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    Hypocrisy about Whistleblowing. Official Ireland is indifferent. This time about Donegal.

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    Editorial, Village, April 2014 Gerard Convie is a whistleblower, but you won’t have heard of him. Over the last few years Village has helped a number of other whistleblowers whose cases are to varying degrees unassailable but have not been championed by the media or pursued by the authorities: Jonathan Sugarman on Unicredit Bank, Noel Wardick on the Red Cross, Paul Clinton on Treasury Holdings and Dublin City Council, Séamus Kirk on planning appeals withdrawn after a 1m payout in Louth, Colm Murphy on solicitor fraud and Law Society ‘skulduggery’. As Frank McBrearty, the whistleblower whose attempted framing for the murder of Richie Barron led to the instigation of the Morris Tribunal, told Village this week: “without whistleblowers you can’t expose corruption”. But the lack of official interest in these brave citizens, or action on their allegations, bespeaks an overwhelming cynicism veiled only by the correlative rush to be publicly perceived as welcoming of whistleblowers such as the gardai who revealed the penalty-points scandal. As one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, so one man’s whistleblower is another’s deluded obsessive. You only really become a whisleblower once your whistle has been heard by the ‘political correspondents’ and the party spokespersons. When you are at your most vulnerable they won’t seek you out or even answer your letters.   Convie worked in Donegal County Council as a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He claims it was well known in Donegal and beyond that he would not capitulate to the “goings-on in planning” by certain councillors and senior officials in Co Donegal. He tried to control one-off housing, produced the first design guide, and used to appeal to An Bord Pleanála on his own behalf and at his own expense all decisions to grant planning permission via the infamous S4 motions. This was controversial. He claims one councilor constantly referred to him as a ”wee shit from the North”. Convie has claimed, in an affidavit opened in court, that during his tenure there was bullying and intimidation within the council of planners who sought to make decisions based exclusively on the planning merits of particular applications. In the affidavit, Convie alleges another planner: 1) recommended permissions that breached the Donegal County Development Plan to an extent that was almost systemic 2) submitted planning applications to Donegal County Council on behalf of friends and associates 3) dealt with planning applications from submission to decision 4) ignored the recommendations of other planners 5) destroyed the recommendations of other planners 6) submitted fraudulent correspondence to the planning department 7) forged signatures 8) improperly interfered as described in a number of planning applications 9) was close to a number of leading architects and developers in Donegal, including the head of the largest ‘architectural’ practice in Donegal, with whom he holidayed but the relationship with whom was undeclared. His affidavit also refers to irregularities perpetrated by named officials at the highest level in the Council as well as named senior county councilors. The Minister and Donegal County Council made no defence of any averment in Convie’s Affidavit. Convie had a list of more than 20 “suspect cases” in the County. As he reverted to private practice he claimed that there must be many more, perhaps hundreds, “a cesspit”. His complaints to various Ministers for the Environment and to the Standards in Public Office Commission went nowhere. After the Greens got into government, Environment Minister, John Gormley, announced “planning reviews” in 2010, not of corruption but of bad practice – in seven local authorities including Donegal. Convie’s case studies comprised all the material for the review in Donegal. But when the new Fine Gael and Labour government took over they very quickly dropped the independent inquiries. A lazy 2012 internal review stated: “The department’s rigorous analysis finds that the allegations do not relate to systemic corruption in the planning system…Nonetheless, they raise serious matters, ranging from maladministration to inconsistency in application of planning policy or non-adherence to forward plans, such as development plans”. As regards Donegal, the Department, extraordinarily and scandalously, decided – according to Minister Jan O’Sullivan in the Dáil, that: ‘’ … the complainant [Convie] has failed at any stage to produce evidence of wrong-doing in Donegal Council’s planning department”.   Convie felt this left him in an invidious position and, in the absence of any defense of him by from any source, he successfully sued. In the High Court Order all the conclusions by the Minister were withdrawn, including reports on the matters prepared for the Minister by Donegal County Council. The government has been forced to reinstate the planning enquiries. But it will be important to see the ramifications for the civil servants who concluded that Convie’s complaint did not constitute “evidence”, and for the Minister who accepted the conclusions. While some of the council officials who are named in the irregularities in Convie’s Affidavit have retired, some remain in the Council’s employ and have seen their careers soar. The Convie file has been referred to the Attorney General for direction and she has now reported back to the Minister. The Department will report its review before the summer. Meanwhile a taint hangs over the administration of planning in Donegal, and a whistleblower twists in the wind.   As Village was going to print, things were finally heating up in Donegal County Council. The Director of Housing and Corporate Services told Village the Council would be responding to Convie’s reported allegations, shortly, and Ethics Officer, Paul McGill, said the matter was being examined by management.    As regards County Councillors, the current mayor of Donegal, independent Ian McGarvey, while making it clear he did not wish to be involved in anything ‘scurrilous’, said he would refer the issue to the county secretary. Independent Donegal County Councillor Frank Mc Brearty noted it was difficult for current councillors to ascertain the truth of such matters because of difficulties getting files – even last year when he was mayor. While complimentary of the current incumbent,

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    Profile: Treasury Holdings and Johnny Ronan

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    The Treasury boys are back.  Without Treasury. Great.  Richard Barrett is reported to be deploying two billion euro of investment in property and Johnny Ronan has paid Nama back and is back in business all  over town.  He’s even found time to make reference to Nazi slogans in pinpointing the injustice done to him by Nama and to get the Banking Inquiry to pull its criticism of him, lest he perhaps injunct it from publishing. The Irish Times misreported in September 2015 (and has still not corrected the error) that Treasury had “exited Nama” but in fact Treasury went bankrupt owing €2.7bn, €1.7bn to Nama alone.  This suggests they cost the country around €7oom. Johnny Ronan may have bought out his personal loans but Treasury benefited from the socialised capitalism for market losers that is the bankruptcy regime.  No swaggering market icon, Treasury. Treasury  – Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, inspired awe and respect in financial, political and media circles but I have had reason to be circumspect, myself, over the years. Johnny is an accountant whose father was a wealthy pig farmer in Tipperary and whose cousin is Vita Cortex’s Jack Ronan. Richard comes from a family of Ballina millers. They were at school together in Castleknock College. Treasury once had little Dublin at their feet. I first met Richard and Johnny in the mid-nineties when they were developing the Hilton (subsequently Westin) Hotel on Dublin’s College Green. I was opposing their plan for the biggest destruction of listed buildings in Dublin since the 1960s. After they got their permission from An Bord Pleanála, an academic advised us that they should clearly have carried out an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) because of the significant “nature, size and location” of the ‘project’. We decided the scheme was unsustainable and uncivilised, Treasury’s attitude cocky and the planning authorities’ flouting of the law on EIA outrageous – so we would attack their scheme in the courts. Treasury, it was said, were vicious, and were involved in twenty-six other sets of litigation around town. An Taisce, which I had been representing, didn’t want the risk of a devastating legal-costs order, we didn’t want the inevitable PR storm to blow away vulnerable individuals and we didn’t want personal legal liability for costs, so we formed a company. We had little time so we got a pre-formed ‘shelf’ company, the chivalric-sounding, “Lancefort’. After 47 appearances in the High-Court and six days in the Supreme Court, Lancefort lost its case on the primary ground that, although it was okay to litigate through a company that had not even existed at the time of the Bord Pleanála decision which it was challenging, the protagonists in the company, primarily I, should have raised the need for an EIA before An Bord Pleanála. The chief justice Ronan Keane seemed to imply I had known of the point at the time, even though I did not, and there was no evidence to that effect. Usually the Supreme Court is very careful not to invent or infer false facts. Furthermore European law clearly states it is the obligation of the authorities to conduct the EIA. The Lancefort decision is generally, by academics and practitioners, accepted as wrongly-decided. Since that time – 1997 – EIA (and its plan-focused counterpart (SEA)) has taken off as a tool for residents and environmentalists in assessing the impact of what is being imposed on them – if only because it often requires photomontages of the proposed schene and an indication that the developer fully considered the alternatives. During the campaign we were assailed by Treasury and their PR team – and I guess since Johnny Ronan reckoned we cost them 6m Euro, we were fair game. Irish Times environment correspondent, Frank McDonald, is sometimes one of the most acute and courageous commentators on these matters. But he was close to Richard Barrett – as well as to some of us in the campaigning sector, and he wrote several damaging reports including pieces misrepresenting our European Law stance in a way that was likely to annoy Irish judges, mis-stating the numbers of listed/historic buildings on the site and giving extraordinary coverage to the supporters of the scheme – including a fawning profile of the ‘conservation’ architect who was writing off the value of some of the buildings to the benefit of Treasury, in an interview under the headline “Keeper of the Past”. When we lost the case Frank McDonald in the Irish Times quoted Richard Barrett saying “his [ie my] house is gone” and that “I” faced legal costs of £1m. In fact we were always going to escape the costs of the case because the company was a separate vehicle from its directors, which at various stages included, apart from me, heritage activists Garret Kelly, Ian Lumley, Tony Lowes and in the end my gamey brother. Nonetheless Lancefort finished up comprehensively liquidated. Treasury later boasted that “certain opponents of ours have underestimated our ability to cause legal havoc to their detriment”. Probably true. At one stage when the publicity was bad and the case looked fragile, we had discussions with Johnny Ronan about settling our case and it appears some of our lawyers got further with instructions we gave them than we had understood. We were then skewered by Matt Cooper in the Sunday Tribune and Cliodhna Ó’Donoghue, editor of the property section of the Irish Independent, in aggressive but not entirely unfair features that made it sound like we were seeking money for ourselves rather than building-conservation causes (which we were not). We had discussed a wide range of possible resolutions ‘without prejudice’ and got nowhere close to agreeing any of them. It emerged a little later that Cliodhna Ó’Donoghue was the beneficiary of a glittering Italian trip paid for by Treasury in 1998, an extravaganza involving a Pavarotti performance I seem to recall. I was invited by current affairs magazine, Magill, to write about all this for a new ‘rant’ column it was

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    Adam’s crucial coded warnings to Robinson

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

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    If we can borrow it, we will spend it

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

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    Largesse, after austerity without reform

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

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    Conviction not ideology: Noël Browne, on his centenary.

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

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