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Corrupting philanthropy

by admin 12 March, 2014

As Frank Flannery revealed as overpaid consultant to Philanthropy Ireland as well as chair of Forum on Philanthropy read Niall Crowley on the corruption of philanthropy in Ireland (July 2013, Village) Worried voice. “The one percent difference?…Is this another tax?”. Authoritative voice. “This is not a tax. This is something only you can decide on.” Still worried voice “So it’s definitely not a tax thing?”. Even more authoritative voice. “The Government decides where our taxes go. This is yours”. This conversation is part of the promotional video for the ‘One Percent Difference’ campaign. This reassurance actually takes up about 20% of the promotional piece. The campaign asks everyone to give one percent of their income or time to causes they choose to support. According to the promoters it is the “largest and most significant” public awareness campaign of its kind ever undertaken in Ireland. Strange that such an anti-tax message should be funded by the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government. It is even stranger that this Department should be inflicting extensive and disproportionate cuts on the community and voluntary sector while funding this campaign to enhance giving from the general public. Is funding now to be privatised? The ‘One Percent Difference’ video concludes, “It’s been proven. Giving is good for you. So, you are helping yourself too”. Philanthropy has always been good for you fiscally, especially if you are wealthy. If you give money to eligible charities you get tax relief on your income as a self-assessed individual or on your profits as a company. This is the sort of policy that contributes to the unacceptably low effective tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals. It’s going to get even better if Frank Flannery has his way. Frank Flannery is a one-time director of elections for Fine Gael, and now the chair of the Forum on Philanthropy and Fundraising. appointed by Phil Hogan (Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government). Frank Flannery has proposed that “tax exiles” (always a strange and inappropriate title) should be given incentives to contribute to philanthropy in the form of extra days they can stay in Ireland. This of course makes the concept of “exile” even more ludicrous. He has proposed that our “exiles” get an extra day at home for every 36,500 Euro they donate to charity, up to a total of an extra 62 days a year. His proposal, bizarrely, extends not only to “investment” in charities but also to investment in small and medium-sized businesses. It is not clear from media reports whether he has the Forum behind him. This should make for an interesting dynamic if they choose to stand up to him. Michael Noonan, Minister for Finance, has, however, responded positively to the extraordinary and unethical proposal [ed’s note: in the end Noonan turned them down]. He believes it might be “an attractive initiative” and he thinks it will enable job creation. He has referred it to the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform for consideration. This is the Minister that should be creating disincentives for those who elect to be “exiles” so that the exchequer has sufficient funds to make provision for the full range of civil society activities. Civil society is sadly malleable. It feels it has to shape up to the funding available and, only then, look to what really needs doing in our society. The philanthropy of tax exiles will not, self-evidently, fund many campaigns for tax justice. The philanthropy of big business will not fund actions to develop a ‘de-growth’ agenda. The philanthropy of the wealthy will not enable an equal society. The Revenue Commissioners reflect the narrow understanding of civil society evident in their tax exemptions to encourage philanthropy. The tax breaks they offer have always been for donations that contribute to the “relief of poverty”, the “advancement of education”, the “advancement of religion”, and “works of a charitable nature beneficial to the community”. Many civil-society organisations stand for equality, environmental sustainability and participation. These values need to be the standard against which to assess the nature and sources of funding that can ethically be availed of. These values need to be deployed before Frank Flannery, Michael Noonan, and Phil Hogan ingrain the murkiness now widely associated with philanthropy; and before worthy and progressive organisations find that their funding has been privatised and the state abrogated minimal responsibility.

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Good god, Google.

by Village 12 March, 2014

By Ronan Lynch. Administration and ‘process’ not innovation drive Irish operation It’s been a bad twelve months for Google. It began with the growing awareness of Google’s tax avoidance, and continued with Google being forced to deny that it participated in the PRISM spying project. It also suffers ballooning costs and falling ad rates. So Google doubtless welcomed the summer movie ,The Internship, which portrays Google as the world’s best workplace. Google boss Sergey Brin puts in a cameo appearance, and the Google logo is omnipresent. Forget the story – but check out the funky sleeping pods, brilliant minds at work, the working rooms that look like playgrounds, the free food, slides between floors, and the bicycles for getting around the ‘campus’. The icon of Google as super-employer is pervasive. A recent RTE news report from Google’s Irish headquarters on Barrow Street in Dublin finds normally reticent George Lee marvelling at his surroundings on the eleventh floor. There are “pretty funky sleeping pods, cowprint rugs, beanbags and snooker tables and a whole lot more,” gushes the economics hardman. “It really is some workplace”. Google has been in Ireland since 2003, and employs close to 3,000 workers. In 2012, it earned worldwide profits of $10.4 billion on the back of revenues of $50.2 billion. Revenue from Europe, the Middle East and Africa is channelled through Google Ireland Ltd ,and on to Google Ireland Holdings which is based in Bermuda for tax purposes. In 2011, Google paid a little over €8 million in taxes in Ireland on revenues of €12.5 billion. It’s little wonder that the company targets so much emphasis on its reputation as a great employer, but is Google the glamorous employer of popular apprehension? Some former Google employees and contractors with significant experience at the company think not. Permanent staff are well taken care of, they say, but even many permanent staff are overqualified, overworked, and perform relatively menial tasks. In addition, entire layers of hidden contractors and temporary workers do much of the work without the benefits or opportunities accorded to permanent staff. The area around Barrow Street is sometimes referred to as ‘Silicon Dock’, a nod to the importation of ‘Silicon Valley’ values to Ireland. Writing in the London Review of Books, Rebecca Solnit observed that “Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young. for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks;…and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous… The tech workers, many of them new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their twenties and thirties”. So how does Dublin measure up as a high-tech wonderland? For a start, the imputation ‘high tech’ may be inaccurate. Much work in the Irish ‘high tech’ sector is actually customer service work requiring language skills. Google’s Irish operation deals mainly with advertising sales and technical services, handling Google’s business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One former Google employee estimates that 20 to 30% of the permanent workforce is Irish. The remaining 70% to 80% are hired abroad and re-locate to Ireland. (Google did not respond to inquiries about the make-up of its Irish workforce.) For its permanent staff, Google generally hires people who are educated to Masters level, and for most of its employees, Google is their first job after graduation. “The pay is okay, median level for the industry, but you can make an extra 20 to 40% in bonuses”, says a former employee. “The people hired by Google are the best in their classes: alpha personalities, highly competitive and highly driven. Most people would come from an arts or business background. In Ireland, they probably hire mostly from Trinity and UCD. There’s class politics at the heart of this all. It’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t come from a middle-class background to end up working for a tech giant as they select from the top universities. Even with a great degree from one of the ITs, most multinationals won’t look at you, as they are looking for graduates of the ‘best schools’ in the country”. After working for Facebook, US enterpreneur Jeff Hammerbacher acidly observed that “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”. At the Dublin headquarters, Google’s employees learn how to use internal software systems, and then start working on dealing with incoming emails and checking ads to see if they meet internal guidelines. They also work on copywriting and editing. It’s one of the reasons that employees eventually move on if they can’t move up. There’s a reason for all the free food and benefits beyond sheer magnanimity, says the former employee. “In principle, the working hours are from nine to six, with an unpaid lunch hour, but I was regularly going home at nine or ten at night. It’s what’s expected. If you go home at six and everyone else goes home at nine, it’s noticed”. The on-site restaurants and free food encourage workers to stay in the building. “At first it sounds brilliant. Free food! But it minimises the time away from work. On paper, you have an hour’s lunch break, but you end up grabbing something to eat and going straight back to work without leaving the building”. A decent balance of working time and outside life is prejudiced as a result, he says. “So, you have 70% of the people coming from abroad, they don’t know anybody else here in Dublin. There is a collegial atmosphere and people share houses and flats and their whole social life revolves around Google. The culture is such that you work till late, go home, switch on your computer and check your email to communicate with your colleagues in America. It consumes your life without you realising it”. Having worked at Google

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Bye Bye Mr Smug (Flannery and Enda’s backroom – Village 2009)

by Village 10 March, 2014

Frank Flannery and Ciaran Conlon, Enda’s backroom boys The smuggest men in politics That man you see on the box when FG do something popular like incorporate George Lee, the one who is so ostentatiously controlling the sequence of press questioning by authoritative sweeps and pointings. That’s young(ish) Ciaran Conlon. He used to work for the PDs. FG’s backroom boys brought you the Twink as charlady sketch, the Celtic snail, Enda the Action Man and the 2007 General Election loss that should have been impossible Tom Curran and Frank Flannery have run the show for years with Curran the capable adminstrator as General Secretary, and Flannery the fearsome Svengali strategiser. But the main problem with Frank is that he thinks FG did well at the last election. He doesn’t feel how bad FF were, how ripe to be taken out. And most of all he doesn’t sense how bad Enda Kenny and FG are, how lacking in credibility as an opposition Not directing the press but thinking for a long time that he’s in charge of a broader agenda that drives this old country of ours is Frank Flannery until recently both director of elections and director of organisation. In an article published in the Mail on Sunday newspaper before the elections, Mr Flannery said his party would consider entering Government with Sinn Féin if the situation arose. Enda Kenny was quick to distance himself from those remarks and said his party has no intention of negotiating a partnership with Sinn Féin. After some nasty talk of demotions Fine Gael quickly confirmed that its national director of elections for the recent local campaigns would not be reappointed to the role for the next General Election. Frank Flannery will retain his position as the party’s director of organisation, concentrating on issues such as candidate development. The spokesman said Mr Kenny said the next director of elections would probably be a politician, as was the case with Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fail of course have deployed grinning PJ Mara for the last few elections, though he is retiring now. Part of PJ’s job, a small part, was to get the message across that they were scared, in a respectful way, of Flannery and his boys. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Flannery saw no problem with Kenny as leader and believed coming in second in the last election was a triumph of his psephological wizardry. PJ was happy just to smile, respectfully. What Fine Gael needs is the iron hand in the velvet glove. Bring on Varadkar. 2009. Pic: Broadsheet

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Denis to Dermot (Village imagines)

by Village 1 March, 2014

Dear Mr Desmond, You never go to Davos. Why’s that then? I’ve been going for more than a decade, cruising in on the old Gulfstream. I love to put myself about. I had them eating out of my hand with my clever stock tips: “I am positive about 2014, but it will not be like 2013 in terms of S&P 500 index gains”, I told Bloomberg in one of my rare but exciting interviews. “Of course, I told them, “politicians are the biggest hurdle facing the global economic recovery”. Now you and I both know what I meant by that. Give an elected member an inch and they’ll be right up your ileum trying to get an inquiry or tribunal into you. “They are more and more worried about their re-election than growing their economies”, is how I put it. Meanwhile “’I’ve been investing heavily in Ireland because I believe in it”. You and I, Sir, believers. The green jersey. Love the new look Sunday Business Post, by the way. Was that your idea, the green bits on the cover? If a man can’t show his patriotism by insisting on green bits on the cover of a newspaper, what’s this great little country come to? How’re you doing for cash? See you netted almost €180m from the sale of your stake in listed online payments and money transfer group Optimal Payments – a near eightfold return on his investment in little over four years. Personally, I’ll be getting a dividend of around $650m from Digicel in 2014. I’ll invest about $500m (€369m) in infrastructure for it in 2014. We won’t be floating it for a while. Meanwhile we’re borrowing another more than €360 million from the capital markets to cover general company spending. See, I’m bloody determined to keep the telecommunications business outside Europe, due to “failed” regulation. By that of course, as you well know, I mean tribunals. Give me Burma any time. But it didn’t stop me in early February becoming the fourth largest player in the UK radio market after buying eight stations from Global Radio in a deal worth £35million after they were forced to sell off by competition regulators following acquisition of GMG Radio. We’ll be adding eight stations with a combined audience of 2.8 million listeners. We’re looking at other opportunities, including China. We have 4,000 people working for us in China in recruitment. And not one of them’s ever been before a tribunal. Someone who should be in front of a tribunal is that Declan Ganley where he gets his funding is even more obscure than the amount I’ve given Fine Gael down the years. Malicious Ganley and his nasty little last-coming consortium are suing Esat, over the ssecond mobile licence. It’s as if they actually believe the Moriarty report that Lowry interfered with the tender process to ensure Esat would be awarded the licence and that he accepted payments from us. High Court – a ring of steel of course – ruled Ganley doesn’t have to cough up security for costs to pursue his action since essentially he was loaded. I’ll show him loaded. I’m on the verge of buying €304m worth of loans linked to Topaz and its mouth-watering 330 service stations across Ireland, as part of a big loan auction from IBRC. IBRC are great sports of course: they wrote off around €100million in debt belong to Siteserv, before I bought it for €45million even though an underbidder offered more – while I owed Anglo hundreds of millions. Hate Anglo of course after how they treated Seanie, my mate. Those eejits in Broadsheet.ie, with their anti-everything smartarsery moved quickies to remove a typically begruding piece about me written by an anti-austerity protester that had been doing the rounds on social media. It suggested several allegations – which it didn’t stand up in the article – about Siteserv and Irish Water. A subsidiary of Siteserv is one of the companies that recently won contracts as part of the rollout of water meters. “It is outrageous that you should seek to impugn an investment by Mr O’Brien . . . in a struggling Irish business (Siteserv) that had the effect of saving jobs”, we thundered and they folded. Sorry to hear about the depositions you’re giving in the Paul Siegel defamation case but a classic stroke getting it upgraded to federal racketeering. According to the Irish Times your man “has admitted setting up meetdermotdesmond.com, a no longer active – deo gratias – website lampooning you”. Fair game for you to file details of a restraining order taken out by Siegel’s former and text messages he allegedly sent to his daughter, as well as details of alleged altercations involving Mr Siegel and his children following his recent divorce. Lovely touch Mr Desmond when this little fellow referred to his own “tenacity” to refuse to back down to his threats and to tell him after dealing with you you’ll “know the meaning of the word tenacity”. Brilliant and right out of the Denis O’Brien book of witticisms. So this whoor’s defence regarding the website is that it constitutes humour and satire, and that he had a right to publish it under the liberal free speech laws of the US. We’ve all a lot to lose if satire takes hold, Mr D. See you in Twickenham. Denis pic – thanks, Broadsheet

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The unpredictable drip of freedom of Information. Understaffed new Information Commissioner withdraws appeal as Aarhus convention flouted.

by Village 1 March, 2014

By Tony Lowes ‘Governments treat the information in their possession as a resource, to be doled out in amounts as they see fit, either copious flows or mean little trickles. I noted that ultimately, it is the Government that controls the tap – Emily O’Reilly, Information Commissioner 2003-13’ In a serious blow to Freedom of Information in Ireland, the newly appointed Information Commissioner and Ombudsman Peter Tyndall has withdrawn his predecessor’s appeal against a High Court judgment that the constitutional right to cabinet confidentiality can not be superseded by rights under EU. Under EU law, no emission to the environment can be exempted from the access to information legislation for any reason – not “commercial sensitivity” or “internal communications” or even “cabinet confidentially”. Requests for information often fall to many such exemptions. But if the information concerns “emissions to the environment”, that information must be released. Nevertheless in 2008 when Emily O’Reilly overturned the government’s decision not to release a cabinet minute relating to greenhouse gas emissions the Government took her to the High Court, which ruled in June 2010 that the Constitution trumped EU law. O’Reilly appealed to the Supreme Court, where the decision – described by one expert as “questionable in EU law” – could be debated at the highest level and if necessary referred to the European Court of Justice for its views. Scheduled to be heard this year, this prospect has been dashed by the new Commissioner’s withdrawal. Strangely but “strongly” of the view that the appeal would not succeed, the Commissioner admitted that he was aware the case raised issues “which went beyond the single question of access to the single document sought”. He was, however “cognisant of the severe financial constraints within which this office is obliged to operate”. His office also admits that the current Government is increasingly unhappy with its separate agencies fighting in public. It is to be hoped that more fibre is on display on April 7, when the Supreme Court is due to hear the Government’s appeal against O’Reilly’s ruling that NAMA is a public authority subject to Access to Information legislation, in a case brought by Gavin Sheridan. As Welsh Ombudsman, Peter Tyndall, a Trinity graduate and ex head of the Welsh Arts Council, spoke widely and wrote a number of articles emphasising the importance of extending the Ombudsman’s remit to public-service delivery by private-sector organisations “since the distinction in delivery…becomes increasingly blurred”. Public outcry may have led to the inclusion of Irish Water but the FoI Act continues to exclude 37 public bodies – from the largest landowners, Coillte and Bord na Mona – through An Post, Tourism Ireland, the Food Safety Promotion Board, the bus companies, the airport, harbour and port authorities, and the National Lottery. Even so, with a large number of bodies now coming under FoI under the new legislation, the delays that were characterised as “unacceptable” in the last Annual Report are now threatening to bring the whole system to a standstill. Only 18% of the cases dealt with under FoI were decided within the legal timeframe in 2012. No matter how right you are, justice delayed can be justice denied. There was some anger in the Information Commissioner’s office when the first Aarhus Convention National Implementation Report was released last month by Phil Hogan’s Department of the Environment. It breezily dismissed any concerns of chronic under-funding by saying that the Information Commissioner was entitled to seek any necessary funds from the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. The Ombudsman had made repeated such requests – and 5 new staff have been appointed to address the new legislation – but while the case closure rate is going up, the number of cases is rising faster. Nor has the Aarhus convention proved to be the white knight that many had hoped. Designed by NGOs under the auspices of the United Nations – led by Irishman Jeremy Waites – the convention promised better access to information, participation, and justice. UCC’s Dr Aine Ryall drew attention to a submission to Hogan’s Aarhus Report made by the Department of Justice: “In cases where the court does not deliver a considered, written judgment the decision of the court is recorded in a court order which is available only to the parties to the case”. She pointed out that many court decisions are in fact delivered ex tempore and that this was usually true when it came to the awarding of costs – a crucial element of the Aarhus convention. “It follows from this unambiguous statement”, Ryall wrote, “that ex tempore court decisions, where there is no written judgment, are not publicly accessible. This state of affairs is a clear breach of the express requirement in Article 9(4) that court decisions in Aarhus cases must be publicly accessible”. The Convention promised access to justice at a cost that is “not prohibitive” but we are denied the right to see how this has been addressed by the courts. Emily O’Reilly did much to advance Ireland’s tortuous journey towards transparency. Will her successor have the bottle to do the same? Tony Lowes is a Director of Friends of the Irish Environment

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Hipsterism: essential reminiscence in a world of airbrushed digitalisation

by Village 28 February, 2014

‘When art is made easy, it’s made cheap’ RóisIn Waters Okay, I admit it – I’m a hipster. I’m the person you see with a polaroid camera slung around my neck on my way to pick up Howlin’ Wolf’s psychedelic album – on vinyl, of course. I belong to that group of people who treat yellowed books like gold and would use a Kindle as kindling. And I’m one of the worst of them – I even have two typewriters, and I’m still at school. There is a general hatred of hipsters felt by almost every individual on this planet who notices us, but we don’t care, don’t register. The criticism is that we think we’re too ‘hip’, that we want to be different for the sake of it, that we drift away from the mainstream and have gone to live La Vie Bohème because of our supercilious feeling that anything popular has to be bad. We’re seen as a strange breed of elevated hippies. However, this opinion misses the point of ‘hipsterism’ (by the way, we’re not a weird unified cult or anything, we wouldn’t coalesce or even conspire). It’s not a matter of “we’re so original and cool” compared with the drab majority who just don’t get it. For me, it is a reaction to the airbrushed digitalisation of art. We’re not trying to be above everyone else, we just don’t buy into this. There is a desire for expression in a tangible form, to read books rather than screens, to see the needle on a spinning record, to understand that light doesn’t create a photograph just by magic. Nowadays we are so distanced from the process of creation that we are reverting back by decades, before iPods and eBooks even started. Think of it in terms of the notorious polaroid. When all you have in your camera is twelve shotsworth of film, you’ll be careful with your pictures. You’ll set them up just right, and you won’t just go snapping away at anything that takes your momentary fancy – film is way too expensive for that! With a digital camera, there simply isn’t the same value in your shots. Admittedly it is convenient, but when you limit yourself you’re more likely to want to photograph something eloquent or beautiful, rather than shooting off 127 ‘selfies’ in front of your bathroom mirror. The case is similar with typewriters; when you’re typing on your robotic wireless keyboard, just as I am now, there’s no sense of an actual connection. I’m hitting the buttons, and letters are appearing magically, but I have no real physical link with it. With a typewriter though, you really get the feeling that you’re making it happen, you can even tell how angry or excited someone was while typing, because they’ll often tear right through the page. But of course, vinyl is the ultimate hipster symbol. I love vinyl, and I don’t care how expensive or scratchable its artful disks are – when the needle sets down and I hear that first crackle, I relay lumbar shivers. Maybe the sound isn’t crystal, but some people just don’t go for the polished auto-tune of the Glee cast; some music is meant to be rough. Take The Velvet Underground for instance, soignée hipster favourites. If White Light/White Heat came out today, Sister Ray would be a three-minute single, most likely featuring Nikki Minaj. And then there’s the wonderment that you can actually watch it spinning – it’s the only form of recording where you can watch the music happen. iPods function on the surreal notion that you can fit Sonic Youth’s complete works into a matchbox, but with records you’re brought back down to earth, where things are made real in front of you. We live in a world of mail-order experience. Why go to a concert when you can hear it all on Spotify? Why read a book when you can just Wiki the plot? Our chronological displacement is a symptom of the search for unique and personal experiences. All the secret treasures you can find – light leaks in a photograph, a locked groove on a record – are alien fugitives in a perfect HD world. Today we ‘access’ everything at our touchscreen-compatible fingertips, and sure, convenience is great, but something is eroded. When art is made easy, it’s made cheap, so we ‘hipsters’ look for the real thing. We want to feel the rough edges of creation in this dented universe.

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Questions for Law Society

by Village 26 February, 2014

Solicitor Colm Murphy struck off after Law Society falsely imputed an undertaking, and relied in part on a forged document and evidence from a fraudulent solicitor By Frank Connolly Allegations of “repeated skulduggery on the part of officials of the Law Society” are likely to be aired in the Supreme Court in the not too distant future when struck-off solicitor, Colm Murphy, finally gets his day in court. Embroiled in a complex legal battle with the society long before, and since, he was struck from the Roll of Solicitors in 2009, Murphy is determined that his former colleagues will no longer delay a full hearing of his claim for damages for breach of duty, negligence, defamation and misfeasance in public office. Kenmare-based Murphy has claimed in a detailed submission to the Supreme Court that his striking off was based on spurious and inaccurate information provided by the Law Society to its Disciplinary Tribunal and the High Court ten years ago. Key to the decision to strike him from the roll was a claim by a society official, Linda Kirwan that Murphy had breached an undertaking he had given to the President of the High Court. Kirwan insisted in an affidavit seen by Village that she had been in the High Court on the day the undertaking was made. It was only after the unfortunate Murphy was struck off that she admitted, in affidavit and in a letter to Murphy in 2010 that she was not in fact in the court when the supposed undertaking was made. No such undertaking is recorded in the order from the court issued on the day in question. Murphy was also able to prove, again after the strike off, that the Law Society had taken attachment and committal proceedings against him based on a document forged by Frank Fallon who was subsequently jailed for two seven-year terms. Frank Fallon had claimed that he had not received title to a property even though he had paid Murphy and received a copy of the Deed from the then solicitor. It later turned out that the Deed in question was forged by Fallon and that no such transaction had taken place. Fallon from Charleville in Cork was sent to jail in Britain in 2009 after he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud by forging the wills of up to twelve people and stealing more than £500,000. The Law Society case against Murphy also included an incorrect claim that he had attended an auction of the Brown Pub in Kealkill county Cork in August 2006 in breach of its rule that a retired solicitor without a practising certificate cannot participate in the sale of a property by a former client. This error sparked what are known as Section 18 procedures against the former solicitor. Murphy’s submission goes on to list various other defamatory allegations pursued by the society including an incorrect implication that his client account was overdrawn. Further, he claims that a suggestion by the President of the High Court, Nicky Kearns, back in 2010 that a full hearing of the case should take place was frustrated by the society which instead sought to restrict matters to a trial of ‘preliminary issues’ rather than a full civil action. When the case came before Kearns again in June 2012 he queried why Murphy’s substantial case against the society had not gone ahead, as he had recommended. In his comments, Kearns referred to the case as a “spread-eagled mess” and referred to the claims of “alleged repeated skulduggery on the part of officials of the Law Society”. If this was not the sort of thing that could bring the Law Society into disrepute, the back story to the whole affair raises even more disturbing questions about its modus operandi in dealing with allegations of wrongdoing by its members. Murphy has insisted that his fall from grace originates in 2001/2002 when he complained about another member of the roll, Fergus Appelbe, who also had a conveyancing practice in west Cork and south Kerry. At a recent Disciplinary Tribunal hearing in Dublin, Appelbe admitted to various trangressions, including putting together false deeds, updating deeds to defraud the Revenue and creating a double mortgage over the same property which he owned (the same misconduct as Thomas Byrne’s). Appelbe, who through his various companies may have incurred debts in excess of €50 million, is due to learn his fate in mid-February. What is most extraordinary about “the spread-eagled mess” is that the society appeared to have based at least some of its unfounded suspicions about Murphy on information in complaints sent to it by Applebe over ten years ago. As far back as 1987/1988, Appelbe was the subject of no less than two investigations by the RTE Today Tonight programme into his somewhat unorthodox conveyancing practices in the south west. The late Cathal O’ Shannon listed a series of allegations involving unusual land deals against Appelbe who, despite the unwanted attention, went on to invest in an impressive portfolio of properties including Waterford Castle through various companies before the crash and his rapid descent into catastrophic debt. In August last year, a liquidator was appointed to the four-star castle, hotel and golf complex in Ballinakill after the operating companies, Negold Ltd. and Cendant Ltd. ended up with debts to the NAMA vehicle, National Asset Loan Management (NALM), of just under €34 million. Appelbe is one of four directors of the companies described in the High Court as hopelessly insolvent and unable to pay their debts. In 2010, Allied Irish Banks (AIB) secured summary judgment orders for some €18 million against Cronin’s Wood, a development company for which Appelbe acted, over its failure to repay a loan to re-finance a property acquisition in Killarney, Co Kerry. Mr Justice Peter Kelly granted the order against Cronin’s Wood Developments Ltd, South Mall, Cork, at the Commercial Court. He also entered judgment for €10 million arising from guarantees over the loan provided by Appelbe, and a businessman,

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Water RescEU European Citizens Initiative can staunch water privatisations

by Village 25 February, 2014

By John Gormley. Debacle is the word most often used to describe the setting up of Irish Water. I always took the view that the need for water charges was self evident, but I could never see the justification for the establishment of yet another quango. Fine Gael and Labour, who pledged in their respective election manifestos to rid the country of red tape and bureaucracy, have succeeded in giving us probably the most egregious humdinger of a quango since Fás. Talk of bonuses and over staffing have annoyed people. But that annoyance will quickly turn to anger when flat-rate charges are introduced, a move which will be completely at odds with the polluter-pays principle. I’ve argued previously in this column that the project was ill-conceived from the start, its primary objective being the eventual privatisation of water services. But it would appear that Fine Gael and Labour could well be thwarted in this ambition. So who will stop the liberalisation gallop of the government? It won’t be Labour backbenchers, or the unions, or protests, or even poor local election results. It will come from the unexpected quarter of the European Union. Or more precisely a provision of the Lisbon Treaty, which was dismissed by opponents of the Treaty at the time of the referendum. Ironically, many of those who opposed Lisbon did so because of fears of further market liberalisation. Article 11 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) has given EU citizens power to call on the Commission to propose legislation. A petition of one million EU citizens from at least seven different member states is required to set the process in motion. On 17 February the first ever European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI),’Water is a human right!’, will be the subject of a public hearing in the European Parliament. On the the same day the proposers will meet the European Commission. Their arguments and demands are very clear: they believe that water is a resource and a public good, not a commodity, and they invite the European Commission to propose legislation which would implement the human right to water and sanitation as recognised by the United Nations. They have three main demands: 1. The EU institutions and Member States be obliged to ensure that all inhabitants enjoy the right to water and sanitation. 2. Water supply and management of water resources not be subject to ‘internal market rules’ and water services be excluded from liberalisation. 3. The EU increase its efforts to achieve universal access to water and sanitation. In line with the regulation on ECIs they will be given the opportunity to explain their demands in both the EU Parliament and the Commission. The meeting with the Commission is a closed session but the hearing in the European Parliament is open to anyone who registers in advance. This is a test case. Would the unelected Commission dare to ignore the wishes of 1.65 million citizens? Any attempt to dilute (I won’t say water down) the proposals by the Commission would only play into the hands of those who believe there is a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU project. Nevertheless, it would be naive to underestimate the sizeable lobby in favour of the privatisation of water resources. There may be some within the European Union who sympathise with the US reluctance to join all other nations in a universal agreement on the definition of rights to water and sanitation as defined in a resolution of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), adopted by consensus in September 2013. Amnesty International was critical of the USA, stating: “At the time [of the unanimous adoption of the UNHRC resolution] the United States was the only country that disassociated itself from the definition of these rights and stated that it did not agree ‘with the expansive way this right has been articulated’. However, it has not explained what aspects of this definition it does not accept”. The press release continues: “Such rights are only ‘expansive’ if one adopts a 19th century understanding of hygiene and of government duties to ensure the provision of public services”. It’s clear that the related issues of water and climate change will be defining issues of the twenty-first century. Regrettably, the last number of weeks have shown that we have a government that understands neither issue. Our only hope at this stage is that the European Union can come to our rescue.