Frank Connolly

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    Adam’s crucial coded warnings to Robinson

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    In late September, loyalist blogger, James Bryson, told a public session of the Stormont finance committee that Frank Cushnahan along with solicitor Ian Coulter formerly of Belfast firm Tughans, prominent accountant David Watters, developer Andrew Creighton and DUP leader Peter Robinson were to receive substantial sums from the sale of Project Eagle. Cushnahan was involved in the preparation of the Eagle portfolio in his capacity as a member of the NIAC of NAMA while Watters had intimate knowledge of the individual properties and their potential values and his firm McClure Watters provided advisory services to the agency. While each of the five has denied the extraordinary claims about alleged kickbacks there is a view that the announcement last month by Robinson of his retirement from politics next year was influenced in no small part by the Project Eagle affair. Robinson’s withdrawal in September from the power-sharing government threatened to bring down the political institutions in the wake of various crises including alleged IRA involvement in the killing of Belfast man, Kevin McGuigan, the earlier killing of Sinn Fein member Jock Davison and an ongoing battle with Sinn Fein over welfare cuts. By November, these and other issues were resolved after intensive discussions involving the Northern parties and the Irish and British governments and during which the “fee payments” allegations hung like a dark cloud over the first minister. In a mid-September statement after Robinson was named as the intended recipient of a £7.5 million sum lodged by Coulter in an Isle of Man account in connection with the Project Eagle sale, Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams made it clear that his party had serious questions for the DUP leader that would not go away anytime soon. Speaking at a public meeting in Drogheda in response to the initial reluctance of unionists to participate in all-party talks, Adams remarked: “if Sinn Féin adopted the same approach as the unionist parties then there would not be a political process or political institutions in the north. The unionist parties’ attitude to the two murders in Belfast and to the recent revelations about the sell-off of NAMA’s northern loan book shows their ad hoc attitude to the political institutions. In July, serious concerns arose around the sell-off by NAMA of its northern loan book – valued at £4.5 billion – for a third of that amount, amid allegations that a senior politician in the North was to benefit from this. Sinn Féin could have decided at that point to walk away from the Executive. We didn’t. We asserted the primacy of due process and the need for these very serious allegations of political corruption to be fully investigated properly by the relevant Assembly and policing agencies. In a comment that went largely unmentioned in the Dublin media he continued: “The sell-off of NAMAs northern loan book involves both the Minister for Finance in Dublin as well as senior ministers in the North. The allegations of wrong doing are very serious”. The talks ended six weeks later with a deal on welfare and spending as well as policing issues and the unexpected announcement by Robinson that he is to leave the stage in May before the assembly elections. In late September, Adams also met with the Office of the New York State Comptroller which has $50m invested in Cerberus to brief them on the controversy surrounding Project Eagle. It is understood that the Comptroller then raised the issue with senior executives of Cerberus who were apparently not impressed by the Sinn Fein leader’s intervention. Neither was Peter Robinson by all accounts. Sources told Village that these two events were intended to telegraph to Robinson that Sinn Féin would not look kindly on any Robinson NAMA delinquencies, if he did not move expeditiously to get the Executive back on track. Questions for NAMA • What has NAMA done to verify that Ronnie Hanna did not have meetings with Cushnahan, Watters and the financial institutions involved in Project Eagle? • Has NAMA asked the financial institutions involved to verify this? • Has NAMA asked Hanna and Cushnahan to verify this.  There is no indication as yet that he has even responded to far less detailed queries from NAMA sent to him by letter on November 19 2015? More generally: • Why are so many properties contained in NAMA’s typical project portfolios, militating against purchased by the public who funded the bailout? • Why are so many of the projects sold at egregious discounts in a market that is among the most bullish in Europe? • What tax right-offs to developers benefit from when they resell former NAMA properties?  

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    If we can borrow it, we will spend it

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    Two recent events highlight the true nature of the ongoing Irish economic recovery. Firstly, ahead of the infamous Ireland-Argentina Rugby World Cup match, the press office of the main governing party, Fine Gael, produced a rather brash infographic. Charting projected growth rates in real GDP for 2015 across all Rugby World Cup countries, the graph put Ireland at the top of the league with 6.2 percent forecast growth. “FACT: If the Rugby World Cup was based on economic growth, Ireland would win hands down”, shouted the headline. Having put forward a valiant performance, the Irish team went on to lose the game to Argentina, ending its incipient ascendancy. Secondly, within weeks of publication, Budget 2016 – billed by the Government as a programme for the ‘New Ireland’ – has been discounted by a range of analysts, including those with close proximity to the State, as representing the return of a fiscal policy of …electioneering. Worse, judging by the public opinion polls, even the average punter out there has been left with a pesky aftertaste from the political wedding cake produced by Merrion Street on October 13th. Tasteful or not, the public gloating about headline growth figures and the fiscal chest-thumping that accompanied Budget 2016 did not stretch far from reality. Official growth is roaring, public finances are in rude health, and the Government is back in the business of handing out candies to kids on every street corner. The air is filled with the sunshine of recovery and talk about the Celtic Tiger Redux is back on the menu for South Dublin along with the fennelised lamb. Ireland by the numbers On budget day the government projected full-year 2015 inflation-adjusted growth of 6.2 percent followed by 4.3 percent in 2016. Extraordinarily optimistic, “one minister acknowledged that the growth figure for this year is likely to end up nearer to 10% than the 6.2% estimated just 6 weeks ago”, according to a story on the front page of the Sunday Business Post in late November. Much less optimistic, the IMF has the figures at 4.9 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Still, this ranks Ireland at the top of the advanced economies’ growth league, with second place Iceland at 4.8 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. The only other advanced economy expected to post above 4 percent growth in 2015 is Luxembourg. Which is dramatically telling: of all euro-area member states, the two most exposed to tax optimisation schemes are growing the fastest. Though only one has a Government gushing publicly about that fact. No medals for guessing which one. The problem is: the headline official GDP growth for Ireland means preciously little as far as the real economy is concerned. The reason for this is the composition of that growth by source and, specifically, the role of the Multinational Corporations trading from Ireland. We all know this, but keep harping on about the said ‘metric’ as if it mattered. Based on the figures for the first half of 2015 (the latest available through the official national accounts), the Irish economy grew by €6.4 bn or 6.9 percent in real GDP compared to the first half of 2014. Gross National Product, or GDP accounting for the officially declared net profits of multinational companies, expanded by a more modest 6.6 percent over the same period. Other distortions arising from this structural anomaly at the heart of the Irish economic miracle are the effects of foreign investment funds and companies on the capital side of the National Accounts. Back in 2014 the European Union reclassified R&D spending as investment, superficially inflating both GDP and GNP growth figures. Since then, our investment has been booming, outpacing both job creation and domestic public and private sector demand. In more recent quarters, capital investment has been outperforming exports growth too. Which compels a question: what are these investments about if not a tail sign of corporate inversions past and a forewarning of the changes in the pattern of economic output in anticipation of our heralded ‘Knowledge Development Box’? Beyond this, the legacy of the financial crisis has compounded the artificiality of growth statistics. Irish ‘bad bank’, Nama, and its vulture-fund clients are aggressively disposing of real estate loans and other assets bought at regrettable cost to the taxpayer. Any profits booked by these entities are counted as new investment here. Once again, GDP and GNP go up even if there is virtually nothing happening to buildings and sites which are being flipped by these investors. And while we are on the subject of the old ways, last month Ireland was announced as the domicile of choice for an upcoming merger between Pfizer and Allergan – two giants of the global pharma world. Despite numerous claims that Ireland no longer tolerates so- called ‘tax-driven corporate inversions’ (a practice whereby US multinationals domicile themselves in Ireland for tax purposes), it appears that we are back in the old game. Just as we are apparently back revenue shifting (another corporate tax practice that sets Ireland as a centre for the booking of global sales revenues despite no underlying activity taking place here), as exemplified by the Spanish Grifols announcement earlier in October. Just when we thought we were out they pull us back in! All of these growth sources also benefit from the weaker euro relative to the dollar and sterling, courtesy of ECB printing presses. Looking at the national accounts for January-June 2015, Gross Fixed Capital Formation accounted for €3.8 bn or almost 60 percent of total GDP growth over the last 12 months, and nearly three quarters of total GNP growth. In simple terms, the real economy in Ireland has been growing at closer to 3.5 or 4 percent annually in 2015 – still significant, but less impressive than the 6-percent-plus figures suggest. exchequer kindness Still, the above growth has worked well for the Irish Government. In the nine months up to September 2015, Irish Exchequer total tax receipts rose a strong €2.75 bn, or 9.5 percent year-on- year.

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    Largesse, after austerity without reform

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    There is no greater telltale sign of an election in the offing than when a government starts pledging to give your own money back to you. The Fine Gael-Labour Coalition has promised no less than €3bn between this year’s budget and 2016 in extra spending and tax cuts. Commentators often decry ‘auction’ politics. However, without an auction or choice, voters would have nothing to go on when it comes to casting their vote. Governments typically inveigle their electoral promises into the budget or two before the general election. In the boom years, under Bertie Ahern, new schemes, lower taxes and generous handouts for the elderly played their part in the winning of at least two general elections. Charlie McCreevy and Bertie contrived an unbeatable mix of lower taxes and higher spending, as it turned out in defiance of the iron laws of economic gravity. The Taoiseach Enda Kenny still insists that it was he and his party who saved you, the electorate, from reckless Fianna-Fail-led government. The story about the army patrolling the ATMs exemplified the threadbare nature of this particular narrative. The Fine Gael-Labour government has largely continued the austerity fare offered up by my late brother Brian Lenihan, when he was Minister for Finance. Michael Noonan is now getting almost exactly the same plaudits from the commentariat, who share a deep love for sound money and fiscal rectitude. In the boom years economic growth was so pronounced it was easy for Bertie, and the government I served in, to dismiss those who predicted it would all end in tears. Those who wisely suggested what goes up can also come down could easily be dismissed as being negative or at some level unpatriotic. It was precisely because of this herd-like instinct that the current government established the Fiscal Advisory Council as a source of impartial and independent criticism when the state itself begins to stray from the right path. It was depressing therefore to witness the subdued public reaction to the warning by Professor John McHale of the Fiscal Advisory Council about the proposed level of spending about to be delivered by this government. McHale and his colleagues believe the spending is wrong and unsustainable. The government appeared to have got away with this huge inducement to vote the right way. Of course, the public is weary of seven years of austerity, cutbacks and higher taxes. This time though the government cannot pretend they were not warned. A full 70% of all state or public spending is devoured by three distinct departments: namely health, education and social welfare. Well over 50% of spending increases are devoted to salaries and wages for people who work in the public sector, with this pay bill disproportionately high in the social services. So, it is very clear, extra public spending spread across the areas it usually goes to offers little in terms of improved medium-term productivity but is intended to keep people happy, or at the very least inoculated from their normal negative feelings about any government. Over the past five years there has been a golden opportunity, because of the global nature of the downturn, to take an axe to public spending but also to create long-term and sustainable reforms to the structure of the state itself. In my last few years as a Minister up to 2011 I made the point constantly that Ireland has 21 third-level colleges and institutions, 34 (now 31) local authorities and 29 hospital emergency departments. This is public provision on a grand scale, utterly at odds with what you would expect from our population size. Since as far back as the 1980s political parties have fought like dogs about the level of provision in health- care. This government, like others, promised a lot but appears to have wilted in the face of the vested interests and the costs involved. Health has become a metaphor for the inefficiency of public provision in Ireland. There is a serious neglect of the cause of reform, in our public system in Ireland, and until the voters see zeal on this front they will continue to regard the main or traditional parties as more of the same. Conor Lenihan Conor Lenihan is a former Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation. For the past four years he has worked in Moscow with the Skolkovo Foundation. He is a board member of San Leon Energy, a company quoted on the London Stock Exchange (AIM).

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    Conviction not ideology: Noël Browne, on his centenary.

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    Post-independence Irish politics provided few characters as compelling as Dr Noël Browne who was born just months before the Easter Rising, a century ago, in December 1915. Raised in a wicked combination of tragedy, poverty and illness, Browne saw his father, an inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, pass away from tuberculosis when he was nine. The destitution which followed led the family to lose their home and most of their possessions before emigrating to Britain, where his mother would die from the same illness just weeks later. In England Browne found some redemptive fortune, first winning a scholarship to the renowned Jesuit school Beaumount College and then befriending the son of a wealthy Dublin surgeon. The Chance family paid the future politician’s way through medical school in Trinity College during the Second World War. But England also offered a sickly Browne, himself now a victim of tuberculosis, an important insight into the early development of socialised medicine, part of the evolution of what became the National Health Service in 1948. Back in Ireland after graduation Browne committed himself to tackling tuberculosis, a disease that killed nearly 10,000 people per year here in the early twentieth century. Frustrated by the impotence of individuals to meet the enormous challenges posed by the disease, and unwilling to profit through private practice from the misfortune of the poor masses consumed by it, Browne settled on politics as the only means to tackle what he saw as “Ireland’s most important social problem”. This was a theme of Browne’s life: it led to politics by moral conviction and a confidence in his ability to solve problems. His ideological progression was shaped by the challenges he aimed to overcome and the frustrations he endured in doing so. In the 1948 general election Browne stood for Seán MacBride’s Clann na Poblachta, a newly-formed republican party that aimed to channel discontent at civil war politics into a social agenda. Browne represented the social-democratic wing of a party that was riven with contradictions but ascendant in the polls. Nominated as the Minister for Health of the first coalition government after claiming a seat in Dublin South-East, Browne began one of Ireland’s most notable political careers at the tender age of thirty-three. In office Browne instigated an enormously successful campaign against tuberculosis, forcing the government to pursue extensive investment in free screening, and providing access to new antibiotics and vaccines as well as a massive construction campaign of hospitals, clinics and sanatoria. This effort is credited with reducing the rate of deaths from tuberculosis from 146 per 100,000 in 1947 to 16 per 100,000 in 1960. Despite this achievement, one of the most impressive in post-independence Irish politics, it was another aspect of his time as Minister for Health which defined his legacy: the attempt to introduce the Mother and Child Scheme. The Mother and Child Scheme was a proposal by Browne, grounded in a provision in the 1947 Health Act introduced by the previous Fianna Fáil government, to legislate for free healthcare, without means-testing, for mothers and children up to the age of 16. The story of the Mother and Child Scheme told today filters it through a modern lens: a contest between Church and state. But this is only part of the story, secured in its particular prominence by Browne’s release of correspondence between the Church hierarchy and political leaders, to the Irish Times. Browne’s political philosophy at the time was weaker in its analysis of Irish capitalism and more focused on the cultural importance of secularism. This blinded him to a degree to the potency of the other opponents of the scheme: the Irish medical profession. The Irish Medical Association was determined to defend private healthcare from socialisation and opposed both the 1947 Act and the 1950 scheme. This followed the path of their colleagues in Britain, who had initially opposed Aneurin Bevan’s NHS, and of their predecessors in 1911 who scuppered the Irish Health Care insurance Act. Although Archbishop John McQuaid later described the face-off over the Mother and Child Scheme, which ended with Browne’s resignation in 1951, as “the greatest challenge to clericalism in Ireland”, its significance was actually even deeper than this. Both the Church and business in Ireland understood the potential of such a scheme, which drew widespread support from the popular classes, as a social-democratic moment for Ireland. Catholic social teaching was not simply an impediment to liberalism gaining a foothold in social and cultural issues, it was the ideological basis of Irish capitalism. Welfare was to be based on the private sphere – the family backed by Church and charity – with services provided on means-tested or modest transfer basis. Catholic corporatism eschewed the concept of universal entitlement, historically a far more potent line of defence for social democratic gains. It also siphoned off large sections of social reproduction to forced labour in carceral institutions. Poverty, rather than be eliminated, was always to be with us. In the end a cheap imitation of the Mother and Child Scheme was introduced in 1953 to satiate public appetite generated by the controversy. Mothers received free health care for infants, but only up to six weeks and on a means-tested basis. The mould Noël Browne had tried to break remained intact. After he was forced to resign from government, Browne went on to join Fianna Fáil, erroneously hoping that the “seed” of social democracy in the party that saw it introduce the widows’ and orphans’ pensions and the sickness allowance and to build social housing could be developed into something more fundamental. Instead he found even more entrenched support for the prevailing economic and social mould than had existed in Clann na Poblachta. Following inevitable expulsion from Fianna Fáil he established the National Progressive Democrats, a social-democratic party in complete contrast to the prophets of the free-market who were later to usurp the name. During his time in the NPD he focused on his favoured role, parliamentary watchdog, teaming up

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    Get moving on that social housing

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    Homelessness was always a winter story and affected individuals only. Now it’s an all-year narrative and the homeless are no longer just isolated individuals -although they are still there – but families, in all their forms and colour. Our recent research for the Housing Agency report, ‘Family experiences of path- ways into homelessness – the families’perspective’, sheds some light on the causes,consequences and features of these unwelcome developments. The research was basedon interviews with a sample of 30 families,including a mixture of family types (couples and one-parent households with children of differing ages, as well as families from minority – Traveller and migrant – backgrounds). The human story was com- pelling. Both of us, ‘seasoned’ researchers long involved in the homeless field, were shocked by the conditions and circumstances in which the families found themselves. Some were homeless for months, but for others it was years. We met families living for months in one room of a hotel. Others lived in damp basements and rooms, with heat turned on for only a few hours a day. Most of the families we met no longer had possessions, apart from those they could put in a suitcase. They were broke, having used up whatever savings they had. Parents were distressed, despairing, humiliated – often eg under curfew – but absolutely determined to ensure their children survived the experience. At a policy level there were clear findings. Almost all the families had lived in private rented accommodation: none were dispossessed mortgage-holders. Many had been in private rented accommodation that they liked, some in the same home, for long periods, whilst others moved around frequently.The problem was that this time, when they left or were evicted (the euphemistic term is ‘issued with a Notice of Termination’), they could not find an affordable alternative. They could not get back in. They typically called prospective landlords, or called door-to-door, 50, 60 times only to find the accommodation already gone, or, more likely, to be assailed with “no rent allowance here”. For some, leaving or being evicted was a sudden and brutal process: eg a violent ex-partner turning up and causing trouble, a ratinvasion or the roof falling in. For the majority, though their departure was the landlord deciding to get more rent from tenants. For tenants told to leave, the one thing theyneeded more than anything else was a reference for the next landlord, so they did not argue. Campaigns for tenants to be ‘better informed’ of their ‘rights’, when they have almost none, overlook the inequality of power. With little new housing built in recent years and a dearth of social housing, which can be traced to 1987, a previous austerity period and its cuts in spending on local authority housing, our rising population has put more pressure on accommodation. The bottom of the private rental market gets ‘squeezed’, and those on low incomes are squeezed out. As demand rises, landlords know that they can charge more. Rents move higher and higher above the rent supplement levels that the Department of Social Protection pays, putting them out of reach of those on low incomes. The introduction of the Homeless Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) which permits a 20% increase in rent supplement marks a welcome recognition that rent supplement levels are no longer adequate. The homeless families to whom we spoke had many ideas on how to solve the homelessness crisis, including the opening up of boarded-up local authority homes. For them(and we should listen), local authority accommodation was the ultimate solution, offering security, acceptable standards and affordable rent. The Social Housing Strategy 2020 – a six-year plan to address social-housing needs – commits to the provision of 35,000 new social-housing units, over half (18,000 units) of which are due to come on stream by the end of 2017, with the remainder (17,000 units) scheduled for completion by the end of 2020 at a cost of €3.8bn.While the requirement is clearly immediate, a useful additional measure has been the introduction of a Ministerial direction which requires named local authorities to allocate up to half of available social housing units to homeless (and other special needs) households for the first six months of 2015. Notably, no-one we spoke to expected to get back to private rented accommodation, ever. Kathy Walsh and Brian Harvey Kathy Walsh is Director of KW Research and Associates Ltd, and an experienced social researcher and strategic thinker with expertise in equality and integration.

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    Red Hand

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    NIance For a long time the two issues that appeared to enjoy cross-party support in Northern Ireland (apart from horror of bauble-free direct rule) were one-off housing and visceral anti-abortionism. Now Sinn Fein appears to take a more nuanced approach to abortion. As do the courts. The Belfast High Court has ruled that abortion legislation in Northern Ireland is in breach of human rights law. Until now termination of pregnancy has only been allowed if a woman’s life was at risk or (unlike in the South) there is a permanent or serious risk to her mental or physical health. In a tragic case of foetal anencephaly, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) had brought the case to extend abortion to cases of serious foetal malformation, rape or incest. The British 1967 Abortion Act does not apply to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland’s Attorney General John Larkin said in a brief statement that he was “profoundly disappointed” by the decision and was “considering the grounds for appeal”. In his ruling, Judge Horner said women who were the victims of sexual crime and cases of fatal foetal abnormality were entitled to exemptions in the law. He said that the issue was unlikely to be addressed by the Northern Ireland Executive in the foreseeable future, and that Northern Ireland citizens were entitled to “have their [European Convention on Human] rights protected by the courts”. In early 2015, Sinn Féin effectively vetoed efforts in the Northern Ireland Assembly to prevent the Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast from performing abortions. The party whip, Caitríona Ruane (MLA for South Down), claimed the move by the DUP’s Paul Givan and the SDLP’s Alban Maginness was “an attempt to restrict the right of a woman to obtain a termination in life-threatening circumstances”. Storey-telling The deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin to save the North’s Executive has allowed the Westminster Parliament to vote through cuts for the North, including to Social Welfare. It is, however, promised that £345 million will be put aside for the next four years to top up payments for claimants who lose out in the changes. However, Green Party Assembly member Steven Agnew has derided Social Development Minister Mervyn Storey who, in a written answer, told Agnew that the Social Security Agency paid out approximately £80m per year in its Discretionary Fund over the last four years and that this fund would be redeployed for Social Welfare. In effect, protection seems to be robbing one set of claimants to pay another. Agnew said top-up money appeared to be “the renaming of an already existing budget”. robins on his way One of the biggest beasts of Northern politics, Peter Robinson, has slipped quietly into the good night of political death. Robinson was one of the toughest political scrappers going: however, the constant rumour of scandal and declining health combined to sap his vigour. Although it is rumoured Gerry Adams contributed to expediting his goodbye at end of his final question time as First Minister, the Sinn Féin Front Bench joined the DUP in giving him a standing ovation. That’s a sign of how the two parties are interdependent. Were the Northern Executive a family, their relationship is so dysfunctional social services would be sent in. However, both know they face disaster if the Executive falls. If people reflect too hard on the political extremities they might finish up voting in some moderates. They are not made whole Colm Eastwood’s defeat of uncharismatic Alasdair McDonnell in the SDLP leadership election was a sign of that party’s desperation. The Assembly election is due in May: parties very seldom dump a leader – no matter how poorly performing – so soon before an election. McDonnell’s defeat was particularly humiliating because many of the party’s ‘ABA’ (Anybody But Alasdair) tendency had walked away. The SDLP is haemorrhageing members as well as votes and Eastwood will lead the party away from its middle-class, middle-aged roots to a greener and more leftist future. When Margaret Ritchie was elected leader five years ago, 409 delegates voted. When 32-year-old Eastwood overthrew MacDonnell, only 305 did. Eastwood succeeds McDonnell, Margaret Ritchie, Mark Durkan, John Hume and Gerry Fitt, in that order. Quinn again There was little coverage in the South of the conviction of Quinn Building Products for the death of 24-year-old Fermanagh GAA star Brian Óg Maguire from head injuries in its Derrylin factory. The company, bought last year from IBRC and US bondholders by a holding company which is reinstating the exciting old Quinn regime, pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the safety of an employee and maintain work equipment. Omagh Crown Court found the company’s procedures were inadequate, and “the equipment used was defective”. The judge pointed out that the company had been convicted for the death of another worker in 1997, when it was called Sean Quinn Quarries. road to nowhere you’d know The Executive has announced it is to contribute £75m (€106.5m) to build a nine-mile stretch of dual carriageway from Ballymagorry, north of Strabane, Co Tyrone, to Newbuildings, south of Derry City. The proposed road is part of the proposed A5, from the Monaghan-Tyrone Border to Newbuildings, the North’s largest ever road project. Two years ago a judicial review overturned the decision to grant this planning permission for failure to carry out an appropriate assessment of the Rivers Foyle and Finn Special Areas of Conservation under the EU Habitats directive.. The Executive’s determination to go ahead with the dual carriageway is mysterious. No part of the existing A5 is among the North’s 50 busiest stretches of road. Options of developing the existing road were dismissed, while expanding public transport was not even considered. Case meant to be The GAA’s proposed 38,000-seater Casement Park stadium in West Belfast is enmired in a bitter planning battle. Residents feel they are being railroaded by the Corporate GAA. Anger at the proposal – and Sinn Féin’s support for it – was key to sweeping People Before Profit’s Gerry Carroll onto Belfast City

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    Wicklow again

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    Apolitical blast from the past has returned to haunt the much troubled Wicklow County Council and its former county manager, Eddie Sheehy. Former councillor and once prominent Green Party member, Deirdre de Búrca, recently learned that the Council has abandoned a Supreme Court appeal taken by Sheehy after she secured a High Court judgment in her favour in a long running zoning row. The story dates back to 2004 when de Búrca complained that Fianna Fáil councillor and solicitor, Fachtna Whittle, had breached ethics legislation when he proposed and voted for the rezoning of land near Brittas without disclosing that it was owned by a man represented by his legal practice. The ethics committee of the Council, including Sheehy and then cathaoirleach, John Byrne, considered that while Whittle had been “unwise to propose the motion he did” he had no “beneficial or pecuniary interest” in the zoning and therefore the complaint by de Búrca was “unjustified”. The then Green Party councillor challenged the decision to the High Court which decided in her favour with Judge John Hedigan ruling in 2009 that Sheehy and the Council had not dealt with the zoning and potential conflict-of-interest issues at the core of de Búrca’s complaint. He quashed their report and directed the Council to review the matter. This was not good enough for Sheehy who lodged an appeal, which has been trundling through the justice system ever since, with the Supreme Court. Following his retirement earlier this year, his successors, including acting county manager, Bryan Doyle, have decided to drop the appeal. To add insult to injury solicitors for the Council sought to impose a ‘gagging order’ on de Búrca as part of what has been described by the Wicklow Times as a “settlement” of the action which the former councillor refused to accept. This involves the Council absorbing the estimated hundreds of thousands of euro in costs accrued in the action, one of a number of legal actions Sheehy left behind when he departed earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Minister for the Environment, Alan Kelly, continues to deflect Dáil questions on the outcome of a number of inquiries into various matters involving planners, councillors and developers in the garden county during Sheehy’s tenure. These include the circumstances surrounding contracts agreed between the Council and the developers of the 1400 Charlesland residential scheme near Greystones, Sean Mulryan and Sean Dunne and their partnership company Zapi Ltd. As previously reported in Village a secret contract, providing the then high-flyers with road and other access to the previously landlocked Charlesland site for little or nothing, is under examination by department officials. The Council has insisted that the contract merely involved an ‘exchange of easements’ of six acres of its land. However, according to the agent who helped to acquire the lands, the road access deal was worth tens of millions to the developers with little or no payment in return to the Council. Before the Charlesland 200 acres site had road access it was worth €22m. Once it had planning permission with road access its value jumped tenfold – to €220m. Auctioneer Gabriel Dooley has claimed that he was present when Fianna Fáil councillor, Pat Vance, discussed maps of the planned development with Mulryan and Dunne in Dobbins restaurant in Dublin in early 2003 and offered advice on how to circumvent various planning obstacles including the objections of local members to any material contravention of the local area plan to facilitate the ambitious Charlesland scheme. Vance signed the ‘exchange of easement’ contracts along with Sheehy, the director of services, Tom Murphy and representatives for Mulryan and Dunne. Bray-based Councillor Vance has also been the subject of an ethics complaint by Dooley over failing to disclose property he acquired in the early 2000s om the town in his annual declaration of interests to the Council. A property in question at Saran Wood was sold earlier this year following publication in Villageabout the ongoing and bitter exchanges between Dooley and Vance, among others. Dooley has not been informed of the outcome of any investigation or if one has taken place. Mulryan, meanwhile, is involved with international investors and NAMA in a major residential development in Dublin’s docklands and will surely be hoping that the long-awaited departmental inquiry into the Charlesland controversy will not cause any difficulties. He may be interested to know that one of the senior official asked to deal with the various complaints from Wicklow has also recently retired which, no doubt, has delayed the investigation even further. Frank Connolly

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    Boyne Valley Chamber of Horrors.

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    The descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danaan who constructed the temples along the Boyne Valley in 3200 BC left a legacy of architecture with calendars in stone, solar and lunar maps; and triple spirals bearing witness to their spiritual, scientific and astrological culture. The temples are older than Stonehenge, the Pyramid of Giza and for that matter Homer’s ‘Iliad’ whose source was the Siege of Troy of around 1200 BC. In Irish mythology, Dagda named the Boyne after his wife Boann who was Goddess of the river known in ancient Gaelic as Bóinn. Apart from Enda Kenny, visitors wishing to visit Newgrange and Knowth should note that this is only possible by joining formal tours which leave from the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre which is located on the south bank of the river, close to the village of Donore. It is possible to view the mound at Dowth by going directly to the site but it should be noted that there is no public access to the tombs themselves. Brú na Bóinne urgently needs to overhaul and upgrade its access for visitors. Daily, there are two buses leaving Dublin at 10 a.m. and 1p.m. The 100X leaves from Custom House Quay to Drogheda where you change to the 163. The later bus is a bigger challenge with a wait of 45 minutes in Drogheda. You cannot expect to arrive at the centre until 15.10 at which time it will be nigh impossible to fit into the schedule in the May-September season, and expect to bus it back to Custom House Quay. Coach tours from Dublin are €35 upwards. Car owners and those on tour buses still encounter problems because of the archaic access policy to the sites. Dowth is not open to visitors. Its carvings include ‘The Stone of the Seven Suns’. The Drogheda Conservative (July 5th, 1856) mentioned the explosives used by the Royal Irish Academy’s 1849 ‘excavation’, a plundering expedition causing a huge crater during its work at Dowth in the nineteenth century, leaving the “beautiful tumulus literally torn to pieces. Its stones barrowed out as if it were to facilitate the dissoluting propensities of road contractors”. Knowth is currently open to the public but like Newgrange fraught in terms of actual access. The summer schedule accommodates groups of visitors up to 5.15 pm. Individuals and families are lower in the pecking order. The policy is quite stolid: “there can be no guarantee that everyone will have access to the sites” according to the official leaflet. Pre-booking is only possible through fax or the postal system, addressee: ‘Reservations’. The latter method is fittingly but frustratingly prehistoric. Stonehenge, for example, has an IT system to optimise the visitor’s experience. Not so at ‘Brú na Bóinne’ whose visitors centre which opened in 1997 uses a sticker system and an internal shuttle-bus service to the sites – a ten to fifteen minute journey away. It already offends that the centre (if necessary at all) is remote in its location. It is ‘disastrously’ situated south of the river whereas Newgrange is across the Boyne, beautifully built on a curve of the river. There is a hut on-site within metres of Newgrange where the staff corral the next group of visitors in the slow and muddled process of access while the preceding group has been shuttled ignominiously in and out. The vaunted ‘experience’ of Newgrange based on the quasi-museum at the centre cannot but fail to deliver. The exhibition meets only minimum standards, replete with predictable plastic skeletons and tiring mannequins wearing primitive raggy costumes. The miniature model of the prehistoric community is appropriate for children but has little or no appeal to adults. The biggest boast is the replica of Newgrange itself which is a filleted version of the passageway and demonstrably inferior to the original, in every imaginable way. The actual passageway is 24 metres long, slopes upwards to meet the level of the light box under which it is possible to walk, giving the effect of a prehistoric fanlight window on entering the temple. The problem with the replica is not just the phoneyness of the materials used but the crucial failure of scale. The centre with contemporary visuals, artefacts and laminated murals cumulatively does not register anything like the impact of Newgrange or Knowth. The centre offers (as consolation?) a twenty-minute DVD of the experience costing €16. It would be easy to leave this experience feeling short-changed. Depression would not be unreasonable as one headed for the fleeting bus. Decidedly, there is a school-tour atmosphere about this experience, from stickered visitors waiting for their shuttle bus to finally getting on site. It has slavishly pursued the kitsch motif of circularity in design. Spirals almost jump out at you everywhere, like attenuated hypnosis. One notorious chunk of glass in the circular glazed walls has an embedded spiral on a circular window. The restaurant is good but pricey, taking advantage of affluent and hungry quasi-hostages on the long wait to see the temples. Soft drinks, crisps and such are available but not at Lidl prices. The car park has had thefts from parked cars. Walkways outdoors are paved and fenced, as well as hedged off. There is no great incentive to go out and ramble as your shuttle bus is the central focus. There is a sense of being confined to barracks in the ever circular interiors of the centre. Outdoors at last, the centre is set in lush pastoral landscape, low on the horizon. You cross a substantial footbridge and traverse the hemmed-in pathways until reaching the shuttle park which is a small circular yard. The shuttles are slightly larger than mini-buses, taking about 20-24 persons at a time. On alighting from the shuttle you have to wait for the previous group to exit the site. You wait in a corralled area for your guide near the checkpoint hut. Released into the field before Newgrange there are further delays as the guide mechanically ‘explains’ the passage tomb. Mystical

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    O’BRIEN-DESMOND LETTER

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    Denis’s mind is on the big picture and packing in as much litigation as possible, while fellow billionaire Dermot spends too much time on philanthropy, his kids’ burger thing, and golf.

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