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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
26May 2015
T
HE rating standard for Ireland’s Environ-
ment Ministers is never how good they are but
how negative their legacy. For aficionados Fine
Gael’s Phil Hogan now vies with Fianna Fáil’s
builder’s friend Martin Cullen and Labour’s
manic gerrymanderer James Tully for the title of worst
ever, but all the indications are that Labour’s Alan Kelly
is catching up since taking the torch in July .
Surprisingly, Fianna Fáil often over compensate for their
perceived dodginess on heritage and local government issues
and lack of interest in the environment by giving the position
to a heavyweight.
Labour’s record on the environment is always poor as
its most diligent ideologues prefer social or economic
ministries. Incumbents tend to be more excited by the
local government aspect of the environment brief than
the workaday tedium of environmental regulation.
That the brief could be a popular vehicle for the engine
that is quality of life has never occurred to any minis-
ter. Perhaps Fianna Fáil’s Noel Dempsey came closest.
Kelly is probably best known as a blow-hard recognised
even within his own party as AK for his slingshot
machismo, the lad who told Mattie McGrath to fuck off in the
Dáil. He is allegedly the dynamo who may power the Labour
Party out of its crisis-resolving martyrdom, as angry tyro
and, soon, as leader. Sometimes Alan can appear almost men-
acing, though in the context of Labour Party burnout, that
passes for a positive.
Surprisingly, Kelly, who comes from an old Labour family,
has a distinguished academic background and CV. He earned
an MPhil from Boston College, and a diploma in leadership
and a masters in business studies, he was the founding chair
of the Kemmy Branch of Labour in UCC, was Chair of Labour
Youth and became an e-business manager for Bord Fáilte
before being elected to the Seanad’s agricultural panel in
.
He impressed many to become MEP for Ireland South in
, beating the truculent if declining Spring dynasty’s
Arthur, and then scraped in as TD in Tipperary North in
, while doubling Labour’s vote.
Though Kelly’s chosen rhetorical method is the lisping
monotone, his campaigns were slick and well-funded, infused
with energy and resources from his high-flying US-politi-
co-PR consultant older brother, Declan (see box on page )
who donated a total of €, in , personally and
through companies.
Having been a Senator and MEP, Kelly shimmied up the
junior ministerial ladder on his first election as TD in
becoming Minister of State for Public and Commuter Trans-
port under Leo Varadkar. His specific brief was the
‘Smarter Travel policy which had clear targets to reduce
climate emissions, congestion and pollution, and to increase
public transport and cycling use. However, the Interdepart-
mental Working Group required to provided biennial reports
on progress on the Smarter Travel targets was not set up.
Public-transport investment was largely abandoned and
Dublin congestion was made worse by the approval of two
extra lanes on the M Naas to Newbridge. EPA reports show
Alan Kelly is pugnacious but is not interested
in ideology, the environment, or quality standards
Labour’s
weapon
PROFILE Alan Kelly: Minister for the Environment
May 2015 27
increases in the ratio of diesel cars to
petrol increased climate emissions by
over % in over levels, and
air pollution now breaches World Health
Organisation guidelines, with the meas-
ures recommended by the EPA not
carried out. For example, Dublin Bus
continues to buy polluting vehicles
rather that the best available emission-
efficient standard.
Kelly’s record in Transport made it
clear he was no tree-hugger.
Last year he swept aside all-comers to
become deputy leader of the Labour
Party winning .% of the vote in a
contest with Michael McCarthy, Ciara
Conway and Sean Sherlock. He took
charge of the Department of the Envi-
ronment and Local Government
(DoECLG).
Kelly’s first act as Minister was to
defuse the water crisis. In doing so he
deployed formidable guile – making
sure to bore his antagonists with
repeated obfuscation about ‘timelines’
without any sense of ideology or per-
spective on the common good: “While
the timelines may have been dictated by
the Troika, we all accept at this stage
that they were simply too ambitious. I
fully accept this. While I was not a
member of cabinet at the time, it is
important that as a Government we
acknowledge that errors were made
– the timelines, the complex nature of
the charging structure and poor com-
munications by Irish Water. Many
people are preparing for bills in the
region of €. Nobody will be paying
these levels for their water. Let me
repeat that, nobody will be paying these
levels for their water services”.
Alan Kelly would not be the man to
explain the ‘polluter pays’ principle that
underpins environmental economics, to
recalcitrants.
In the end of course it was resolved
that householders will be liable for
charges of € for single-adult homes
and € for all other homes, while
water conservation grants of € a
year mean the effective costs will be
€ and € respectively and it has
recently been announced that no-one
will be jailed for payment default. For
good and bad Kelly killed the issue, even
if tens of thousands of diehards con-
tinue to protest the principle at
occasional marches in Dublin.
Kelly’s ideology is best summed up in
an interview he gave to the Sunday
Independent where he noted that
Labour was a “party of workers that
support people who want to work,
people who are unemployed, but want to
work’’. He warned that the economic
policies of Sinn Féin and the far Left
would condemn the unemployed to a
lifetime on social welfare. The ideology
if it can be called that is entirely com-
patible with that of Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative party. But the message is
delivered pugnaciously by a street-wise
-year-old with gel in his hair.
Kelly and his party wanted the envi-
ronment brief to forward their priority
policy: social housing. In November
, Kelly launched the Government’s
Social Housing Strategy: , a six-
year strategy intended to deliver over
, social housing tenancies
through the provision of , new
social housing units, at a cost of €.bn,
and to meet the housing needs of some
, households through the housing
assistance payment and the rental
accommodation schemes. There will be
a major acceleration of local authority
direct construction and acquisition. A
further €m will be provided by way
of public private partnerships. The
focus overall is on quantity and little
mention is made of the quality of the
housing. Moreover, as the Irish Times
recently noted, the Minister regurgi-
tates the €.bn announcement in the
presence of different County Managers
so many times that it has become some-
thing of a joke.
Kelly is also requiring that new devel-
opments include “up to %” social
housing though even Martin Cullen and
Ministers ever since maintained the rate
of “up to %”. New ‘Part V’ proposals
will remove the ability of developers to
account for their social housing com-
mitments through cash payments to
local authorities, a socially divisive pos-
sibility facilitated by Cullen when he
was Minister for the Environment in
. The new proposals will ensure
that the social housing units will be
located “predominantly” on the site of
the original developments.
€.m of additional funding to
address scandalous homelessness was
announced in the budget bringing the
total to €.m in the last budget.
Focus’s Mike Allen emphasised that this
did nothing to deal with the immediate
crisis and Peter McVerry, a Jesuit priest
working with homeless people, consid-
ers that the budget fails to address the
major cause of homelessness today,
namely the increase in rents in the pri-
vate rental market, particularly in
Dublin. In May last year the Govern-
ment approved the Implementation Plan
on the State’s Response to Homeless-
ness which is focused on people who
have been in emergency accommoda-
tion for a period of longer than six
months.
It is a practically focused delivery
plan which contains actions that are
direct, immediate and solutions based
though it has not arrested the problem.
Prevention measures are a key part of
the overall response to homelessness. A
new homelessness prevention campaign
was recently initiated in the Dublin
Region to support families at risk of
losing tenancies in the private rented
sector. This campaign includes a public
awareness campaign to highlight ten-
ants’ rights and also the availability of
supports. However, progress is slow and
ill-advised temporary measures against
homelessness in Dublin City centring on
a temporary revamp of Marmion Court
before it is demolished, were thwarted
by Dublin City Council.
Kelly and his party have also surpris-
ingly acquiesced in the removal of the
% anti-speculation tax on windfall
land rezoning profits, before it had any
effect.
Kelly will represent Ireland at the
Paris Climate summit later this year.
After the budget last autumn he made a
revealing outburst to journalists saying
that the EU targets for climate
emission reduction were an unfair
burden on Ireland. While Irish agri-
business has now assumed sacred cow
status, there has been no Irish climate
strategy since the last one lapsed in
. Kelly serves on autopilot, pushing
Phil Hogan’s entirely toothless climate
bill through the Oireachtas, a model of
international worst-practice.
After the EU council meeting in Octo-
ber on framing targets to
Kelly adumbrated:
“I am on record as stating that the
targets were unrealistic and
unachievable and that did not take into
account Ireland’s dependence on agri-
culture or the fact that we have one of
the most climate-friendly agricultural
systems in the world. This deal recog-
nises that we have secured recognition
across the EU of the importance of a
sustainable agriculture as a key consid-
eration in ensuring coherence between
the EU’s food security and climate
I am on record
as stating
that the 2020
EU climate
targets were
unrealistic and
unachievable
and that
did not take
into account
Ireland’s
dependence
on agriculture
“
28May 2015
change objectives. Having met two
weeks ago with outgoing climate change
Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, I
made it clear that Ireland would not be
signing up to any future targets that
would be unachievable”.
The DoECLG published its -
Statement of Strategy in April, with
Kelly’s Ministerial Forward avoiding
any reference to namby-pamby climate.
The main strategy states: “The overrid-
ing aims of Government of primary
relevance to the Department are to sup-
port sustainable economic growth”.
After this “contributing to the response
to the global challenge of climate
change” is thrown in with a bundle of
other considerations, qualified by the
small print in an appendix that “the
Government will also ensure that any
additional climate change and renewa-
ble energy targets for Ireland are fair
and realistic, and take appropriate
account of our particular national cir-
cumstances and economic challenges,
including in respect of the agriculture
sector”. This shows that the real passion
for climate change comes from Simon
Coveney in Agriculture – and it is a pas-
sion for reducing the stringency of
targets.
After his appointment, ‘Stop Climate
Chaos’, the group of organisations
lobbying for climate action sought a
meeting with Kelly. This was arranged
for ‘Earth Day’ April nd, but in case
there was a suspicion of any mutual
respect, Kelly bailed out, though in the
end the meeting was rescheduled. And
postponed, though the environmental-
ists remain uncynical.
At a recent dinner for business-peo-
ple, Kelly was engaged by a Green Party
spokesperson who sat next to him but
whom he did not recognise. The conver-
sation turned to climate change and the
Minister grew increasingly frustrated
and then furious at the tenor of the criti-
cism. Eventually, he told the
spokesperson to “get out of my face!”.
Subsequently, one of Kelly’s handlers
approached, to advise that whatever the
environmental NGOs wanted, the
Department would be doing the
opposite.
Ironically, even the Department of
Public Expenditure and Reform seems
more concerned about the financial pen-
alties of Ireland exceeding its binding
EU targets, than the Department
of the Environment.
A Review of Expenditure notes
that failure to meet Renewable Energy
Sources (RES) targets could cost up
€m. For the non-Emission Trading
Scheme (ETS) sectors of agriculture,
transport and heating a €m figure
was put forward based on DoECLG data.
However, this is inadequate to factor the
continuation of continuing increases in
agriculture and transport, and lack of
action on heating.
Earlier this year Kelly announced that
“rural Ireland is in my DNA”. He lives in
a one-off house on family land at Por-
troe near Nenagh with panoramic views
overlooking Lough Derg. In an
aggrieved neighbour initiated a tradi-
tional legal case over use of a laneway
against Kelly and his father, which the
Kellys won in after many tears
were shed in front of the judge.
His ministry to date is marked by
servility to the rural housing lobby. In
April he initiated a “review” of the
building regulations to reduce the “cost
burden involved for one-off houses.”
through exemption. In October he initi-
ated a review of An Bord Pleanála
weirdly focusing only on rural building:
“Planning is a major issue for rural
Ireland...there is a lack of consistency in
decision making and priorities in differ-
ent areas. Now is the time to make sure
we have the balance right. There will be
no change in the independent status of
An Bord Pleanála, but we have to ensure
we have the appropriate mix of strategic
national planning, that is sensitive to
community needs and that allows us to
take advantage economically of
increased construction activity”. Again,
quality doesn’t enter into it.
The message to the beleaguered Bord
is: cop on with yer old planning in the
country and ignore the fact that policy-
derived mass suburbanisation is
compromising the service and func-
tional base of villages and smaller rural
towns, making cities, particularly
Dublin the only viable alternatives.
He is reinforced in the ‘rural’ agenda
by an articulate lobby noting that “rural
Ireland is dying”. So Kelly with Rural
Transport Minister of State Ann Phelan
is concerned to “do something”. And if
it’s something you want, there is no
better man than Kelly. In March,
they announced the establishment of an
expert advisory group to assist the
development of rural development
policy and implementation of the report
of the Commission for the Economic
Development of Rural Areas (CEDRA)
which was chaired by footballing Kerry
publican Pat Spillane and including
Supermac Pat McDonough whose burg-
er-sauce-spattered packaging litters
much of the country, rural and urban.
There is much whining about the need
for rural public transport, devoid of any
recognition that perpetuating dispersed
housing undermines its viability and a
delusive atavistic dream that the coun-
tryside can rival the level of services of
major urban areas, without the market
that density provides for them.
Kelly will publish a new National
Planning Framework to replace the oxy-
moronic National Spatial Strategy later
this year. The recommendations of the
Mahon tribunal are clearly dead and
there is no evidence that any change
from scattergun and developer-led
planning will result. Whisper it, but the
approach is laizzez-faire, in keeping
with the Minister’s real gut.
After advice from the Attorney Gen-
eral was first delayed and then finally
digested the Minister for the Environ-
ment, Alan Kelly has now finally
announced that a senior counsel will go
to Donegal to investigate serious allega-
tions of dodgy practice in Donegal
planning.
Somewhat disconcertingly, Village,
Convie and local newspapers including
the Donegal Democrat were unable to
confirm an Irish Independent report to
this effect and it is not clear what the
terms of reference for the senior counsel
will be, or how wide ranging his powers.
In view of the fact that Labour’s Jan
O’Sullivan had to shell out damages to
Convie after she originally dismissed
his evidence as lacking substance it is
important for Labour’s credibility on
corruption issues that Minister gets a
move on with this issue.
Though Ireland has made much
progress in waste-recycling in the last
decade, it continues to generate a
league-topping amount of it. Kelly is
failing to take the action needed to
make the producer legally and finan-
cially responsible for all categories of
“waste” including cars and tyres which
are stockpiled in unauthorised sites
Kelly and
his party
wanted the
environment
brief to
forward their
priority policy:
social housing.
A six-year
strategy will
deliver over
110,000
social housing
tenancies at a
cost of €3.8bn
“
PROFILE Alan Kelly
May 2015 29
across the country. In September he
made a strong statement to the deregu-
lated waste industry that the “race to
the bottom” in service provision was not
acceptable, but the range of action pro-
posed is awaited.
With construction activity now
increasing the failure to regulate unau-
thorised quarrying is registering again,
despite the elaborate retrospective
“Substitute Consent” process that has
taken place over the last few years to
regulate the industry. The M Gort-
Tuam motorway, for example, is being
built with unauthorised material.
The same placation of vested inter-
ests manifests in Kelly’s response to
unregulated peat extraction, which is
having multiple climate, nature conser-
vation and water quality impact. Rather
than integration with the planning
system combined with robust enforce-
ment, Kelly is proposing total planning
exemption for domestic cutters and
light touch licensing for large-scale hor-
ticultural compost extractors. This will
inevitably generate years of EU com-
plaints and legal actions, though these
always result in political settlements as
the EU has finally revealed its hand as a
deal-making, if grandiose, bluffer.
With the need to hold ground against
back-yard gombeen Michael Lowry the
poll leader in Kelly’s benighted constit-
uency, the Minister’s online blog is
nearly all about North Tipperary led by
announcements of routine funding allo-
cations from other Government
Departments, as well as his own. A
recent one noted: “I am delighted to
announce that a Tipperary company is
among the preferred bidders to deliver
the Government’s Jobpath programme”.
The Minister did not have time to
record whether he was concerned that
the measure, instigated by his party
leader, Joan Burton, is part of a privati-
sation of social security provision.
It might be expected that Kelly’s suc-
cession to the fief of Phil Hogan would
have seen a renewed emphasis on
Labour policy in the Custom House,
particularly on climate and energy. For-
gotten entirely is Labour’s policy
‘The Energy Revolution’ to address
“overreliance on fossil fuels and our
capacity to meet international climate
change targets”. The policy included “a
major national retrofit scheme”, to
reduce domestic heating demand and
emissions. There is now major Euro-
pean Investment Bank (EIB) funding for
this but action is being stymied by the
DoECLG through which EIB applica-
tions must be channeled.
The SIPO report on political
donations showed that Labour’s Alan
Kelly was the biggest receiver of per-
sonal/corporate donations in the
Oireachtas at circa €,. Among
those those donations were from the
same address – €, each from
Nessa and Michael Madden, a childhood
friend, and a donation of €, from RONOC International,
€, of which was subsequently returned. A net donation
of €,. Michael Madden is the MD of RONOC Interna-
tional. RONOC and its associated companies are involved in
financial services such as money transfer.
Strangely, Madden was a speaker at a conference in
at the ‘Naval and Military Club, St James Sq., London’ organ-
ised by The Defence and Security Forum about the financial
global trade and money transfer.
The Defence and Security Forum was founded by Lady Olga
Maitland in . It was originally a campaigning organisa-
tion known as Families for Defence launched to challenge the
anti-nuclear protest movements such as CND. Families for
Defence’s remit was to promote the NATO case for multilat-
eral nuclear disarmament and for defence expenditure in
Britain.
The links are very odd for an alleged ‘Socialist’ Labour
Party then Senator and aspiring MEP. Declan Ganley has been
berated in the media for not a lot more. •
KELLY’S interesting brother, Declan, served as
an advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential
election bid in 2008 and was appointed in
2009 as economic envoy to Northern Ireland by
then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He
had sold his Dublin-based company Gallagher
and Kelly Public Relations, which he co-owned
with Jackie Gallagher, one time special advisor
to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, to Financial
Dynamics, one of the world’s leading financial
communications companies, and a subsidiary of
Britain’s Cordiant and then led the buy-out of
that company for $340m – the largest price
ever paid for a communications consulting
company, becoming executive vice president of
FTI Consulting, a 3,500-person business with a
market capitalisation of over $2bn.
An award-winning business journalist who
started with the
Nenagh Guardian
and went on
to the
Examiner
, he was once described as one
of the top communications experts in the world.
Business and Finance
says that he has been
described as this generation’s Tony O’Reilly,
and Irish Central reported that: “Several
successive Taoisigh in Ireland have
acknowledged reaching out to him for advice
over the years. He is an adjunct professor in
business studies at his alma mater, National
University of Ireland, Galway”.
Unfortunately, he was implicated by the
New
York Times
in a 2013 article titled ‘Unease at
Clinton Foundation over Finances and
Ambitions’ which flagged concerns that some
Clinton insiders had about the activities of
Declan Kelly and Doug Band, described by some
as a kind of surrogate son and “gate-keeper” to
Bill Clinton, and one of the forces behind the
Clinton Global Initiative, a series of
collaborations with corporations and
individuals to “solve problems”. Their company,
of which Kelly is CEO, is called Teneo. Its idea
was to have Fortune 400 companies pay large
monthly stipends in exchange for access to
Band, Clinton, and their massive international
network. It poached executives from Wall
Street, recruited other Clinton aides and even
Tony Blair to join as employees or advisers and
set up shop in midtown Manhattan merging
corporate consulting, public relations and
merchant banking to a single business. The firm
recruited clients who were Clinton Foundation
donors, while Band and Kelly encouraged
others to become new foundation donors.
An article in the
New Republic
by Alec
MacGillis said Band, who apparently is
nicknamed “butt boy”, was more responsible
than anyone, except Clinton, for creating a
culture of “transactionalism” in Clinton-land.
On one occasion Declan Kelly 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 President
there. Concerns about Teneo gained special
significance as part of a critical internal review
of the Clinton Foundation led by the law firm
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
Worse still, in April the US State Department
announced it was to investigate its employee
Huma Ubedin, a long-term trusted aide of
Hillary Clinton, for conflicts of interest in her
consultancy work for Teneo. The conservative
group Citizens United is suing the State
Department for not responding to requests for
email exchanges between Clinton and her staff,
and Teneo. It is set to be a point of controversy
during Clinton’s presidential campaign. •
Declan Kelly
