Frank Connolly

The NAMA story is the media gift that keeps on giving. Not a day passes but further damaging revelations emerge of the manner in which the agency charged with selling off the distressed and other assets arising from the State’s property collapse has behaved. Charged with disposing of commercial and residential properties on an enormous scale across Ireland, the UK, Europe and the US, NAMA and its executives have regularly encountered media criticism, court actions and political challenges. The latest such challenge comes from the Namaleaks project sponsored by TDs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly. People who consider themselves victims of NAMA can post their experiences online and anonymously on this website. Launching it in mid-August, Wallace claimed that Namaleaks.com is a secure and anonymous whistleblowing platform if used in a careful and discreet fashion. He advised that users should: “Take your personal computer and go to a network that isn’t associated with you or your employer, such as at a coffee shop. Ideally you should go to one that you don’t already frequent. Leave your phone at home, and buy your coffee with cash. Choose a coffee shop without security cameras, or a spot within the shop where cameras aren’t recording. Be aware of your surroundings, turn your screen away from curious neighbours”. Speaking to Village Wallace added that: “We have received some really interesting correspondence but obviously we require hard evidence and we are very measured as to how we approach it”. According to Wallace, it is too early to say how much information will be processed through the site but already signs are that people, including former property developers and professionals as well as many who have lost their homes and businesses as a result of the crisis, are prepared to share their stories. He claims to have up to forty separate sources of information concerning NAMA and its operations and recently took exception to an effort by one hostile newspaper to the suggestion that he is being used by one or two disgruntled but powerful developers to undermine the work of the agency. Given the scale of transfers going on in Ireland’s distressed property market where a small number of wealthy and powerful vulture funds are acquiring substantial commercial and residential portfolios through NAMA or from receivers, at huge discounts, it is certainly inevitable that there will be sore losers. With the news that many of these funds have been availing of the controversial Section 110 tax status to greatly minimise their taxes on vast property transactions, the questions over the manner in which the State has allowed unprecedented transfers of Irish wealth to global funds are likely to intensify. US fund Cerberus paid just a paltry €2,500 in taxes from its €1.6bn purchase of Project Eagle, NAMA’s Northern Ireland loan book, a deal that is mired in controversy and inquiries on both sides of the border, in Britain and in the US, as reported extensively in Village. It was Mick Wallace who first revealed in July 2015 that a number of people, including a senior politician or party was to receive monies from the sale of Project Eagle to Cerberus. It has since emerged that a member of the Northern Ireland Advisory Board of NAMA, Frank Cushnahan, was to receive a €5m fee payment from the deal, while solicitor John Coulter was involved in routing funds from the purchaser to an offshore account. Although denied by NAMA the controversy implicated others at executive level in the agency including its former head of asset management, Ronnie Hanna, who resigned from his post in late 2014 just six months after the sale to Cerberus was agreed. Competing bidders claimed that Cushnahan and Hanna were involved in meetings with them in advance of the bidding process, while Hanna worked in an executive role with NAMA. Both men and Coulter have been questioned by the PSNI in connection with the Project Eagle purchase. Peter Robinson was the most prominent political casualty of the affair and announced his resignation as First Minister and DUP party leader in November last year, although he insisted that he had done nothing wrong in relation to Project Eagle. This followed the appearance at the Stormont finance committee of loyalist flags protester and blogger, Jamie Bryson, who said that Robinson was to receive monies from the transaction. Bryson’s appearance at the finance committee in September 2015 is now the subject of fresh controversy after it emerged that he was coached in advance by its then chairman, Sinn Féin MLA, Daithi McKay. Bryson texted McKay and his SF colleague Thomas O’Hara in advance of his appearance at committee during September 2015 and received advice on how best to get Robinson’s name into the proceedings without being blocked on procedural grounds. Bryson was widely blamed for leaking the damaging texts but vigorously denied doing so. A member of the Stormont finance committee, Jim Wells, told Village that Bryson leaked his own texts because he was annoyed that a loyalist parade near his home in Rasharkin, county Antrim was recently stopped by the Parades Commission and local nationalists. Again, Bryson disputes this. However, Village has learned that Bryson is almost certainly the source of the leak to the media which brought down McKay. In the wake of the leaked texts, McKay, stood down as a Sinn Féin MLA. O’Hara also resigned his Sinn Féin positions. Following McKay’s resignation 18 members of the party in North Antrim did likewise in a rare moment of collective disunity and internal dissension for Sinn Féin in the North. Among the claims being made by Monica Digney, a former SF member of Ballymena District Council, is that McKay would not have acted without clearance from others further up the party hierarchy but again this is denied. In this regard the other parties at Stormont have come looking unsuccessfully for the head of Sinn Féin finance minister and former finance committee member, Máirtin O’Muilleoir, who was mentioned in the leaked texts but it

Irish politics insincerely enmires itself in the need for joined-up thinking, that ubiquitous cliché. But it skirts around the best place for it: amalgamating our erratic but once again soaring economic genius with other more real agendas – making sure we pursue ends and not just means, that we advance social, environmental, cultural and transparency agendas. Quality of Life. Not just GDP, which measures, according to Bobby Kennedy, “everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. Once in a while we get an insight into where our politicians stand on the economy and society. For example, Enda Kenny’s principal vision is to make Ireland the best little country in the world in which to do business. That’s shocking dereliction for a country’s chief visionmaker. The only “absolute red line” issue in 2010 for the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, in international talks about Ireland’s banking bailout was retaining Ireland’s Corporation Tax Rate of 12.5%. Then-Tánaiste Mary Coughlan confirmed it was “non-negotiable”. Similarly tax credits for research and Ireland’s 12.5 per cent corporation tax rate, were among the “red line issues” for Ireland outlined by the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan to an EU committee on taxation that visited Dublin last year after the LuxLeaks tax-avoidance scandal. It is clear that petty red lines flow in the blood of most of our inestimably unimaginative leaders. Not once has a government minister asserted that social-welfare rates, income inequality, Traveller welfare or quality-of-life indicators were any sort of red-line factor. It’s always wheedling businesses and its horrible corporation-tax rates. Sometimes we see deference to corporations and multinationals in a broader vista. There was Michael Noonan’s ludicrous slurpings over a bovine Donald Trump on a red carpet at Shannon on the promise of some golf dollars to the peasants in Doonbeg. There’s the silence on Shannon rendition flights since ethical objections to the warfare and kidnappings effected by transient US troops using the airport as a base risk attracting a spoonful of disapproval from our friends in the headquarters of capitalism. There is our longstanding deference to international pharma and the inflationary effect this has on Irish medical costs, because many of its purveyors have their EU headquarters in Ireland. But the most Orwellian moment in the history of tax and the relationship between corporations and governments everywhere came at the end of August, courtesy of the EU Commission’s ruling on Apple’s tax liabilities to Ireland. It was pure Myles na Gopaleen. The EU Commission of course dramatically ruled against Apple, whose EU headquarters employing 6000 people is Cork. Apple paid an effective rate of tax on its earnings in 2014 of 0.005% (not much). It has pulled off the scam by filching profits into a special ‘stateless company’ with its headquarters in Ireland. Apple paid the standard 12.5pc corporate tax on its Irish earnings – indeed it is our biggest taxpayer – but it contrived simply not to earn much in Ireland. “The profits did not have any factual or economic justification. The “head office” had no employees, no premises and no real activities,” said Margrethe Vestager, the EU spoilsport competition chief. Paul Ryan, speaker of the US House of Representatives – admittedly not the smartest guide, claimed: “This is precisely the kind of unpredictable and heavyhanded taxation that kills jobs and opportunity”. Moving sharply to contradict himself he then pontificated: “Above all, this is yet another reason why we need to fix our tax code. We need more American companies to invest their money and create jobs right here in the United States. Today’s decision should be a spur to action”. Perhaps indeed it should. But you’d think even Paul Ryan would know that the action should be for people, not for corporations. The mishmash of national rules and bilateral treaties that determine how much tax companies owe, and to whom, is egregiously dated. It was designed for the manufacturing age. Business today is increasingly digital, services-based and driven by intangible assets, including rights to exploit intellectual property, from patents to logos. These are easier than physical assets to shift from subsidiaries in high-tax countries to those in low-tax ones. Hence the relentless rise of tax planning as a fundament of multinationals’ greedball business plans. The OECD conservatively reckons that the resulting revenue losses to national exchequers have grown to as much as $240 billion a year, or 10% of global corporate income tax. The ethics of this are revolting. The growth of the likes of Apple, the world’s biggest company by capitalisation, is at the expense of ordinary people whose countries forego the benefits of equitably taxing them. The US’s 500 largest firms hold more than $2tr in profits offshore. Its tax laws encourage this, because – to facilitate American corporate colonialism – profits its companies make abroad are taxable in America only when repatriated. Unless Donald Trump comes to town. Anyway the Commission wants Apple – with perhaps (many) others to follow – to reimburse Ireland for unpaid taxes of €13bn, plus interest that might amount to another €6bn. That’s €2,600-€4,000 per head of population: far more to the poor if equitably distributed. This could change the country, beleaguered after nearly a decade of austerity. It could take a chunk off the national debt, which now stands at €200 billion. It could pay a few years of the Universal Social Charge (USC) which brings in around €4bn a year annually. It could put a rocket under the school building programme between 2016 and 2021 currently limited to capital of €2.8bn, intended to deliver 310 major extension/refurbishment projects and 14 new schools. More enticingly still €13bn is the exact figure budgeted for our health system this year. Or it could pay more than twice over for the Government’s Action Plan on Housing which commits €5.5bn for building social housing and infrastructure between now and 2021. The government claims €5.5bn would fund 47,000 social houses and help to end long-term homelessness. So why do we hear so much about the need to

Children are more than twice as likely to end up in care in one region of the country as they are in another, official figures from the child and family agency Tusla have shown. The records show that the number of children ending up subject to care orders is significantly above the national average in the HSE South region. There were 614 care orders in the South during 2014 – which ended up higher than two of the other regions (Dublin Mid-Leinster and the West) even when combined. Over half of those care orders, 320 in all, were in the city and county of Cork which meant that out of the 1,632 children to enter care in that year, almost one fifth were in Cork when the country makes up just 11% of the Irish population. Detailed analysis of the figures on the basis of population aged under 17 bears out the stark difference in rates around the country. On a national level, 142 children per 100,000 ended up in care during the course of 2014. However, the rate for the HSE South was significantly higher at 209 and the rate significantly lower in Dublin Mid Leinster where it was just 81. The other two regions – HSE West and HSE Dublin North East – were closer to the national average and stood at 125 and 158 respectively. Professor Pat Dolan, a childcare expert from NUI Galway, told Village that ultimately care orders should develop a consistency across the country but that “supply and demand” was still playing a major part. He said: “If you look back in the eighties, we really only discovered child sexual abuse and there was a massive increase in referrals after the Kilkenny incest case. Was there suddenly a proliferation of abuse of children? Or did we just become much more aware of referring it into the garda and social work systems? There are trends in this. The other main factor has to do with availability of service. If you take residential care, the more children’s homes you build, the more you fill. There is an issue of understanding this in terms of services available. The more [children the services] can see, the more these numbers will go up. If you have waiting lists, the numbers stay down – that doesn’t mean the cases aren’t there. But if you buy a Panadol in Cork, it should be the same dosage as everywhere else. It should be the same in terms of service provision. It should be the same regardless of where you are but the one thing we know is that it’s not”. Professor Dolan, who is Director of the Child and Family Research Centre in NUIG, said unusual spikes like this were not uncommon and that after high-profile cases of abuse referrals could suddenly rise. Similarly, highly publicised cases of abuse in care settings could have the opposite effect and lead to a reduction in the number of children being placed. He said that while poverty was a key factor – the country also tended to concentrate services of this type in areas that are more deprived. He said; “What is the level of abuse in middle and upper class Dublin? It’s not policed as much from a social perspective. [So the question becomes] is there far more abuse in one area, or is it just that we are looking much more closely? “It’s a problem and provision issue. In some areas, you have more social workers seeking care orders in some communities. It’s almost like a siege for them but you would wonder why this is the case in Cork”. Nationally, 1,632 children were taken into care in 2014 with over two-thirds of those cases involving a voluntary admission. There were 163 cases – around 10% of the total – involving emergency care orders and another 198  where interim care orders being used. One case involving a detention order of the High Court was also recorded. The figures – provided under FOI – were also listed according to age, with the largest number of cases, 231 in total, involving babies of twelve months or less. Significantly, of those cases – over 100 involved some form of care order and only 130 were by voluntary admission. By comparison, of the 118 cases involving children of eight years of age, 100 of those were a voluntary admission where a parent had given consent. In a statement, Tusla said: “Children and young people are referred into [our] Child Protection and Welfare Services in each of its four regions (West, South, Dublin North East and Dublin Mid Leinster). The rate of referrals is affected by a range of factors in each region including, but not limited to, population, demographics, deprivation levels, addiction issues and the level of supports available, e.g. family support services. These can in turn be affected by the social and economic history of the region. By Ken Foxe

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