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Shathead Villager likes Shatter. Well likes is a little strong.  Likes more than any other Fine Gael member of government, apart from Frances Fitzgerald,  perhaps. Or respects. Anyone that annoys the Garda, the legal profession and judges, inspires a debate on their respective contributions to the common good and then wins it, deserves a little indulgence. It is entirely predictable that he will be replaced just as he implements the Troika-mandated Competition Authority recommendations on the legal profession. That said, of course he should have resigned over leaking details of Wallace’s trivial traffic incident – even McDowell at least complained he was saving the state when he tried it on with Frank Connolly. There was no possible justification or proportion to Shatter’s action, which was committed in front of the Garda and which the Garda decided to overlook. We do not live in a police state and information received by Ministers, particularly the Minister for Justice, must be treated with scrupulous discretion. Tellingly, Shatter hasn’t helped his own case by revealing any corroboration: Villager presumes someone knows if the Minister likes a drink (though he seems like a man who would, perhaps, drink on his own, if at all), and indeed if he suffers terribly from the asthma, for which no proof has been offered. Meanwhile, Villager is concerned at rumours that Shatter has a class of superinjunction out against coverage of the prices charged by his former law firm. Certainly there’s been a precipitous decline in media mention of this once controversial issue.   Bitter PIL Unfortunately for him, Shatter was the latest member of the cabinet to come under the spotlight of non-party activist network ‘Independent Resistance’, when ten members of the group held a silent vigil outside the minister’s home in the leafy suburb of Ballinteer, Co Dublin on Sunday 2 June. Independent Resistance is a broad network of anti-austerity and community-rights-based groups, joined together by collective endorsement of a six-point economic strategy for prosperity and sovereignty put forward by Professor Terrence McDonagh of NUI Galway. Members see the network as an alternative to the anti-austerity campaigns covertly driven by ‘Marxism-based’ political parties in Ireland. Organisers (including a number of academics) claimed they were holding the vigil as a response to the Personal Insolvency Legislation (PIL) and Shatter’s plans to make home evictions more expedient through empowering County Registrars as special judges to preside over debt cases in the courts. This is already practised informally throughout the country with Dundalk being an example where the County Registrar, who is also the Sheriff, sits in her own court, handing out repossession notices, enforcing them and in doing so enriching the Sheriff’s office that receives a percentage of the value of the repossessed home or articles. One placard at the vigil read “You leave our homes alone and we’ll leave your home alone”. Independent Resistance also held silent vigils outside the home of Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, last month. A number of the network’s founding members held an eight-week rolling vigil outside of the house of then Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern’s, in 2011. In Ahern’s case he resigned and stated that the protesters were “the last straw” describing them in local media as “worse than the Provos”.   Dishonest and corrupt people are dishonest and corrupt The editor was going to synopsise the findings of the report Village has commissioned on private prosecutions against dishonest bankers and tribunal villains. But the legal advice was to keep it quiet for the moment. And all of us here in the sweat-pit that is Village always follow the legal advice: senior counsel chose the headline for this paragraph, for example. Anyway, it’s all happening…   Crash to crèche 37 inspectors to monitor 4,700 crèches and pre-schools? Sounds like the beef industry. Or the industrial schools. Or planning or building-regulation compliance? Or the banks?   Gonzaga What secondary school do parents whose toddlers send them to a crèche called Little Harvard go to?   The big issues: corporation tax Irish journalism famously confuses on the big issues (does Nama make a profit, can we renege on our debts to bondholders, is Enda Kenny an eejit, what colour is Shatter’s hair etc). Corporation tax is no different. So, after a fortnight’s scintillating media debate, we know that we charge 12.5% Corporation tax, although there seems to be a problem and our grown-up friends abroad think we’ve a special deal with Apple, though that’s sort-of not true. In fact, just like in France where the  official rate is 32% but the actual rate 8.2%, you need to look behind the headline. In 2011 Michael Noonan said our effective rate was 11%. But we do better for our IT companies. In fact there’s a special tax rate on income arising from intellectual property (IP) which can be as low as 2.5%. Up to 80% of the cost of acquiring IP can be set off. You don’t need to create the IP in Ireland you just need to operate in Ireland and buy the IP here, wherever it has been created (Palo Alto, normally). So you just bump up the cost of acquiring the IP and bingo, you pass for a tax genius, and fleece the ordinary man across invisible borders. Who cares if it’s a ‘special deal’: it’s globalism, and Ireland majors in it.   Hari Nama Similarly, news that NAMA claims to have made a profit of €224m boggled the brains of the nation for a few days recently. What it means is that some of the loans that Nama bought at discounted prices (remember haircuts) were sold at a profit over the last year. Of course NAMA has carefully chosen to sell the best of its portfolio – 80% of its asset sales since inception have been in Britain. Clever, but meaningless for the prospect of the agency getting this country back the €32bn it has invested. A shocking augury is that the likes of Harry Crosbie have indicated that