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    Ungenerous Ireland

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    The 2015 Summer refugee ‘crisis’ was the moment when refugees entered the European consciousness as an existential dilemma. Many European media asked if this influx represented the death of the Schengen line, the free travel zone and even of the European project. The pan-European furore that followed contributed to the Brexit vote. Indeed it is difficult to think of that time without being reminded of scenes of refugees at Calais attempting to make their way across the sea to Britain and of Nigel Farage campaigning in front of a billboard depicting long lines of refugees. However, to a large degree Irish society has escaped the pan-European panic. There have been no terrorist attacks in Ireland, and neither immigration nor the recent refugee influxes have been a major factor in any of our elections. News this week that one of the perpetrators of the London Bridge attack spent time in Ireland is notable as the first time Ireland has featured in international discussions of Islamist terrorism. On the face of it Ireland would appear to have been unscathed by the xenophobic political tensions that have been spurred in other countries. However, consider Graph 1 on Irish asylum applications. 2015, the year of the refugee crisis, should have been the year in which Ireland accepted its most refugees. And yet it is was in 2002 that applications peaked for asylum, at 11634.     Perhaps the recession led to the drop, yet if we look at the table it really begins to plummet in 2003 and 2004, boom years of great economic prosperity in the Republic, before gradually dropping to a recent low of 916 in 2013. For the sake of clarity it is important to note that an asylum-seeker is an applicant for refugee status – someone hoping to be declared a refugee. Like other European nations Ireland is obliged through international treaties to accept refugees. Refugees are defined as those who are forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. The situation in countries like Syria is so bad that many of them are accepted to be refugees, without question: they do not have to go through the process of seeking asylum. For example in Germany in 2016 57% of Syrians entered as refugees. The figures for people entering the country as asylum-seekers are different from those entering as refugees. Before 2015 Ireland’s efforts went almost entirely into asylum-seekers rather than refugees. So a big reason for the strange graph is that most of the crisis in 2015 were refugees, not asylum seekers. The Irish Refugee Programme (IRPP) was set up as a direct response to the 2015 refugee crisis. By the end of 2016 760 refugees had arrived through it. The State committed to taking in 4,000 people over three years through the IRPP. The commitment of the IRPP applies to two different groups of people. The first group is made up of people living in Turkey and Lebanon who have fled the Syrian war and already have refugee status. The second is made up of people who arrived in Greece and Italy by sea from Syria whose asylum applications are to be assessed in Ireland. 520 of the 760 refugees accepted in 2016 belonged to the first group, 240 to the second. It is most dramatic to note that Germany, albeit with demographic demands, will take a million refugees over the same period. To further complicate matters it is important also to note the success rates for asylum-seekers in different countries. Ireland’s is particularly low. For example over the period 2012-14 Ireland accepted only 677 asylum applications from asylum-seekers. Norway accepted 20 times as many per head of population. The US accepted 68,317 asylum-seekers in the same period, the most in the world; Germany 48,000; the UK 28,000. During that period the US accepted 16.7% of asylum-seekers; Germany 7.7%; the UK 16%; Ireland 3%. In fact only 21% were rejected with the majority deferred or closed for some reason, including that the asylum-seeker leaves the country. Separate from asylum-seekers and refugees are ordinary migrants, those who come to Ireland for economic reasons, to make a better life for themselves and their families. The total figure for non-nationals in Ireland is 584,000 out of a total population of 4.7 m. The figure of 12.5% of the population is substantially higher than that in Britain where it is 8%, a little more than in the US. However it should be remembered that Ireland’s immigrants mostly arrived in the last twenty years. Other richer countries will have accepted generations of immigration. In recent years the categories have become confused as many asylum applicants are in fact economic migrants attempting to use asylum as a way to enter into wealthy western countries. In spite of how perilous their economic situation can be, abject poverty has not been recognised as a criterion for refugee status. Instead, the Irish State’s suspicion that many asylum applicants are in fact economic migrants in refugee’s clothing lies at the heart of direct provision. In his paper on ‘Social Welfare Law and Asylum-seekers in Ireland’, Liam Thornton sets out how welfare conditions for migrants decreased considerably after direct provision was introduced in the year 2000. Before 2000 asylum-seekers could avail of social welfare like anyone else in Irish society once they had met the necessary conditions. This included payments for medical conditions, non-contributory pensions if the asylum-seeker was over 65, one- parent family payments and child benefit. Asylum-seekers who did not qualify for pensions or single parent allowances could still avail of  the same supplementary welfare allowance that anyone else in the State could qualify for. After the direct provision system was introduced asylum applicants instead received their supplementary welfare as a benefit in kind in the form of bed and board with an additional small payment per adult per week and an additional smaller payment per child per week. The meagre accommodations that ground Ireland’s system of ‘direct provision’ are

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    Time for more Times

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    Launching a new newspaper is a tricky proposition at the best of times, but in the middle of historic declines in print circulation, as titles struggle to manage the transition to digital first publication, it seems downright bloody-minded. Yet that’s what News UK’s Dublin outlet has decided to do, with a daily print product following the model of the Sunday Times. While the Sunday Times has been producing an Irish edition for several years, print readers have had to settle for the international edition of The Times since the 1990s, when an Irish version of the paper was printed by the Examiner. However, in September 2015 a daily digital Irish edition was launched, building on the back of the Sunday paper, with ‘editions’ available for download to phone and tablets. But the newspaper market has changed drastically since the 1990s, both in Ireland and internationally, and the internet, then a novelty, is eating news. In the last decade in particular, the internet has moved off desktops and into everyone’s pockets with the introduction of smartphone technology, at the same time that advertising revenues were scaled back due to the Great Recession; and concentrated away from newspapers due to the rise of Google and Facebook. In this environment, where most titles have lost up to half their peak circulation at the height of the boom, launching a new title might seem downright reckless. But Richard Oakley, editor of the Ireland edition of The Times, thinks they have identified a gap in the market. “Our reader is someone interested in quality, they have a broad outlook”, says Oakley: “The Times is for people who want news at fixed times. We’re not pandering to the breaking news agenda. Our readers are not slaves to breaking news. We’re well suited to business people, people with an interest in sport, people who want quality reading on politics and a worldview. We are more outward looking than any Irish paper, we have an office in London, correspondents around the world. We feel there isn’t a newspaper like this in the marketplace at the moment, with strong coverage of things like Brexit and Trump from people on the ground, from the number of correspondents on the ground. We’ve been printing the international edition in Ireland, and we looked at that and asked ourselves, why not add our Ireland content into that newspaper, along with UK and international content, producing an Ireland edition in print to go along with the digital edition”. The new Irish print edition will, however, involve more than simply adding existing Irish digital output to the international edition. The online product required about 20 to 25 articles per day, while the print product could require up to twice that number. Paradoxically, this may actually serve to increase subscriptions to the online edition, since it now offers an expanded product because of the needs of the print newspaper. The print launch may also have another promotional effect, whether unintended or not. Morning Ireland’s “It Says in The Papers” segment does not as a rule include the stories broken by the digital Times Ireland edition, something that may change when the reviewers have a physical copy of a paper to peruse. “Roughly the first seven pages will be Irish, then Irish opinion and Irish sports spreads, plus six to eight Irish business stories”, says Oakley. “It will take a similar shape to the digital edition, with an Irish splash unless there’s a massive international story, then Irish news, UK news, world news, and with Irish sports, business, opinion sections”. News UK won’t discuss its circulation or revenue targets for the newspaper, so it’s not straightforward to define what might be considered a success. The Times international edition manages less than 3,000 copies daily, on a par with the other English titles, the Guardian, Express, Telegraph and the Financial Times. By contrast, the English titles creating dedicated Irish content, the Mirror, Daily Mail, and the Sun, as well as the Irish Daily Star, jointly owned by Independent News & Media, manage 30-60,000 copies daily. The Examiner, the lowest performing domestic daily title, also hovers at the 30,000 circulation mark, ten times the circulation of the Times international edition. Catching up with the Examiner might seem an ambitious project for the new daily Times Ireland Edition – and it certainly would pose a target that could not be achieved overnight – but it would provide some benchmark for what might be possible. However, even if the print edition does manage to capture advertising revenues not available to the digital edition through supplements, inserts and other features, this is still a brave and high-risk product launch in a market facing long-term decline. Written by Gerard Cunningham

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    Not quite feeling the Bern

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    In the foyer collected a curious mix of tattooed half-American lefties, millionaires, NAMA refugees, journalists, politicians and the plummy denizens of Dalkey. Interestingly there did not seem to be a presence from Ireland’s hard left or even soft left, though Eamon Ryan was there. What they were there for, surprisingly, was Senator Bernie Sanders, recent Democratic Presidential candidate, on his first ever visit to Ireland speaking to the Dalkey Book Festival at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Tickets – €35 euro including a compulsory copy of his book ‘Our Revolution, A Future to Believe In’ – had sold out in under five minutes, which was quicker than Katy Perry’s gig at the theatre. This was because attending this event was a Cultural Statement for the Irish political classes. What they were not there for (except the plummy denizens) was David McWilliams but he was, predictably and essentially, oblivious to this. He started proceedings with a lengthy, familiar and unnecessary summary of the “magic” appeal of Bernie but really it was about the magic of how McWilliams and his entourage had enticed Sanders off his tour of Britain to Dublin. McWilliams (and Sanders) had been welcomed earlier to Áras an Uachtaráin by President Michael D Higgins. This made McWilliams proud. You sensed he feels pride every time the President has him up. Then like a ringmaster he summoned Bernie from backstage and the audience rose to its feet. Sanders is a brilliant speaker: never a word astray, never dull, always passionate. On occasion he did refer to the US as “this country”, some of the speech – about terrorism for example – had been lifted from comments he must have made to British audiences earlier in the week and it was a little strange to hear an Irish audience cheer to the rafters acknowledgements of national political delinquency in another country, even if the country is the US. But Bernie is heroic and his talk was a joy to behold, politically. He opened with an excoriation of Trump’s policies on climate change. He said Trump’s actions in withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Accord were “incredibly stupid and short-sighted and will end up harming the American economy and the world economy”. Trump’s claim that climatechange is a hoax is “dead wrong and not believed by the majority of Americans”. “How in God’s name do you make public policy in defiance of science?” he thundered, to applause. Trump was “lying through his teeth” when campaigning when he said he was on the side of the working class and at this stage in the cycle was the least popular President in history. He’d duped the people into believing he was on their side. Sanders said that 28 million Americans do not have health insurance and Trump’s measures would throw a further 23 million out of health cover. Trump plans to cut $800bn from Medicaid, which helps the poor, over the next decade and to defund Planned Parenthood which serves the poor with abortion and family-planning services, while, at the same time, providing a $300bn tax break to the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Trump’s Budget proposals are even worse, as he wants to cut $2.5tr from programmes that help the poor over the next decade while giving the same amount in tax breaks to the top one percent. He said Trump’s Budget proposals are “the ugliest and most destructive attack” ever by an American President on the working class, middle class, and poor people of America. His most incisive attack was on those who think they can champion equality in issues of feminism, abortion, racism and homophobia while not addressing the issue of the very richest, the 1%: of social inequality. He let loose on the very richest, particularly in America: “The top one tenth of the top 1% has almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. 20 people in America own more than the bottom half. The richest 1 per cent of the world’s 7.3 bn people now own as much as the rest of the world put together. Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 bn people who make up the poorest half of humanity. After the Great Recession the total wealth owned by the top 1% of the population in the US grew from 35% to 37%, and that owned by the top 20% of Americans grew from 85% to 88%. 52% of all new income generated in America goes to the top 1%. One family, the Walmart Waltons, owns more than the bottom 42% of the American people. Under Trump’s proposals, that family would get a $50bn tax break over a decade”. It was blistering. And statistical. His most memorable attack was on the Democrat party for not representing the disenfranchised, for wasting time on fundraisers, for cultivating Wall St. After an hour of rhetoric from Bernie, McWilliams ushered him to a faux-livingroom set where he prodded him with questions, each of which necessitated a McWiliams’ hand revolution, every answer generating furious foppish nodding. McWilliams lounged the smug lounge of the initiate, head tilted in the general direction of Bernie at an angle twenty degrees north of what anyone who doesn’t run their own hedge fund would have adopted. However, there was an appropriate response from one of the world’s most people-attuned political practitioners: every time McWilliams asked a question from the intimate bay of yellow-lamp-lit armchairs where he and Bernie nestled, Bernie rose and addressed the audience, his back to the great man. Much worse than the optics of having an event for a radical leftie pre-paid and over-priced for a bourgeois book festival in a lavish amphitheatre that usually hosts blockbuster musicals, was the misconstruction of Sanders’ politics. At one point McWilliams seemed to make common purpose with Sanders, both being “people on the Centre or Centre-Left”. But this is a failure of imagination. To be clear: Bernie is on the radical left; McWilliams is a clever analyst whose whole body of

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    Demexit

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    While the consequences of the UK’s decision to leave the EU remain unclear, one thing is certain – the power and influence Ireland, North and South, will exercise over the final decision-making is limited. The hype in May of this year over apparent ‘concessions’ gained by Ireland from the EU, about an early resolution to how the Irish border will be affected, was quickly rubbished by UK Brexit Secretary, David Davis. He and other English Tory politicians have made it clear that the UK’s self-interest goes beyond, and is much more important than, the concerns of those living either side of the Irish border, or indeed the Irish peace process. It is not even clear how the 27 remaining member states of the EU (of which the Irish State is only one) will actually approach negotiations with the UK, and whether they will indeed take the concerns of the Irish seriously. The Irish State has not been awarded a veto similar to the one apparently granted to Spain by the EU over any decisions on Gibraltar, in relation to the North or the Border. Indeed it is not clear that EU interests (if they exist collectively) are likely to coincide with Ireland’s when it comes to what will be a new EU land border with what will be a non-EU state. And if the Irish State will have limited power and influence over negotiations it is clear that the people of the North will have none at all. Despite a majority of the North’s population (56%) voting to Remain in June 2016, that voice has more or less been silenced by an overwhelming majority of English MPs in Westminster supportive of Brexit whose minds are concentrated on negotiating a deal that will suit their own constituencies. One option touted by some hopeful nationalist politicians is for the people in the North to vote for Irish reunification, in a referendum (allowable under the Belfast Agreement, 1998). David Davis accepted in March of this year that by joining an existing EU State (Ireland) the North could remain in the EU without having to reapply. However, while many Unionists, particularly in Border areas, voted against Brexit it’s not clear that this would translate into a vote for the ending of partition. The Northern Ireland entity was after all created in 1920 specifically to give Unionists a majority, where they had lacked one in the whole of Ireland. It is true that that majority has decreased in recent years. It is also true that in the Assembly elections in March 2017 the Unionist parties (for the first time since partition) did not win a majority of seats, but then neither did the Nationalist parties. There is also no guarantee that votes for the Nationalist parties would necessarily translate into votes for reunification, particularly if this led to the loss of the NHS, social services and public-sector jobs. Ironically, a Westminster Tory Government dedicated to rolling back the welfare state and public-sector cuts, might make that choice easier! In any event the British Government has refused to agree to a referendum in the North as it also has in Scotland, apparently fearful that this might lead to the break-up of the UK. The lack of control over its own destiny is not something new for Ireland of course. Though the North remained within the UK after the 1921 Treaty, the ‘independence’ of the Irish State in the South always seemed compromised, initially by economic dependence on Britain and then, from 1973 onwards, by EU membership and a progressive seepage of sovereignty to the EU and, in particular, its bigger states. The lack of democratic control over the economy in Ireland, North and South, became particularly clear during the banking crisis and the period of austerity. While the experience of the crisis and austerity was different, North and South, reflecting different social, economic, and political contexts, as well as different forms of democratic control, it nonetheless showed that power lay elsewhere. The 2008 global economic crisis and the responses to it in the industrialised rich countries of the world led not just to a re-moulding of capitalism, but to increased clarity about both the lack of global democracy and what John Pilger termed in 2002, “the new rulers of the world”. Neoliberal minimalist State regulation of financial institutions, and the economy in general, was replaced by high-State interventionist ‘austerity’ measures, aimed at protecting capitalist financial structures. In the EU, Governments nationalised private debt, spreading the costs across their local communities, largely to ensure that capitalism as an economic structure and ideology was maintained. The notion of ‘European-ness’ and a sense of a unified EU citizenship – used to promote the idea of a greater social and economic union from the 1970s – gave way to single-State self-interest as the bigger economies banded together to protect their national interests and the interests of their banks and their bondholders. Smaller EU states, having progressively relinquished sovereignty to the larger states, from Maastricht (1992) to the Euro (2002) to Lisbon (2007) in the interests of ‘Europeanisation’, realised that they no longer controlled their own economies, budgets or fiscal arrangements. Ideological choices appeared limited in smaller states – either accept the new ‘austerity’ measures, enthusiastically, as the only solution to a global crisis, or accept them, reluctantly. What Greece’s former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was to call, “financial terrorism” was in town. Irish Governments from 2008 on fitted in with that ‘austerity’ agenda accepting with enthusiastic energy the dominant agenda of public-sector cuts. Although the capitulation to threats from the IMF and the EU seemed to show a lack of democratic control, they still had a choice, even if it was simply to raise a protest at the way their State was being treated. A ‘pragmatic’ approach to the powerful seemed the best option and by and large the approach fitted with the world view of the main parties. Up until 2015, the North of Ireland had not suffered

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    Cooke-ing up a NAMA investigation

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    Now that the long-awaited Commission of Investigation into the sale of Project Eagle has been conceded it remains to be seen which players will actually be on the pitch when the inquiry is finally convened. As predicted by Village several months ago, there was no chance that Enda Kenny or Michael Noonan would still be in power by the time any inquiry into the controversial deal came around. Indeed it might be considered a success on their part that the decision to hold an inquiry was delayed until they had a foot out the door of government. The flip-flopping by Fianna Fáil on the issue also contributed to the government’s foot-dragging and it was only the resounding criticism of NAMA’s handling of the €1.24bn sale of its Northern Ireland loan portfolio by the Committee of Public Accounts (PAC) that made a judicial inquiry inevitable. Former High Court judge, John Cooke, will have his hands full when it comes to ensuring that the investigation does not run well past its current deadline of late 2018 to deliver its report given the number of modules that have been demanded by various parties and independents who contributed to recent Dáil debates on the subject. While the Fine Gael members are determined to restrict the inquiry to the Project Eagle disposal by NAMA to Cerberus, which the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) criticised for leaving the public purse short some €220m, opposition parties including Sinn Féin and independen ts, most notably Mick Wallace, want a much more wide-ranging investigation. The PAC, which spent weeks last year interrogating the C&AG’s ‘value for money’ analysis, had much narrower terms of reference than those now demanded given the extent of the revelations that have emerged in the North about some of those who were seeking to make huge sums of money from the Project Eagle sale. A number of BBC Spotlight programmes, in particular, shone a light on the activities of Frank Cushnahan, the former member of the Northern Ireland Advisory Committee (NIAC) of NAMA, who was recorded accepting bundles of cash totalling €40,000 in car park of a Belfast hospital in 2012 from developer, John Miskelly, one of the agency’s debtors to whom he was offering consultancy advice. Cushnahan was recorded telling Miskelly during a secretly taped meeting, how he was “thick as thieves” with Ronnie Hanna, the then Head of Asset Recovery at NAMA, whom, he said, was doing his best to help developers in the North salvage their distressed loans. Among a range of other matters, these tapes were outside the remit of the CAG and the PAC but their contents will surely be examined by the Commission when it finally convenes. However, as Wallace has argued during the first debate on the terms of reference last month, there are also the matter of leaks of allegedly confidential information from NAMA, the conflicts of interest involving not just Cushnahan but former employees at the agency and the sale of other large bundles of public assets to global funds which have come under question. The latest of these to come to light is the sale of Project Shift, a portfolio containing loans associated with supermarkets in Germany which was disposed of to Cerberus by NAMA as part of the larger Project Eagle loan book in 2014. Wallace alleged last month that Cerberus was involved in discussions to purchase Project Shift for £76m before the entire Northern Ireland loan book was put up for sale and that it knew the price which NAMA was seeking for it. When it was later included in the Project Eagle portfolio sale, it had a competitive advantage over the underbidder, Fortress, as it could factor in the German retail assets in its tender. The Wexford TD also claimed that another former NIAC member, Brian Rowntree, had confirmed that the advisory committee had not discussed the sale of Project Shift: “Fortress was bidding on Project Eagle without the knowledge that a minimum of €76 m would be taken off the price of the portfolio. Is this not a form of insider trading? Cerberus had non-public knowledge that the price for Project Eagle would be lower”, Wallace told the Dáil in late May. “Fortress did not have this knowledge. Why did NAMA not write to all bidders who signed non-disclosure agreements at the start of Project Eagle and inform them that a debtor was sale agreed for €76m and that it may be removed from the price? I have written to the Committee of Public Accounts today to ask them to examine all aspects of Project Shift”. NAMA confirmed that Cerberus had agreed with the agency to convert Project Shift into a loan sale after it selected the US fund in April 2014 as its preferred bidder for Project Eagle. The Commission of Investigation will also be hampered, as was the PAC, by the difficulty in getting key figures to co-operate with its inquiry or to appear at public session as Cushnahan, Hanna, Belfast solicitor, Ian Coulter and others have previously cited the fact that they are prevented from public comment about their role in the Project Eagle purchase due to the ongoing criminal investigation by the National Crime Agency in the North. Other investigations by the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the Department of Justice in the US will, no doubt, be a reason for other potential witnesses from that side of the Atlantic declining to give evidence to the commission. On 1 June NAMA chairman, Frank Daly, told RTÉ that the agency was ready to provide any information required by the Commission but insisted that it would not be changing its criticism of both the C&AG and PAC findings. Accusing the C&AG of failing to have the required financial expertise to examine the Project Eagle sale, Daly rejected its finding that NAMA lost €220m on the deal. He also denied that it had ignored evident conflicts of interest involving Frank Cushnahan, who had declared as

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