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And what RTE, the Irish Times and the Journal removed, and the Indo never published. Dail Eireann 28 May 2015 Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Bill 2015: First Stage Deputy Catherine Murphy: I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Act 1993 in order to make an addition to the First Schedule, to expand the areas under which an examination under section 9 may be conducted, and to provide for related matters. The Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Bill 2015 proposes to extend the functions and powers of the Comptroller and Auditor General to cover IBRC. It was the Taoiseach who first suggested that the Comptroller and Auditor General review the Siteserv sale process at which time it was pointed out to him that the IBRC does not come within the Comptroller and Auditor General’s remit. With this Bill, I am attempting to address that problem by broadening the remit of the Comptroller and Auditor General. The reason I anticipate the need to involve the Comptroller and Auditor General, if not a full commission of inquiry which latter might well be a better option, is that the Government has got this matter badly wrong. That is not least because most of the key players in the Siteserv saga have links with KPMG and the eventual purchaser and vice versa. It is a web of connections and conflicts that requires outside eyes to unravel. I have no doubt that the special liquidator is more than capable of carrying out such a review, but his direct involvement in the sale process, his relationship with the eventual purchaser of Siteserv and his current actions in the High Court in supporting Mr. Denis O’Brien against RTé place him in a position where there is, at the very least, a perceived if not an actual conflict of interest. The review is not confined to Siteserv, but that is the transaction that prompted a review in the first instance. I worry about the transactions that have been excluded from the review given what that we now know that in the final months before prom night, the relationship between the Department and IBRC had completely broken down. If deals were being done without the knowledge or input of the Minister, we must know what those were. We are now aware, for example, that the former CEO of IBRC made verbal agreements with Denis O’Brien to allow him to extend the terms of his already expired loans. We also know that the verbal agreement was never escalated to the credit committee for approval. I am led to believe and would welcome clarification by the Minister that the rates applicable to the extension were extremely favourable. I understand that Mr. O’Brien was enjoying a rate of approximately 1.25% when IBRC could, and arguably should, have been charging 7.5%. Given that we are talking about outstanding sums of upwards of €500 million, the interest rate applied is not an insignificant issue for the public interest. We also know that Denis O’Brien felt confident enough in his dealings with IBRC that he could write to Kieran Wallace, the special liquidator, to demand that the same favourable terms extended to him by way of a verbal agreement be continued. We now have Kieran Wallace, who has been appointed by the Government to conduct the IBRC review, joining with IBRC and Denis O’Brien in the High Court to seek to injunct the information I have outlined from coming into the public domain. Surely, that alone represents a conflict. In documents released to me under freedom of information, the Minister, his officials, the Central Bank and even the troika acknowledge that IBRC – the former Anglo Irish Bank – is no ordinary bank and that there is a significant public interest as the bank was fully nationalised and was in wind-down mode. They all accept that this is the people’s money we are dealing with and that there can be no dispute regarding the public interest in this. The same materials obtained under freedom of information detail instances where the Minister can specifically intervene and issue a ministerial order that material matters have a significant public interest. Included in these material matters are instances that are outside the ordinary course of business. I argue that what I have outlined here regarding verbal deals and extensions etc. are outside the normal course of business and ask the Minister to exercise his right to intervene in the current proceedings to defend the public interest. I have a motion on the Order Paper signed by the majority of Opposition Members calling for a debate on the proposed review. I note that 45 Members have signed and more are welcome to. When I tried to raise the matter on the Order of Business, I was silenced and told to take it up with my Whip. I am the Whip of the Technical Group and I had raised the matter at the weekly Whips’ meeting. The Government Chief Whip told me that the Government would not be altering the KPMG review and that it would not provide time to debate this issue. He suggested that we use Private Members’ time. This is not just an Opposition issue; it is an issue for the whole House. It is an issue of serious public concern involving public money. If the Minister opposite, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, got his hands on an extra €20 million, he would not have to think too hard about how to spend it. I urge the Government to reconsider this matter and to give the Bill and the motion the time they deserve. It is in the public interest to do so. An Leas-Cheann Comhairle: Is the Bill opposed? Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport (Deputy Paschal Donohoe): No. Question put and agreed to. An Leas-Cheann Comhairle: Since this is a Private Members’ Bill, Second Stage must, under Standing Orders, be taken in Private

Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s most powerful media owner, is – as an individual – exercising an extraordinarily chilling effect on journalism and journalists after grossly negative findings against him in the Moriarty Tribunal. When Village asked Sam Smyth to contribute a piece about a media topic of his choice for this edition, he replied “I’m still under legal siege from you-know-who and cannot venture into print yet”. Smyth was the lead Irish Independent reporter on the Moriarty Tribunal, which reached negative conclusions about Denis O’Brien. O’Brien is suing Smyth for alleged defamation on TV and radio, and in print. Frank Connolly, one of Ireland’s most experienced journalists, conducted a wide-ranging  interview with Éamon Dunphy for Village. In the end Dunphy’s lawyers advised that because O’Brien is suing him, he should ask to have the interview withdrawn. As these old pros batten down and page after page remained virgin white I realised Village was going to have to take a look at Denis O’Brien – if only to fill the now gaping blankness. Journalist and broadcaster Vincent Browne recently resigned from the Sunday Business Post where he was a columnist, in part because the newspaper refused to print a piece he had written about Denis O’Brien’s pervasive media influence. A former editor, Ted Harding, left the  same paper as long ago as 2004, some time after he was forbidden to  print material about O’Brien that  his bosses were unhappy with. In  June last year O’Brien wrote to Vincent Browne, who was close to him  when he was personal assistant to Tony Ryan – the businessman who helped Browne revive the Sunday Tribune in 1983. He finished up: “I am putting you on good notice that if you continue to libel [sic] me that I will be left with no other avenue but to sue you personally”. Browne replied that the  threat was an abuse of money and power. After academic Elaine Byrne wrote an article in the Sunday Independent, “So Who’s Afraid of Denis O’Brien? Enda Kenny”, she received a letter from lawyers for Denis O’Brien: “the article is characterised by an appalling lack of objectivity. This is demonstrated in Ms Byrne’s repeated references to the Moriarty Tribunal report in support of criticisms of our client…[and her] sneering and sarcastic description of him as a patriot …It is also obvious from … an avalanche of commentary via her Twitter account that Ms Byrne has a personal animus against our client and is clearly pursuing an agenda…. Her snide and uninformed comments in relation to our client’s tax affairs are further evidence of this…We hereby call upon you to publish, in a prominent position, a full retraction, an apology in the next edition of the Sunday Independent. And let us have your proposals to address this grave wrong in terms to be agreed with this office”. Byrne says “There was no apology and there was no retraction”. The case proceeds. O’Brien has two years to move it. Meanwhile Byrne, a young if precocious heroine of free speech, has migrated to Australia as a consequence. She told Village, “the Sword of Damocles has a marginalising effect on your career”. O’Brien has also threatened to sue corruption watchdog, Transparency International, for linking Ireland’s descent down its international corruption index not just to the Mahon and Moriarty Tribunals in general, but to Denis O’Brien in particular. The group is apparently not yielding. Anne Harris, editor of the Sunday Independent, has claimed that 17 journalists have received legal letters from Denis O’Brien in the last ten years. Last week cash-rich O’Brien obtained an injunction stopping the Sunday Times publishing confidential details of his business relationship with cash-short Paddy McKillen. O’Brien also has two challenges before the Supreme Court relating to Moriarty’s decision to deploy former Attorney General, Michael McDowell, to cross-examine key pro-Lowry witness, Professor Michael Andersen, and to curtail his evidence. He even wrote to Village about a profile of him last year, though his letter was painfully thin and he didn’t bother to make legal threats. And O’Brien is suing his cousin Donald MacAllister, most notable until now for self-publishing an incendiary book making allegations about the death of his mother in a car crash in 1972. O’Brien objects to allegations he has made about the Moriarty Tribunal and associated litigation, in emails he sent to Micheál Martin, Vincent Browne and Aung San Suu Kyi, among others. Less chilling, because it didn’t really centre on denying the proceedings of a Tribunal, was O’Brien’s recent successful defamation case against the Irish Daily Mail which was grounded in his concern at the misrepresentation of charitable works associated with his involvement in a Carribean mobile-phone company, Digicel. After a week-long trial, the jury found for O’Brien and awarded him damages of €150,000. Experienced Mail columnist, Paul Drury, had written that O’Brien “kept popping up” on RTÉ news to promote his image “set to be tarnished by a pending report of the Moriarty tribunal”. It was, Drury wrote, an “ingenious feint”. Unfortunately for the Mail, this view of the facts did not hold up. In addition, while the article said Moriarty was “about to report”, O’Brien stressed that anyone familiar with the tribunal could have told Drury that publication was not imminent. The new ‘honest opinion’ defence advanced is defined in the Defamation Act, 2009. The guts of the defence is that published opinion may be defended in a libel suit if it was anchored in fact, concerned a matter of public interest and was honestly held by the publisher or author. But in this case it was not so anchored. That Denis O’ Brien was genuinely concerned for Haiti and not self-promoting  may not suit liberals or begrudgers but it seems to have been the facts, and it explains the finding. The National Union of Journalists has been strangely silent on all this, though it raised some concerns about the recently-proposed 39-point discussion document on an INM editorial charter which would leave journalists ‘on their own’ in

By Michael McNamara, TD. Though many might want to tell Paul Murphy to toddle off or stronger words to the same effect – and he deserves at least that – Murphy  wasn’t just an ordinary citizen who accidentally wandered into the Dáil chamber to ask a question out of turn this week. He was there as a public representative with a mandate to question Government and hold it to account on behalf of his constituents. And the disrespect shown to him by the Taoiseach when he told him to “toddle off” was a disrespect for those who elected him. Of course in some of his own dealings with Government, Murphy abjectly failed to respect the mandate entrusted to him, but that’s not an excuse for the leader of government to sink to his level. This incident followed weeks after Michael Noonan’s failure to answer Catherine Murphy’s parliamentary  question on Siteserv. His answer conveyed a sense that there was something to cover up. Now he assures us  there’s nothing to cover up and a special liquidator, overseen by a High Court judge, will look into the books  to be sure. This is far cheaper and faster than a commission of inquiry but still expensive. Why not just answer the question? I was recently  passed a briefing to a minister which stated: “Minister this is not information that would be provided in an answer to a PQ but…”. Why not? What’s so wrong with public servants freely providing information to the democratic representatives of the public they serve? When Irish Water was established, it was deliberately placed outside the parliamentary questions process by two parties in government, including my own, that had spent years criticising the fact that the provision of vital health services was not susceptible to parliamentary questions. The minister who took the Irish Water legislation through all stages of the Dáil in one afternoon – despite a clear commitment in the programme for government that there would be two weeks between all stages – has had a change of mind since he lost ministerial office. What is it about the advice of civil servants that is so enchanting that their commitment to keeping information from the public they serve is always followed by their political “masters” who subsequently go into opposition and complain that they cannot get information from government on behalf of their constituents? Returning to health, in a reform introduced by this government, TDs now get responses to parliamentary questions about the HSE but those responses rarely answer the question asked. If the TD is tenacious enough to follow up with a complaint to the Ceann Comhairle who agrees with him or her, it’ll be returned to the Department for what is frequently another response that studiously avoids answering the question.  If the TD is too pig-headed to walk and take his or her beating at this stage, another complaint can be made to the Ceann Comhairle and, should he agree that the question still has not been answered, he may select it for a Topical Issues debate. At the start of this government’s term, Cabinet Ministers promised to come into the Dáil to participate such debates. However, now the aforementioned, intrepid TD – if lucky enough to be selected for debate – can expect to be met with a junior minister from a different department with a prepared script to read aloud but no information to impart. If they do this well enough and often enough and perfect the hangdog look of “it’s not me that avoiding your question, I’m just the messenger” they may be promoted to become the actual minister avoiding the question. This would be funny in a Monty Python kind of way if the questions asked weren’t about life or death  issues, like health services. One of the first things this Government did after extending the Freedom of Information system was to close it down again when it came to the Refugee Appeals Tribunal – one of the shadiest areas of our justice system and it did so by ramming a motion through the Dáil with a limited debate on the last sitting day before a break The Dáil was suspended for much of this week. An opposition spokesman went to a funeral and the couple of hundred amendments he was proposing could therefore not be debated. The debate was futile anyway. I can say with certainly that they amendments would not have been accepted no matter how much sense they made , how glaring the flaw in the draft legislation they sought to remedy because this government, like its predecessors, does not accept amendments from the opposition or even its own backbenchers. At best, a Minister might concede that a valid point had been raised and give an assurance that will be addressed in a Ministerial amendment in the (yet to be reformed) Seanad. If the amendment makes sense, why not just accept it? Would it break the illusion that the Government is always right and the opposition is always wrong? The only problem with this is that those who are always wrong also have a mandate and refusing to accept that they may sometimes , even once , have a point, completely disregards the basic democratic right to representation of those who voted for them. While the Dáil this week was suspended there were 22 Bills by individual TDs being put into a hat for the chance to be drawn out for discussion before an invariably-empty chamber every second Friday.  This was heralded as another landmark reform by this government.  Not one of those Bills has yet gone anywhere near passing through one House much less both, which it would have to do before being signed into law by the  President.  Are all of the authors of those Bills – TDs, individually elected to legislate by their constituents, adjudged too stupid to do so by the Government they’re also supposed to hold to account or by the civil servants

Aosdána, 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 14 April Dear Editor, In his article in your publication, dated 14th April 2015, Mannix Flynn is wrong when he states, regarding election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána, “Currently, if a position is vacant for one of the Saoi (Saoithe) all it needs is for certain insiders in Aosdána to get together 15 members to put a name forward to guarantee the elevation”. The procedures for nominating a member of Aosdána to the honour of Saoi are laid down in the rules of Aosdána, clearly and unambiguously. They state that at any time, fifteen members may propose in writing another member for election as Saoi. There is no such thing as “guaranteed elevation”. When a nomination has been correctly put forward, it then goes to the entire membership for ratification by secret ballot. A successful nomination must gain the positive votes of 50% of the entire membership plus one. Mannix Flynn’s contention that this process can be hijacked in secret by what he calls “certain insiders” is therefore factually wrong. Having been a member of the Toscaireacht (Steering Committee), from 2007 to 2011 Mannix Flynn is, or should be, familiar with the rules of the body. The current Saoithe were nominated by a very wide range of members. At a conservative estimate, more than half of the members have been involved in these nominations. Mannix Flynn’s definition of “certain insiders” is, therefore a most peculiar one. Mannix Flynn’s motion before the last General Assembly proposed that, on a vacancy arising, the Toscaireacht should advise all members that a vacancy exists. The fact is that both the Registrar of Aosdána and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon issue condolence notices to all members when a Saoi dies. Given the status of the Saoithe as artists, there is invariably extensive media coverage of the death. Mannix Flynn is extremely economical with the facts when he refers to the contribution of our member Theo Dorgan to the debate on Mannix Flynn’s motion at the 2015 General Assembly. Theo Dorgan, as the minutes show, made the larger point that the honour of Saoi is conferred to acknowledge the work of the most gifted of our artists.  Theo Dorgan’s view was that, as an honour freely conferred by the membership, it would be inappropriate to make the position of Saoi the subject of a competitive election with multiple candidates, which was the thrust of Mannix Flynn’s motion. It would be equally inappropriate, for example, to institute competitive elections for the honour of Freedom of Cities of Dublin, Belfast, Cork etc. Honours are properly, freely given – neither sought nor competed for. Mannix Flynn put his motion before the General Assembly and, following a full and open debate, his motion was put to the meeting; it was overwhelmingly rejected. Yours sincerely, Mary FitzGerald, Chair of the Toscaireacht, Dear Toscaireacht and members of Aosdána,   I am replying to the letter of 14th April from the Toscaireacht about my article published in last month’s Village magazine. It is apparent that anyone who challenges Aosdána’s processes is wrong in the Toscaireacht’s eyes. Aosdána deemed it wrong of me to raise the issue of artists endorsing Arts Council guidelines on protection of children in the aftermath of the Cathal O Searcaigh scandal; equally it said I was wrong to raise the issue of the inappropriateness of undermining the dignity of the Garden of Remembrance by siting the proposed State memorial for victims of child sexual abuse there; and here we are again. The point about elections to the honorary position of Saoi is that, once nominated, nominees are almost assured of election. Members are loath to vote down a fellow artist eminent enough to have been proposed. This means that particularly acute attention must be paid to how nominees are nominated. That is the point of my intervention. We all know how things are done. It’s the secret guarantee, the insiderist nod. What gives confidence to that nod is the failure of the Toscaireacht and the general Aosdána assembly to engage in any systematic way on this issue. It is disingenuous for the Toscaireacht to deny Aosdána’s established modus operandi and to fall back on obfuscating references to the election being fair, when the fact the nomination which precedes the election is handled unfairly is the problem, a problem that necessarily taints the entire process. Nor is it normal not to draw members’ attention to vacancies. In democratically-driven organisations the process is notification of members about forthcoming democratic procedures, not condolence. Your response to my article takes a rather high tone in relation to my motion insinuating that it would be inappropriate for the position of Saoi to be, in your words, competitive. You quote Mr Dorgan’s view that as an honour freely conferred by the membership it would be inappropriate to make the position of Saoi the subject of a competitive election of multiple candidates” but this in fact touches on my very point. For it is that already. The Aosdána modus operandi is that whoever is first through the letter box for nomination vanquishes all, because of Aosdána’s characteristic and understandable reluctance to vote down an eminent nominee. An unseemly rush to nomination is the symptom of the competitiveness. The issue is not competitiveness, which is there already, the issue is transparency and democracy. Regarding the honour of the Freedom of Dublin City – it is indeed an honorary position and it is the prerogative of the Lord Mayor (and indeed of a single member of the council placing a motion before the council). The procedure is very clearly laid down in standing orders. That is not the case with Aosdána whose procedures or rules are not properly explicated, as I have pointed out in my correspondence to you. For instance, unlike with the Council, there is no procedure for the members to make nominations.  Nor, according to the registrar of Aosdána, need members be told that a vacancy