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    An Offence Against The State

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    On 1 December 1972 a car bomb exploded beside Liberty Hall in Dublin. Fortunately no one died but George Bradshaw, a CIE bus driver, and Thomas Duffy, a bus conductor, perished in a second explosion at Sackville Place. No one has ever been charged with these crimes. The UVF belatedly claimed sole responsibility for them but there are legitimate doubts about the veracity of this claim. These bombings were part of four bombings in Dublin’s north city centre at the end of 1972 and beginning of 1973 and are to be distinguished from the even more horrific bombings in the same general area in 1974.   A State In Denial Margaret Urwin has just published ‘A State in Denial’ which unravels a web of intrigue connecting the British Secret State (BSS) to loyalist paramilitaries at a variety of levels. No objective reader of this impressive work could doubt that London focused the might of its counter-insurgency arsenal against Republicans while turning a knowing blind eye at loyalist wrongdoing and also arming and colluding with them. Irwin’s book is fascinating for its dissection of official papers to discern what was going on behind closed doors.   The Man with the English-Belfast Accent The publication of ‘A State in Denial’ is timely as yet another anniversary of the 1972 Dublin bombings comes around. On that fateful evening a man with a mixed English-Belfast accent parked a car bomb beside Liberty Hall. After he alighted, he asked someone who had just left the building when it was likely to empty out for the night. One of the cars used by the bombers to get to Dublin was a Ford Zephyr which had been stolen in Antrim from an Englishman called Joseph Fleming the previous August, along with Fleming’s driver’s licence. Fleming’s licence was put to use on two occasions in November 1972 by an imposter posing as Fleming, to hire cars in Belfast. The imposter was either extraordinarily reckless or had good reason to believe Fleming’s licence was not detailed on the lists circulated by the RUC to carrental companies. He obtained a number of cars over the space of a week, a timespan which underlines his confidence about the use of a stolen licence; and all this at a time when an epidemic of car bombings was bringing Belfast to a standstill. In addition, he left his fingerprints and handwriting on the forms he completed. Another significant fact was that he spoke with a mixture of a Belfast and English accent.   Kitson’s Military Reaction Force The UVF would have us believe that its volunteers: • Stole Fleming’s car in August 1972 and hid it for three months, and; • Drove it across the Border with its original registration plates on display, and; • Proceeded to Dublin at the same time – and possibly as part of a convoy of cars, parked it with explosives, and • Faced an extremely high risk of detection because the rental cars had been acquired using a stolen licence which the gang must have believed was on an RUC watchlist; • Yet all the while possessed the confidence to proceed without any high-level protection from the BSS. It is unlikely this is what happened. On the other hand, the highly secretive Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) of the British Army had the nerve, skill and high-level protection in place to undertake just such an operation. The MRF was literally above the law. It was a sprawling organisation established by Brigadier Frank Kitson in 1971 to engage in agent-recruitment; surveillance; drive-by shootings (deploying the type of weapons the IRA were known to carry); laundry collection, to detect the residue of explosives on clothing; and even brothel management, to collect gossip and obtain blackmail material. It had access to loyalist agents recruited by the British Army and M15. Stealing vehicles and hiding them at its Palace Barracks HQ for use later was one of its known practices. The MRF could easily have arranged for the details about Fleming’s vehicle and licence to have been erased from the RUC watch lists. With this backing, the loyalist gang that bombed Dublin (or at least some of them) would have enjoyed the confidence to hire the cars and drive them to Dublin.   Albert Ginger Baker Albert Ginger Baker, an alleged British Army deserter, who joined the UDA in the early 1970, ticked all the boxes as an MRF agent. His family have claimed that he was involved in the 1972 bombings. In 1976 the Sunday World published an article exposing his links to a ‘Captain Bunty’, a mysterious figure who can only have been his handler. The pair met regularly in a Belfast coffee bar. Baker was involved in a string of gruesome sectarian murders in Belfast. During one of them, James Patrick McCartan, a 22-year-old forklifttruck driver, was stripped naked, hung up by his ankles and punched, kicked and beaten with a pickshaft, while a dagger was used to stab him in the hands and thigh over 200 times. He was threatened with castration and dropped head first from the ceiling. Eventually one of Baker’s UDA superiors gave him a pistol and told him to kill McCartan. Baker put a hood over his head, and blasted into his skull three times. A grenade Baker’s gang used in another attack was standard British Army issue, which raises questions about how they acquired it. It is doubtful the prospect of bombing Dublin could have troubled the conscience of those in the BSS who ultimately controlled men like Baker. Baker suffered some sort of a crisis in 1973, and fled to England where he confessed to a string of sectarian murders to the police in Warminster, in Wiltshire. As far as the BSS was concerned, some rather nasty cats were now peeping out of the bag. Damage limitation became the order of the day. Hence, while Baker was convicted and sent to prison in 1973, his secret link to the MRF was

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    Contextualising continual conflictual conflagration

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    Published in the November 2016 issue of Village Why has rebel-held East Aleppo taken so long to fall, despite being besieged for months by Syrian Government soldiers, backed by Russian war-planes? Will ISIS-occupied Mosul hold out similarly against Iraqi troops supported by the Kurds and Americans? Or will agreed escape corridors in either case help the rebels/terrorists steal away? World War 2 showed how costly it can be for troops to take besieged cities in house-to-house fighting against well-motivated defenders holding out in cellars, rooms and on roof-tops, with good sniper positions on all sides. The sieges of Stalingrad, Warsaw and Berlin are good examples. Even our own Easter Rising’s Battle of Mount Street Bridge showed the heavy losses a small group holding a building can inflict on a much more numerous attacking enemy. President Assad’s soldiers are presumably in no hurry to get killed, so the miserable Aleppo story goes on while the international media try to make our hearts bleed at the thought of the unfortunate civilians, especially children, in the besieged city. The Assad Government and its Russian allies are judged heartless for not permitting enough truces to allow in food and medicines. But who decides the allocation of aid once it gets behind rebel lines? Presumably the rebel leadership, who are unlikely to allow themselves starve while they dole out food to the women and children. Last year I saw a TV film of food aid being distributed in another besieged Syrian town. Some children grasping for the food tins being handed down from the back of a lorry looked as well-nourished as their Irish counterparts. Other children beside them were clearly starving. One could count the ribs of their thin bodies. The scene pointed to a pecking order among aid recipients, with unseen people in the background, presumably the rebel leadership or administration, giving aid supplies to those they favoured and denying supplies to others, when there were no TV cameras around to film them. This is likely to be the reality on the ground as regards aid being delivered along ‘humanitarian corridors’. While Assad is the West’s current “bad guy” in Syria and we are urged to wax indignant at the thought of his bombs falling in Aleppo, we hear little of the bombs which Saudi Arabia, that staunch ally of “the West”, is dropping simultaneously on a different group of rebels/terrorists in Yemen. One of these recently killed a hundred mourners at a funeral. This selective indignation is encouraged by the aid agencies which echo the political rhetoric of the Western Governments that supply most of their funding. It is startling to learn that the income of Ireland’s aid agency, GOAL, increased three-fold from €60m in 2012 to €210m in 2015, according to the Irish Times, mostly for its Syrian operation. This money came from the US and British Governments which have their own political agenda in Syria. Syria has turned GOAL into Ireland’s biggest charity. Political allegiance follows donor money. GOAL spokesmen have strongly criticised the Syrian Government’s attempts to suppress the rebellion against it, although such suppression is the right of any lawful internationally recognised government, which, whether one likes it or not, the Assad regime happens to be. Likewise spokesmen for Médecins Sans Frontières Ireland echo French Government policy on Syria as it assumes a continuing right of intervention in France’s one-time mandatory territory. These aid agencies serve the internationally orchestrated campaign to delegitimise the Assad Government and give moral sanction to those attempting its overthrow. Yet if the Assad Government were to be overthrown thousands of Shias, Alawites and Christians could expect to have their throats cut by the fundamentalist ‘freedom-fighters’ who would then take over in Syria. Concern at the fate of civilians in Benghazi, Libya, in face of Colonel Gaddafi’s threatening rhetoric was what ostensibly motivated Britain, France and America to intervene in Libya in 2011. This led to Gaddafi’s overthrow and gave us the current failed State there. Hilary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, pressed hard for that intervention and got a UN Security Council resolution to authorise it. Mrs Clinton has called for a no-fly zone in Syria to stop President Assad’s forces dropping bombs on East Aleppo, ostensibly because they hit civilians. If the President tries to push through such a policy while the Russians are still supporting Assad, it could have the potential to start World War 3! The Syrian conflict shows alarming evidence of tension between the military hardliners of the Pentagon and the diplomats around US Secretary of State John Kerry. On 17 September last US and Australian air attacks on Syrian army troops killed 62 and wounded 100. The Americans said it was an accident. Others thought it a deliberate attempt by hardliners in Washington to scuttle the partial ceasefire which Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov had agreed with the support of Presidents Obama and Putin, and which had taken effect just five days before. In public remarks bordering on the insubordinate, senior Pentagon officials showed unusually open scepticism regarding key aspects of that Kerry-Lavrov deal. One can assume that what Lavrov told his boss in private was close to his blunt words on Russian TV on 26 September: “My good friend John Kerry is under fierce criticism from the US military machine. Despite the fact that, as always, they made assurances that the US Commander in Chief, President Barack Obama, supported him in his contacts with Russia, apparently the military does not really listen to the Commander in Chief”. Lavrov also criticised General Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, for telling the US Congress that he opposed sharing intelligence with Russia “after the agreements concluded on direct orders of Russian President Putin and US President Barack Obama stipulated that they would share intelligence…It is difficult to work with such partners”. It is scarcely surprising in the light of this that the Russians and the Assad regime are desperate to get the siege of

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    Trump/Slump

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    By all possible measures the US presidential election of 2016 has set a record low in the quality of political discourse. However, with the outcome handing the Republicans a decisive victory in the White House, Senate and House of Representatives contests, the election will have a lasting and systemic impact on the development of economic and social policies in the US for years to come. First, the presidential contest failed to develop key policy proposals that could define the new administration. In a way, by diverting election debates away from large-ticket economic and social issues toward personalities, legal and ethical mudslinging, and geopolitical blame-games, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have cleared the water for a rudderless new Presidential Administration. Key issues including immigration, healthcare, social insurance and taxation, spending and fiscal policies, and economic strategy were left largely unaddressed. This leaves the legislative agenda to the Republican-controlled Congress. This is a far better outcome than the commentariat allow, but not as good an outrun as those of us expecting significant economic change would have wished for. Second, for all the differences between them, both candidates were aligned in one specific area: their propensity to shower voters with promises irrespective of their costs. While Trump mentioned the Federal debt overhang, his policy priorities included accumulation of more debt to fund increased social security handouts to interest groups, massive infrastructure investment, and tax breaks. His isolationist stance on foreign trade also implies heavier debt though the effect is unclear. Hillary Clinton was even more profligate that Trump.   The US is heading for Government debt of over 108% of GDP in 2016, and up until 2021. With President Trump and the Republican-controlled legislature, the likely outcome will be that US Federal debt  will remain high, as the deficit swings from the 3.5% average expected 2017-2021 to closer to 3.7-3.8 percent. Most of this debt will go to fund military expenditure (the so-called modernisation of the US armed forces will take trillions out of the Treasury, interest groups, and a wave of tax cuts, primarily targeting capital and financial markets, as well as the upper-middle class and higher earners. Third, neither of the candidates offered a serious plan to address competitiveness, including bureaucratic regulations and the tax codes, especially corporate taxation that incentivises capital flight and corporate-tax avoidance. Trump vaguely talked about the need for change, but never offered specific measures. Hillary Clinton advanced only marginal reforms. By default, the regulatory and tax agenda will now shift to Congressional Republicans. As a result, we are likely to see unwinding of even the feeble banking and financial-services reforms currently in train. Clawing back Federal controls and giving more room to individual States is preferable to the Democrats top-down approach. Fourth, while both candidates decried the loss of competitiveness and jobs in the manufacturing sector, neither offered a plausible solution. Declining labour-productivity growth, stagnant total-factor productivity, and the challenges of growing automation and robotisation, including for many services, remain untouched. And there was nothing constructive on offer on external imbalances and the impact of the trade deficit on the domestic economy. On balance, therefore, the Democrats loss across ensures that the gridlock and acrimony that characterised the presidential contest will now be past. Much however, remains uncertain, given the unclear divergence of agendas between the Republican legislature and the Republican Presidency. While the US economy inherited by President Trump appears to be in much better health than the one inherited by President Obama in January 2009, US growth has been weak and the risks of a new economic calamity are rising, not abating. Within the last two weeks, the US economy reported a much better trade deficit for September, down 10 percent compared to August. This is the best external trade imbalance in 19 months driven by the fourth straight monthly rise in exports. Exports rose 0.6 percent on a monthly basis, reaching the highest level since the summer of 2015. The silver lining imported a couple of clouds: much of the recent gains were driven by lower energy imports and the weaker dollar, albeit this was moderated by the undesirability of currency volatility. However, since the dollar is expected to further strengthen as US monetary policy tightens, the likelihood of these trade gains continuing is low. A Republican-controlled Federal Government will deliver current account deficits that remain around 2.5-2.7 percent of GDP over the next four years – below the 3.4 percent average for the last ten years, but not healthy enough to support export-driven growth. Another bright spot in the economy over recent months has been the labour market. Based on October figures, US pay levels are rising at the fastest pace since 2009 and unemployment currently stands at 4.9 percent, a near eight-year low. Healthcare companies, white-collar professional services, education and financial firms now lead job creation: a change of fortune from the low-wage-jobs growth that characterised 2015. In line with tight labour markets, hourly average pay jumped 0.4 percent in October, to $25.92. This implies we are now witnessing a change in the US labour market compared to 2015, when gains in income were predominantly concentrated amongst the non-working population. Judging by the headline numbers, the pace of the jobs recovery  since 2008 has been faster than after the 2001 recession, and is running closer to that of the recovery of the 1990s – the last ‘golden’ era of growth. It all sounds wonderful. And yet… those in unemployment for 27 weeks or longer (the US definition of the long-term unemployed) currently account for 40 percent of all unemployed, the lowest share since 2009, but still well above the same figure at the same time after previous recessions. It is also roughly double the average rate across the growth cycle. This attests to the severity of the Great Recession, but also reflects the simple fact that the US economy continues to deleverage, meaning that the massive fiscal and monetary stimuli deployed over the years are having less impact than

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    Poverty shapes abortion

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    A woman in poverty is damned from two perspectives when it comes to pregnancy. She can’t afford to continue a pregnancy but she can’t afford to stop it either. Constitutional reform; investing in women; trusting women; reversing austerity; treating all mothers equally; addressing poverty, low pay and childcare and all the other social and economic issues – are part of the politics of motherhood and choice in women’s lives. In our ‘Repeal the 8th’ debate we need to make links to a different section of the Constitution, Article 41.2. This prioritises a woman’s domestic role over her labour market participation by unambiguously implying that a woman’s place is in the home. Repeal the 8th needs to make links with the reality of a contemporary politics of motherhood based on Article 41.2. The values informing this Constitutional Article are still widely and deeply held and shape the politics of motherhood today. They are reflected in current policies on child income support, lone parents, homecare tax credit, tax individualisation and childcare. Economic independence and women’s access to, and control of, economic resources are key to understanding women’s choices and the barriers to women’s choices. Crisis Pregnancy Agency research has established that economic factors mediate a woman’s pregnancy in complex way: “the balance between the ‘value’ and the ‘cost’ of a child is important in shaping fertility decisions”. Poverty and financial dependence impede women’s ability to act on a range of choices, not least those associated with reproductive health including her right to choose to have a child. Poverty is a barrier to having children as it may make it impossible to pay for food. 10% of Irish people experience food poverty. They have problems meeting basic needs including health, housing, and children’s education. Austerity has made people more likely to experience poverty and the recently loosened purse strings have yet to dispense much to those who need resources most. Precarious jobs, bogus self-employment, if-and-when contracts, casual hours, low-hour jobs and internships all make pregnancy a non-viable option. Young people, women and migrant workers are most likely to have such jobs. Being pregnant and an employee is precarious. There has been an increase in unfair dismissals of, and discrimination against, pregnant women. Being self-employed and pregnant is often the foundation for stress and poverty. Poverty, and related lack of access to economic independence act as a constraint on a woman’s capacity or right to choose not to have a child. The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) argues that the high cost of prescription and non-prescription contraceptive items interferes with the right of men and women on low incomes to obtain affordable contraception and to enjoy their right to adequate reproductive health. Cost deters young adults from using contraception. The need to get a GP for renewal of a prescription for a contraceptive pill acts as a further barrier. Once a woman living in poverty falls pregnant, accessing the finance needed for an abortion is a barrier. Borrowing from informal or formal sources, money lenders or credit unions, is rarely an option. Austerity has acutely affected the extent and depth of financial exclusion. Small-scale debt is now part of many households’ day-to-day finances. There is little capacity to absorb unexpected one-off costs. Informal sources of credit are exhausted. Money lenders (legal and illegal) and other forms of high-cost credit are used when conventional credit is no longer available. Such sources offer loans at exorbitant interest rates and often with far more serious risks. Credit Unions’ ability to make small-scale loans accessible is diminishing, due to increased regulation and a change in the Credit Union ethos. A 2016 study found 43% of women using at-home medical termination of pregnancy through online telemedicine, the abortion pill, could not afford to continue the pregnancy. Indeed 34.6% struggled to cover the £70 donation. These women were also more likely to lack emotional support. Financial control is another restraint. Some women in well-off households do not have access to their own income or control of their own time or space. To make choices to get pregnant or avoid pregnancy real, women need the practical capability to implement those choices. Debates must reflect this or lose relevance. by Mary Murphy

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    Enda(ngered)

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    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

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    McKinseygalitarian

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    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

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