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No one ever charged with murderous 1972 Dublin bombings

Public Accounts Committee needs to answer serious questions in the absence of key witnesses in Project Eagle investigation

The Stack family were satisfied that the meeting had led to some closure about their father’s murder. That was until the general election

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This November marks the second anniversary of my successful gender equality case at the Equality Tribunal against NUI Galway for its failure to appoint me to the post of Senior Lecturer. It was hailed as a landmark case and should have been a call to arms, not just for NUI Galway, but for all third-level institutions. However, the awakening is slow and I doubt that much has changed on the ground – or in attitudes amongst university management. Currently, many staff in NUI Galway are disillusioned and afraid. Few staff feel able to challenge the authorities. Many are in precarious posts or worried they won’t be promoted. Some staff, I gather, have been reprimanded for speaking out. Fear has filtered through to the students. Recently a society was told it could not display images of Jim Browne, the NUI Galway President in its ‘Mr Browne’s Boys’ cartoon T-shirts at a table supporting five women lecturers pursuing similar litigation. Last April a cartoon exhibition to raise funds and awareness about the five women was booked on campus by the Students Union, but was taken down by Security in the middle of the night. My case was a landmark case partly because, despite being in the public service, universities have a lot of autonomy, as they should. However, this has led to a lack of transparency in processes such as the promotion and appointment of academics. This has in turn led to an abuse, or perceived abuse, of power. The universities have been getting away with this for a long time now. However, change comes slowly because university management is not answerable to any board of trustees or shareholders. The governing bodies seem powerless or unwilling to effect change. Ireland has an appalling international record for gender equality in academia. It has been ranked second worst in Europe after Malta for its Glass Ceiling Index in academia. Irish third-level institutions have a lot of catching up to do. The facts were stark in NUI Galway when I took my case in 2009. The proportion of successful applicants was stunningly different for men and women. 50% of male candidates were successful compared to the 6.7% of female candidates who were successful (see Table 1). Summing up twelve points in my favour, the Equality Tribunal ruling highlighted that “perhaps the most significant frailty in the respondent’s [NUI Galway’s] rebuttal” was that in all four recent rounds of promotion to Senior Lecturer combined, men had a one in two and women less than a one in three chance of being promoted. One successful man had not even been eligible to apply. I donated my €70,000 award to five other women who, despite being fully deserving of promotion, had been unsuccessful. Their course of action is far more difficult, with only the High Court as an option because the Equality Tribunal deadline was long past. What I find extraordinary is that the university, instead of conceding errors were made, has chosen to spend large sums of taxpayers’ money fighting these women in the courts through an on-going, protracted and emotionally draining, to say nothing of financially stressful, legal wrangle. The Equality Tribunal ruling specified that NUI Galway should send a report to what is now the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission within 12 months of the ruling. I recently got hold of this and am stunned at what took them 13 months to deliver. It comprises two parts, the larger part being an appendix. The first part, three pages long, sets the tone in stating that “a review had already been underway” but fails to specify that this ‘review’ was actually completed in 2011, three years before the Equality Tribunal ruling and is in fact referred to in the ruling. The first part goes on to repeat the recommendations from that report and devotes one page to the recommendations for the 2013/14 round of promotions, initiated a year before the ruling. No reference is made to the fact that 20 of the candidates deemed suitable but not promoted in that round appealed and that only 18% of female candidates were promoted compared to 35% of male candidates. The consultant’s report commissioned on the back of these appeals is not available even under Freedom of Information (FOI). There was a burst of outrage in the university on foot of my successful case and the action taken by the five other women. The injustice to the five women was immediately raised at the NUI Galway Údarás (Governing Body). I understand the discussion was heated. However, the minutes of that elevated body are only available under FOI where, as part of the process, any useful information has been redacted. Several heated meetings of the NUI Galway Academic Council, that comprises professors, deans and heads of school, and so is overwhelmingly male, resulted in nothing. It was told it was powerless to change matters. Large numbers of students joined the campaign to support the five women, horrified to learn that they had not been promoted. “I am joining the campaign because [name of one of the five women] is the best lecturer I’ve ever had” was a common refrain. The Students Union and both staff unions gave their full support and 26 student societies signed up in solidarity to the campaign. This support continues. What has happened since? A task force was established with much public fanfare and it delivered its final report in May 2016. This was hard-hitting, if limited, since it did not address the position of the five women or focus on non-academic staff, where matters are even worse. The recommendations of the task force are not faring particularly well. It recommended that 50% of the “major influential” committees should be chaired by women by 2018. However, College Deans (all men) chair such committees and three of them were recently replaced by three more men. The task force suggested a cascade system of promotion. This is being watered down. Although 52% of lecturers are women,

The election of Donald Trump is just the latest headache for an already precariously balanced Irish government. The election of the man whose words were described as ‘racist and dangerous’ by Enda Kenny just a few months ago does not in itself pose an imminent threat to the Taoiseach’s political survival but it certainly intensifies the political and economic uncertainty already heightened by Brexit. While most Irish people would agree with the sentiments expressed by Kenny during the US election campaign in response to Trump’s consistent attacks on immigrants, women, minorities and the disabled, it may not have been, in hindsight, the cleverest thing in the world for the Taoiseach to express such forthright opinions about a possible incumbent of the White House. No wonder he was on the phone to ‘The Donald’ less than twenty-fours hours of the shock US presidential result to ensure that the door will still be open when he brings the bowl of shamrock to Washington in March. It would not be so awkward for Kenny if he was not already under pressure to set a date for his departure as leader of his party and the government. And it will have to be both, despite the kite he has recently flown about staying on as Taoiseach while relinquishing the leadership of Fine Gael. He has already claimed at various times that his experience is needed to navigate the turbulent waters following Brexit but he can’t have any such illusions about the impact of the latest international shock to the Irish economy from the promised Trump era. The most immediate is Trump’s promise to reduce domestic corporation tax from 35% to 15% with its inevitable consequence for Irish tax revenues from multinationals but others include his threat to deport undocumented immigrants and to place obstacles on young people making study and work trips to the States. Not to mention the knock-on effect of his victory for the election of extreme right-wing forces in France, the Netherlands, Italy and possibly Germany if the refugee flow persists, over the coming year. Kenny knows he is hanging on by a thread and the rival contenders for leadership will almost certainly intensify their campaigns in the new year with the expectation of a contest by late Spring, if not before. Neither can Michael Noonan expect to receive any retrospective laurels from his cringe-making welcome for president-elect Trump on his arrival in Shannon in 2014. Whatever about Kenny the finance minister is a political dead-man walking, for a number of reasons. In the week before Budget Day in October, according to a number of flies on the wall in Merrion Street, there was the usual flurry of activity and panic in the Department of Finance as the big day approached. Except the nerves of officials were frayed, not by the well flagged budget, but by the minister’s date with the Public Accounts Committee days later where his role in the Project Eagle affair was to come under scrutiny. Noonan had been informed by NAMA executives, in March 2014, of the dodgy fee payments associated with the planned sale by the agency of its £5.6 bn Northern Ireland property portfolio to US fund, Pimco. While Pimco withdrew from the sale on the advice of its compliance team the sale went ahead to Cerberus who paid just £1.24bn for the commercial and property assets just weeks later. Although he protests otherwise, Noonan could have made known his reservations about continuing the sales process in the light of the shocking information about backhanders to legal and other insiders, including a former advisor to NAMA, but did not do so. It then emerged that Cerberus was represented by US firm Brown Rudnick, the same law firm that acted for Pimco. And that Brown Rudnick along with Belfast solicitors, Tughans, and a number of others including Frank Cushnahan a former member of the agency’s Northern Ireland Advisory Committee (NIAC) were due to receive £15m between them in success fees from Cerberus for their assistance with securing the deal. Former NI first minister, Peter Robinson was also named a possible recipient in the arrangements. At the early October meeting of the PAC, Noonan defended his position and argued that he was not legally empowered to interfere with the NAMA sale. He rounded on committee members, notably Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Fein, who clearly got under his skin when she questioned his failure to intervene. He tetchily reminded her that her colleague, Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister had not expressed any concerns over the recommendation of Cushnahan as a member of the NIAC by former Stormont finance minister, Sammy Wilson in 2010. He told Fianna Fáil members of the PAC that it was their man, the late Brian Lenihan, who had passed on Cushnahan’s name to NAMA as an appropriate appointment to the NIAC at the time. However, nothing could disguise Noonan’s discomfort at being subjected to detailed questions about his role in the controversy over his hours of evidence during which he was accused of bluster by McDonald. His reputation as a financial guru who has safely steered the ship through the Troika years into economic recovery has also been severely dented not least by his miscalculation of the available ‘fiscal space’ or financial reserves in the Fine Gael election manifesto earlier this year and over his dithering on the question of the massive tax avoidance by US multinationals and vulture funds. When the full extent of the climb down in the face of the Garda threat of all out strike became known on the eve of the mass walk out by AGSI and GRA members of the force, Noonan commented that he was taken aback by the potential €50m-plus cost of the eleventh-hour deal proposed by the Workplace Relations Commission. But nobody, in government not to mind opposition, believes that the finance minister would not have been aware of the concessions on pay, overtime and allowances given to the Garda to avert

Stephen Donnelly is an accidental politician. There he was sitting in front of his TV minding his own business, watching the news pictures of IMF officials striding the streets of Dublin. He saw the threat. “I’m trained in this stuff – what happens when the IMF arrives in your country, the mistakes that get made, and how to protect people in a context of painful economic correction”. He had a sense, from watching the government make mistakes, “that our political system was missing some key skills. I couldn’t just sit by and watch it happen”. A whirlwind election campaign saw the new deputy take his seat in the Dáil.  Endearingly, his first day he mistakenly went to the gate of the next-door National Museum in search of his new place of work. The 2011 election “created a politburo”. A huge majority in the Dáil was controlled by a cabinet that was ruled by four people. This “consolidation of power” made for a highly dysfunctional Dail with parliament effectively “sidelined, left with the role of observer to critical decisions affecting millions of people”. Donnelly was unimpressed with his initiations in the Dáil. “I, and many other TDs, invested a great deal of time and effort in drafting amendments to proposed legislation and then spent hours debating them, only to find that none of them were ever, ever accepted”. It is not easy to break into politics in Ireland. You need to be family, you need to be part of the party machines and you need resources. Irish politics has been unique, with economic crisis and austerity merely nudging politics to the left without any real change in personnel or direction. New faces and new ideas are scarce. Donnelly stands out in this regard. It’s not easy to start a new political party in Ireland. Donnelly gave it a go, but came a bit of a cropper. Ambition, however, will not hold him back. He is an enthusiast for the ‘new’ politics. He is unforgiving of the “jaded commentary” that asserts “this Dáil is a mess”. “Parliament is relevant for now. Parliament has a role. It is working”. “I’m talking with TDs and Senators across the political spectrum who are flying. This Dáil provides them with the opportunity to make progress on issues they care about and that matter for the country. That is what good politics should be about”. This could go in the future but “once you empower people it is hard to revert back”. TDs who have never been “remotely happy with their role on the sidelines” are unlikely to allow a return to the dysfunctionality that was a feature of previous majority governments. Tax avoidance by vulture funds costs the State between €10bn and €20bn, according to Donnelly. He offers treatment  of this issue as an example of the ‘new’ politics in action. He raised it at leader’s questions a few months ago but the government had no position on it. He then talked to politicians across Fianna Fáil, Labour and even Fine Gael and prepared a policy paper on the issue. Fianna Fáil then announced they would not vote through any Finance Bill that did not address the issue. Michael Noonan presented an amendment to address the issue. Donnelly prepared a technical note on the amendment, pursued the matter further through the new Budget Oversight Committee, and met Michael Noonan privately on the matter. A further amendment was put forward by the Minister. Another detailed technical note issued from Donnelly: further change was promised. This new-found efficacy, he allows, may reflect the fact he’s a more experienced legislator in his second mandate. However, his case is that this is the ‘new’ politics in action. This would not have happened in the last Dáil. “TDs can now raise issues, co-operate across party lines, and have some confidence that the executive will respond. TDs have greater and more varied forms of leverage open to them. They have more possibilities for engagement on issues. More responsibility leads to better outcomes. My hope is that is what we are seeing now through this ‘new’ politics”. He comes across as somewhat unforgiving in his first responses on issues. He is not patient with popular disaffection. If we are not happy with our political system, we need to be aware that: “the political system is a manifestation of the country. If it has faults we need to remember we get to choose those who run it”. If we are not happy with our economic system, we need to keep in mind that: “we live in one of the most prosperous countries in the world. We have high quality public services compared to most countries”. However, conviction gives way to further reflection and nuance when he is pushed. This is what makes him an interesting politician. “Are we short of political vision? Yes. Do we need more political vision? Yes. Would the public respond positively to this? Yes”. It gets more interesting when he suggests politicians “need to get better at laying it out”. We don’t do much political vision and the bit we do, we don’t do very well. That last element is missing from most commentaries, but it could be the real stumbling block. Still he doesn’t let go. “We have an awful habit here of blaming the supposedly lazy or self-interested politicians for everything. That’s a trap and it disempowers us. If we want to see change, we have to stand up and make it happen”. Donnelly’s political vision is set out in neat frames. We should be building “a country where every child grows up with opportunities and everyone can live with dignity. We have a fantastic country but we’re still a long way from achieving this”. If we are to pursue this goal, we need first to secure “sustainable exchequer revenues”. That means “backing SMEs and Foreign Direct Investment, stopping unwanted tax avoidance, and responding well to Brexit”. Secondly, we need targeted investment “looking at short-term and long-term