denis only
submitted three pages. Was it known he
was going to win, before? In June
Sierra, a Siteserv subsidiary which ulti-
mately won the water metering
contract, began hiring in specialist staff
for water-meter installation. They were
ahead of the game. Did they too know
that they were going to get the metering
contract? Sierra wasn’t even formed as
a company when it got that contract.
The competition authority absurdly
looked on the transaction as a media
takeover even though it wasn’t. “IBRC
said the only reason Siteserv won was
price. If it turns out there were other
reasons there’s a real scandal on our
hands”.
She admits she knows lots of things
that she can’t reveal. The bidding proc-
ess was a figleaf.
Questions. Questions. Questions.
I ask if she enjoys the job: “Look at, I
enjoyed being a county councillor. I’m
looking for tangible results on matters
that are important to me and the people
who elected me. Sometimes those can
be for an individual. For example we
recently matched up a person with a
disability with a journalist, and got a
great result. I get a great buzz out of
that. Isn’t it nice to feel you can make a
dierence?”. •
She thinks
KPMG are
conflicted
“all over the
place…There’s
a lot of Davy
linkages
“
INTERVIEW Catherine Murphy, TD
Davy Stockbrokers – in her sights
