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Frank Connolly interviews Mick Wallace When Mick Wallace raised some uncomfortable questions in the Dáil last October about the sale of Siteserv to Denis O’Brien and the role of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) in the deal, he was roundly abused by government ministers, including his constituency rival, Brendan Howlin. Phone calls were made to several newsrooms by O’Brien’s media handlers and Wallace’s speech went largely unreported. Some days later, the former chairman of the IBRC, Alan Dukes, protested loudly over the remarks in a lengthy column in the Irish Times and called for the comments to be withdrawn from the Dáil record by the Wexford TD. His pertinent questions about the timing of the Siteserv deal and the subsequent award of the lucrative contract to install water meters to O’Brien’s company went unanswered and the controversy was buried until Catherine Murphy revived it, not for the first time,  in the House on Thursday 28th May. Once again the media were asked to suppress her comments and O’Brien, Dukes and others trotted out widely published attacks on the Kildare deputy accusing her, among other things, of lying and using stolen documents. O’Brien was given most of a page in the Irish Times on Tuesday 2nd June to attack Murphy whom, he said, had used Dáil privilege to “gain notoriety and political advantage for herself”. “O’Brien himself with his court injunction on RTÉ has made a circus out of it to such a degree that his own friends in Fine Gael are distancing themselves from him and his threat to Dáil privilege”, Wallace said of the latest twist in the IBRC/Siteserv debacle. “I got a call from one journalist in a national paper last October to say that several news outlets had been contacted and warned not to pursue what I said in the Dáil about the Siteserv deal. Dukes had a free run at me in the Irish Times”. As someone who has been the subject of vicious attacks in the O’Brien controlled Independent newspapers with no less than 19 front-page stories published about his financial difficulties in its daily edition, Wallace knows something about media interference and selective banking practices. “I know how banks operate and the idea that Denis O’Brien would ring the bank to say he wanted the term extended on his loan repayments is perfectly normal. The difference on this occasion is that it is taxpayers’ money he is using. The question I was trying to get an answer to was: “How in God’s name did O’Brien’s company get the water contract so soon after buying Siteserv?’”. He is still waiting. Wallace is not convinced that his namesake, no relation, and IBRC liquidator, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG, will shine sufficient light on the controversy to allay many suspicions when his review is completed and has plenty of grounds for scepticism given his experience with internal investigations he has witnessed into Garda wrongdoing and other matters during his four years in the Dáil. “If you follow what goes on in government it is a regular thing to see conflicts of interest in different inquiries and investigations. The penalty-points scandal was full of internal investigations that went nowhere. Many of the crime correspondents ignore serious wrongdoing in the force because they depend for their stories on the guards”. Wallace has, with Clare Daly, been to the fore in calling for greater transparency and fairness in the way the country is run. He has had his share of trouble since the collapse of his company, M & J Wallace, which was put into receivership after he was unable to meet bank debts of some €41m. However, he was not made bankrupt and says he still leases the wine bars and coffee shop in the Latin Quarter from the banks which took them from him; employing 55 people in jobs that pay well above the industry norm. Notwithstanding the continuous years of hostile reporting of his financial affairs by the Irish Independent, Wallace insists that he settled his issues with the Revenue over the under-declaration of VAT which arose because of his genuine efforts to save his construction business, and made payments for thirteen months until a High Court judgment for €19.4m in favour of ACC effectively brought the company down. He also insists that the widely held, and reported, view that he withheld pension entitlements from some of his employees, is simply false. “We paid every penny due of the pensions. I was fined for late payment and this was due to a row over whether we owed money for people who had left the company”. After watching assets once valued at €80m drop to €20m in the property crash he believes that there is  another scandal about to emerge over the manner in which huge profits are being made by certain investors, including US vulture funds, which are getting in on the act while others are excluded from privately-organised sell-offs. “The IBRC issue is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to insider dealing in the sale of distressed assets”, he claims. Across the country, Wallace believes that over half of the population is struggling to pay their bills at the end of the month and these are the people searching for a political solution to their personal and family crises. “We have never witnessed such numbers of people in such a difficult place. These are whole sectors of society who are poorly represented. They want society run in a fairer manner. Sometimes I listen to people in the Dáil going on about things and they are clueless. There is a serious shortage of people with experience in the real world including how to run a business. And if you think the Dáil is a talking shop what does that make the Seanad. The greatest load of b….x”. Wallace does not do clinics or attend every second funeral in the constituency as other politicians do with their time but he is

By Anton McCabe The UK General Election in the North saw the stalling of the Sinn Féin juggernaut. Its share of the vote fell by 1% compared to the last election – despite fighting an extra seat, South Belfast. This was the party’s first electoral setback in the North since 1992, when Gerry Adams lost his West Belfast seat at Westminster. Overall, the long-running apparently inexorable rise of the Nationalist vote was halted. The Nationalist share of the overall vote was down 3.6%. For the first time in 32 years, Unionists took a Westminster seat from Nationalists – Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Another nationalist seat is extremely vulnerable, that of SDLP leader Alasdair McDonnell in South Belfast. He was only 900 ahead of the DUP candidate, despite a three-way Unionist scrap. In North Belfast, seen as a possible Nationalist gain, the total Nationalist vote in fact fell by 4.2%. While not as prominent as in the Republic, social issues are at last and at least bubbling below the surface. The conservative wing of the DUP were losers. Health minister Jim Wells resigned after claiming child abuse was more common among gay people, then police being called to an incident with a lesbian couple in Rathfriland. Wells stood in the Nationalist-held seat of South Down. His vote fell sufficiently to allow the Ulster Unionists to outpoll him. The Reverend William McCrea, traditionalist Free Presbyterian minister and outgoing MP for South Antrim, lost to Ulster Unionist Danny Kinahan. Kinahan was the only Unionist Assembly member to vote for equal marriage. The election has weakened the threat to the DUP from the right. The right-wing Traditional Unionist Voice polled poorly: six of seven candidates polling under 2,000 votes. A DUP source told Village this indicates the DUP’s future is in the centre, in electoral competition with more moderate forces. Under the radar, there is a peculiar development. The DUP is courting Catholic social conservatives – an estimated minimum 10% of the North’s Catholics. They are more middle-class and motivated to vote. A Catholic social conservative told Village: “I have three issues: Abortion; Homosexual marriage; A united Ireland. The DUP is with me on two of them. Sinn Féin is only with me on one, and even then it is compromised”. He said he was reluctant to vote Ulster Unionist, because some of their candidates took liberal stances on social issues. After the election, a Catholic pro-life group in Dungannon has claimed credit for the Unionist victory in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. It circulated 20,000 leaflets, targeting Sinn Fein as pro-abortion. The DUP source was careful not to exaggerate the support from Catholic social conservatives. “It may be only a handful”, the DUP source said. “But in an election, a handful of votes can make a difference”. He pointed out that, while all the Churches have sought DUP support on social issues “only one Church ever backed that up with a statement – that’s the Catholic Church”. A priest in a nationalist rural area has said he has been surprised at a number of parishioners telling him they were voting DUP. They were former SDLP voters, who saw that party as standing for Catholic principles – but have lost faith in it. Certainly, with constitutional issues and controversy over flags and marches having retreated, the DUP is no longer as toxic to a section of Catholics. Its difficulty may be that the issues which attract these Catholics are increasingly toxic to the majority of the North’s Protestants. Sinn Féin’s stalling in the North  has certain implications for the Irish general election. The political opponents most avidly anti-Sinn Féin were those who most strongly believed it was unstoppable. They will breathe more hopefully now. Sinn Féin has perhaps been nurturing excessive expectations or the next election. Strategists believe its seat tally will probably be in the mid-20s, from the current 14. It has suffered from the reduction in the total number of Dáil seats, and changes in constituency boundaries. In a number of seats, it has a weak organisation and no well-known candidate. However, North and South Sinn Féin has shown an ability to learn from setbacks. From the Northern results, it is clear that the Republic will be the area of growth. •

By Frank Connolly Rumours and predictions of an Autumn election have been spreading like summer gorse fire over recent weeks with reports that Fine Gael is preparing its national advertising campaign for a run to the country soon after the October budget. A number of factors could point to a November campaign including the opinion polls that have consistently placed Fine Gael as the most popular party and the fact that the results in the recent Carlow Kilkenny by-election suggest that it could rely on the handful of right-wing independents likely to be elected under the Renua or Shane Ross banners. The meltdown in Labour’s vote in a constituency where it held a seat over generations could also influence the decision of the senior FG strategists as to when to pull the plug on the coalition, although their junior partners have not yet conceded that their future is completely bleak. Labour can point to the agreement reached with public-service workers which will put €2,000 in the pockets of low- and middle- income workers over the next two years as well as restore pay for higher earners and provide assurances to employees across the health, education and local-authority sectors that their jobs will not be outsourced. It can also argue that the election should be delayed to the new year until the benefits of these pay increases and the expected tax and USC concessions in Budget 2016 reach public- and private- sector pay packets. The sale of Aer Lingus was an undoubted blow to Joan Burton’s troops, even though the government stake had been diluted in significance by Fianna Fáil all those years ago, but other legislation – albeit less than robust – which recognises collective-bargaining rights for workers will appeal to the working-class base which has been deserting the party over the past four years. The by-election results show that Lucinda Creighton’s project could throw up enough seats to get her into cabinet in an FG-led government. The Ross gang too are solely interested in cabinet seats. This all serves to diminish the chances of Enda Kenny having to distastefully share power with the old enemy, Fianna Fáil. The by-election also threw up a potential interesting development on the left of the political divide. This is because Sinn Fein’s Kathleen Funchion (16%) and the hard-left candidates from People before Profit (PBP) and the Anti-Austerity Alliance (AAA) (with 4,500 between them) took 1,500 more first preference votes than the victorious Fianna Fáil candidate, Bobby Aylward. The efforts to develop an alternative platform or charter for the left bringing SF, smaller parties, Left TDs such as Mick Wallace, Clare Daly, Thomas Pringle, Catherine Murphy and others together with the Right2Water unions and community groups will continue at a meeting in Dublin in mid-June. Already the prospects of an agreement embracing all these elements looks dim given the reluctance of PBP and the ‘pure’ socialists of the AAA to engage with others who do not accept their rigid positions on a range of issues, including how to run a civilised policy debate. Others on the trade-union, SF and independent-left side of the equation are unhappy with any suggestion that the Right2Water movement could or should be transformed into a political party. However, if a loose alliance were to develop a charter of credible policies on taxation and spending, and on the solutions required to fix our ailing public services, the low-wage economy and widespread poverty it could increase the numbers of left-wing candidates, and the numbers elected to the next Dáil. Meanwhile, the latest controversy surrounding the Fine Gael’s most prominent and richest supporter, Denis O’Brien, and his dealings with IBRC and  Siteserv, as well as his other recent acquisitions, has no doubt served to focus the minds of party strategists on the benefits of a November election, before the next crisis is too far down the tracks. •