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    Denis O’Brien: a complicated career and dubious ethics

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    Denis O’Brien is one of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs with investments in international telecoms, radio, media, property, aircraft leasing, golf and other leisure interests. He founded the Esat Telecom Group plc and built it throughout the 1990s until its sale to British Telecom plc for €2.4 billion. He became a Portuguese resident and avoided £55m in taxes otherwise due. He also founded Communicorp Group which he owns outright to manage a portfolio of media and broadcasting-related companies in Ireland and eight other European countries. These include 98FM, Newstalk, Today FM, Highland Radio, Spin 1038 and Spin South West. He has a €600m stake (around 22%) in INM which owns the Evening Herald, Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and the Irish Daily Star, as well as 14 regional titles, two free newspapers, and a magazine. He founded Digicel in 2001 when the company launched a GSM cellular phone service in the Caribbean. Digicel has extended its operations to 32 markets with over 11 million subscribers in the Caribbean, Central America and Pacific regions. In the year to March 2011, revenues at Digicel were up 27% to $2.23bn. In 2010 O’Brien netted $693 million from the sale of his Digicel Pacific Limited (DPL) business to the Digicel group. In 2005, O’Brien became Deputy Governor of the revered Bank of Ireland. Simultaneously, he moved his residence from Portugal to Malta, for tax avoidance reasons. He resigned from the position of Deputy Governor Bank of Ireland, and also as a member of the Bank’s ‘court’, in 2006. O’Brien also resigned from the Norkom Group and from the UCD Smurfit School of Business. O’Brien is a member of the Bilderberg group. O’Brien part-funded the wages of Irish soccer manager, Giovanni Trapattoni. He is Chairman of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Judging Panel, having previously been a recipient of the award. In 2010, he was named Goodwill Ambassador for the city of Port-au-Prince in recognition of his efforts to rebuild Haiti and attract foreign direct investment. The Guardian recently ran a piece headlined “How an Irish telecoms tycoon became earthquake-devastated Haiti’s only hope of salvation”, which detailed how Port au Prince’s iconic Iron Market will shortly reopen “all down to Denis O’Brien”. He is the Chairman and Co-Founder of Frontline, the International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders which “works to ensure that the standards set out in the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted in 1998, are known, respected and adhered to worldwide”. In 2000, Denis O’Brien established The Iris O’Brien Foundation, named after his mother, to identify and assist projects in Ireland and internationally which aim to alleviate disadvantaged communities. The foundation has broad aims, including promoting human rights, helping people affected by disasters, helping people with a mental or physical handicap, advancing education and supporting the arts. The foundation has spent nearly €15.4m on charitable works. O’Brien has links with Unicef, the Special Olympics, and Camara, which sends computers to developing countries. He has also funded multicultural awards and awards run by Social Entrepreneurs Ireland. He serves on the US Board of Concern Worldwide. He once donated £250,000 he had been awarded in libel damages to Amnesty International for which he sometimes hosts (not always uncontroversial) lunches. He was Chairman of the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games when the games were held in Ireland. In 2011, he provided money for the Presidential campaign of Mary Davis who had been CEO of the Special Olympics at that time. He has an honorary doctorate from UCD and is a mate of former US President, Bill Clinton. Indeed, he flew him to the recent Dublin Castle beano in his jet, and later paid the tab for a late-nighter in the Unicorn restaurant with Clinton, the strangely ever-present Séamus Heaney and 22 others. If you mention your charitable cause to Denis O’ Brien he is likely to give you his personal phone number. In short he is a dynamic and successful businessman and a hero to charities. Presumably on the back of this, he was a high-profile guest at events for Queen Elizabeth II, with whom he was oft-photographed earlier this year and at the two Irish Global Economic Forum conferences, whose invitees were suggested by the Department of Foreign Affairs (though this did not stop some protestations from Éamon Gilmore’s Labour Party), held in the last year or so. Last March, a judicial tribunal found that a former minister for communications, Michael Lowry, “secured the winning” of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition for Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone. The tribunal also found that O’Brien made two payments to Lowry, in 1996 and 1999, totalling approximately £500,000, and supported a loan of Stg£420,000 given to Lowry in 1999. In his 2,348-page report, Mr Justice Michael Moriarty found that the payments from O’Brien were “demonstrably referable to the acts and conduct of Mr Lowry” during the licence process, acts which benefited Esat Digifone. In effect O’Brien was trading in influence or ‘legal corruption’. His former mate, Barry Maloney, absented himself from the recent Irish Global Economic Forum, writing to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste informing them that he could not attend the event because Mr O’Brien would be a participant, despite the criticisms of him made in the final report from the Moriarty Tribunal. Maloney had given evidence to the tribunal that in 1996 he had a discussion while jogging with O’Brien concerning payments that Maloney, as chief executive of Esat Digifone, was obliged to sanction. O’Brien remarked that he himself had to make two payments of £100,000, one of which was to then Fine Gael minister, now Independent TD, Michael Lowry. This, he said, was a joke. What was not a joke, however, was the termination of Sam Smyth’s contract with O’Brien-owned Today FM. Smyth was the best-informed commentator on the Moriarty Tribunal and drew legal proceedings from both Lowry and O’Brien for his troubles. The point, for these purposes, about Denis O’Brien is that, if you believe that not

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    Village editor on Irish Times’ misreporting of SIPO’s Cllr Oisin Quinn ethics case

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    Interesting to see how the Irish Times, the newspaper of record, handles challenging and sensitive stories concerning the political establishment – when you know what the real story is. Here’s an article from a December edition: Councillor’s property stake and vote to be investigated MARY MINIHAN, writing in the Irish Times THE STANDARDS in Public Office Commission is to investigate alleged contraventions of the ethical framework for the local government service by Labour Dublin city councillor Oisín Quinn. The complaint against Mr Quinn relates to his participation in votes on the draft Dublin City Council’s development plan while he had an interest in a property in the city. The property, which Mr Quinn has declared in his annual declaration of interests, is 84-93 Lower Mount Street, the majority of which is occupied by the Revenue Commissioners. Mr Quinn continues to have a one-sixth interest in the property. A public sitting of the commission will be held next Monday to investigate the complaint submitted by Michael Smith, editor of Village magazine and formerly of An Taisce, and Independent councillor Cieran Perry. They wrote to the commission on November 23rd, 2010. According to the commission, the investigation will take place under the Ethics in Public Office Acts 1995 and 2001 (the Ethics Acts) and part 15 of the Local Government Act 2001. Mr Quinn said the same complaint had previously been made to the council’s ethics registrar and had been rejected. “I believe I behaved with exemplary care and transparency,” Mr Quinn, a nephew of Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn, said. “I believe I followed not just the letter but also the spirit of the ethical framework. I took advice by asking the city manager, senior city planners and the city law agent for their view and, importantly, I followed their advice and did it transparently by putting it on the record at the start of the meeting.” The complaint from Mr Smith and Mr Perry states Mr Quinn had an interest in the “substantial and valuable” property and acknowledges that he has disclosed this to the council in writing as required. The complainants argue that Mr Quinn should have refrained from voting on matters relating to the development plan. They argue that he breached the ethics provisions of the Local Government Act 2001 and the associated code of conduct for councillors on a number of grounds, one of which was “through his speaking persuasively to, and voting for, other resolutions in . . . July 2010 which would have allowed increases in heights across the inner city including for his own property on Lower Mount Street”. The complaint continues: “His disclosure before the 2010 meeting was not accompanied by his leaving the chamber and refraining from voting.” The council’s ethics registrar previously told Mr Smith and Mr Perry: “I am satisfied that there has been no breach of the ethics framework contained in the Local Government Act 2001 and the code of conduct for councillors.” Here are the problems, as I see it: 1) Mary Minihan uses comments from only one side of the story. I would have been unwilling to give her a quote, as there is a quasi-judicial hearing imminent and it is unedifying, and inappropriate and unfair (at least while Oisín Quinn remained silent) for us as complainants to comment. I wonder what guidelines the Irish Times has on this. 2) The article not only uses comments from only one side, it is also one-sided in outlining the respective cases. It is unbalanced and it makes multiple mistakes all of which, not uncoincidentally, are to our detriment, not Cllr Quinn’s. For example: A) Balance a) the article tendentiously quotes six of Oisín Quinn’s arguments and only three of ours, one of which is essentially a repeat though an inaccurate one and b) it suggestively finishes up with a quote from an apparently independent source supporting the first (key?) argument Oisín Quinn makes in the article. B) Inaccuracies in reporting central details of our case a) Mary Minihan does not state our best case, part of which is that Cllr Quinn improperly proposed changes in height in ‘Dublin 2 minus the Georgian area’ – a far smaller area than the ‘inner city’ and therefore far more blatantly to his financial advancement and b) she comprehensively mis-states our case – we did not argue that he ‘should not have voted on matters relating to the development plan’ merely on height standards that affected his property (I’m going to ask the Irish Times to correct this – we’ll see how I get on [see below]); C) Inaccuracies in reporting central thrust of our case Mary Minihan entirely fails to understand our case which is that if you make a declaration you (obviously!) withdraw: there are no brownie points under ethics legislation for declaring a relevant interest and then voting – it’s quite simple; D) Apparent unawareness of current status of complaint Finally, she emphasises not just once but twice the hasty, and obviously not independent, view of the ‘ethics registrar’ who works as a senior official in the local authority whose officials had advised Oisín Quinn to make a declaration and then stay to vote. She never mentions that SIPO, which looked at the ethics registrar’s opinion, considered our complaint for over a year, delegated an inspector to follow up the complaint and then took an official decision to pursue it. Cieran Perry and I will probably take no further role in this case. The essential case we made will now be presented on behalf of SIPO by its senior counsel, not by us. This matter is more relevant than the matter she mentions twice, regarding the current status of our complaint. You’d think from her article that our case could be borderline frivolous or vexatious. In short, Mary Minihan quotes comments from Cllr Quinn but not from us, quotes twice as many arguments for his case as for ours, does not state our best case, mis-states the rest of

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    “Durbanism” – the art of containing disappointment and moving from “headline targets” to action. By James Nix

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    After Durban, delivering a 20 per cent emissions cut moves centre-stage, for Ireland We need to move quickly from the headline figure to a hard-minded sector-by-sector approach. The new climate agreement reached in Durban is bitterly disappointing for its lack of ambition, revealing a world held back by the continued foot-dragging of the United States. But at least the Durban deal contains a pledge that all the major polluters will put in place legally binding measures to reduce climate change emissions over the next three years. The EU already has binding measures in place, and under them, Ireland must cut emissions 20 per cent by 2020. Indeed, Minister Phil Hogan told the Durban negotiations that the Irish Government “is prioritising the climate agenda to ensure that we realise our 2020 climate ambitions and position ourselves on a pathway to a low carbon economy”. EU law does not specify how that 20 per cent cut will apply in Ireland, but the reality is that we must move very quickly to translate our headline figure into real action in all the key sectors. Agriculture, transport, buildings, waste management and domestic fuel use are central to this effort. Agriculture and transport between them account for around half of Ireland’s emissions. Agriculture alone accounts for 30% and increased by 0.2% in 2010. The government’s current agricultural policy is set out in Food Harvest 2020. This strategy document envisages a 50% increase in milk output by 2020. Clearly, it will be impossible to reduce or even contain emissions from agriculture if the number of dairy cows increases rapidly over the next 8 years. There are other goals we can adopt in agriculture. There are strong arguments to increase the income of farm families by adding value on the farm – rather than focusing on the volume of goods produced. In this way there is scope to increase farm revenue without damaging our environment and the longer term prospects for food production. Concentrating on massive hikes in production – as Food Harvest 2020 does – is no guarantee of higher income. Countries such as Austria are following a different vision to Ireland’s, working to minimise input costs (such as electricity and diesel), adding value at farm level using direct sales, and encouraging multi-product farming. At the centre of this approach is reconnecting farms and local economies, and the first steps in how this strategy could be applied in Ireland have already been documented.* Work is also slow in Ireland in terms of implementing feedmix changes and the use of biomass, and a greater focus here would deliver progress. More sustainable transport and better agriculture policy are linked, if indirectly. Nothing damages local producers more than massive out-of-town hyper-markets served by vast expanses of free parking. Sadly, much of the floorspace in these stores tends to be given over to non-Irish produce, or products with limited country-of-origin information. In 2009 the Government pledged to introduce minimum car parking charges at retail centres, much like the plastic bag levy. It won’t be a popular idea at the beginning – but it does offer long term dividends. Flagged in the Smarter Travel policy document two years ago, the idea would be to collect 20 to 25 cents for every 2 or 3 hours of parking at major retail outlets where parking is currently free. Again the vision is simple, to nudge us to leave the car behind if we can. If we can’t, the charge is not prohibitive – and it does provide much-needed revenue for public transport alternatives so that we can wean ourselves off our over-reliance on imported oil in the medium to long term. A step-wise approach should be adopted, introducing the levy first at large retail centres which have more than, say, 40 parking spaces available for free. Some revenue would need to go to back the retailer in the initially period to pay for installing the car park charging system, but over time the money would be sent to local government to provide sustainable transport. All of our cities are struggling to secure funds for bike-sharing. Dublin has ambitious plans to deliver a 9-fold increase in its programme, but lacks the money. Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford are all finding it very tough to even start bike-sharing programmes. In rural areas local authorities must do far more to deliver sustainable transport. At the very least councils need to finance structures so that vetted volunteers can offer lifts to people living in isolated areas, and pave the way for county-wide services over time. When it comes to cutting emissions from the use of energy in new homes, offices and other premises, we should, within a short few years, only construct new buildings that generate as much energy as is required for their occupation – i.e. carbon-neutral buildings. For the most part, however, Ireland’s work is in retro-fitting existing buildings, with a document published by the Institute of International and European Affairs in September (“Thinking Deeper: Financing Options for Home Retrofit”) pointing the way in this regard. Minister Hogan controls Ireland’s stock of social housing and can lead the way in this area. Turning to waste management, EU policy has been shifting for some time, but moved decisively in September 2011. From 2020 only material which cannot be recycled should be incinerated according to the European Commission’s “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe”, a new policy that also applies to incineration with energy recovery. Incineration causes far more climate-altering emissions than recycling. The most effective policy step to ensure recyclables are in fact recycled is to have incinerator levies. Critically, incinerator levies will help to ensure Ireland does not start burning recyclables only to be forced into a costly switch in direction in 8 years time. The Minister will need to change course here but the cost of not doing so is simply too high. Applying a levy at the rate recommended by the ESRI (and there are strong arguments that this level is too

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    Counselling Often Beats Pills

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    [October 2011] Irish doctors over-prescribe anti-depressants, writes Éibhir Mulqueen One of Ireland’s most recognisable actor exports, Gabriel Byrne, is now famous in the US for a role whose function has just registered in his home country. For the last three years, Byrne has played Dr Paul Weston, a well-to-do psychotherapist in New York featured in intense, often harrowing, half-hour programmes in the HBO hit-TV series In Treatment. His Irish-American character reads the Irish Times and drinks Barry’s Tea, and Dr Weston has his own ‘miserable Irish Catholic childhood’ to reveal, as the series unfolds. Back home, as a nation, we have made little of psychotherapy, a form of treatment that is, according to Byrne himself, not so different from confession – a search for reassurance. Psychotherapy can be defined as the relief of distress by a therapist trained in a particular method. A more well-known cultural reference for Irish audiences is Dr Melfi from the Sopranos whose treatment of Tony formed the basis for the series’ plot. With the changes in community structures, the alienation that seems to come with the modern condition, and the disappearance of confession, there is plenty of scope for some kind of ‘reassurance’ to be re-introduced in Irish life. As in the rest of the western world, even where counselling and different forms of psychotherapy are accepted, the gap is being filled by pills. How big is this gap, this space where people get dragged down by their unhappiness, where they are unhappy but don’t know why? The World Health Organisation says that one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or  neurological disorders at some point. Such a high figure is contested but there are even greater claims being made: in September the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology stated that more than a third of Europe’s population suffers from a mental disorder annually, with conditions including insomnia and dementia. A 2005 survey in the US found an estimated lifetime rate of 51% for a mental illness and one in New Zealand claimed more than 50% of people had suffered from an anxiety disorder at least once by the age of 32. Such figures have led to accusations of the medicalisation of normality and what Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad, has called “the imperialising tendency of the mental health sector”. The issue can become self-perpetuating. If you are primed to think an unhappiness problem is a mental issue, you will present yourself to a GP with it. The phenomenon has been a boon to pharmaceutical companies, which stand accused of finding new conditions, like social phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder, for which their products can be prescribed. Glaxosmithkline states its anti-depressant, Seroxat, is also a treatment for “anxiety disorders” in adults. According to Irish-born psychiatrist, David Healy, professor of Psychological Medicine at Cardiff University and author of such books as the Antidepressant Era, there has been a subtle change in the use of terms for what he believes are new, fashionable treatments. The term ‘anxiety disorder’ implies a condition whose treatment is more about drugs, whereas what are also called phobias imply a behaviour that can be treated by therapy, he contends. Depression was all but unknown half a century ago, Prof Healy has pointed out, and “the idea that there might be a depression that drugs could treat had in one sense to be invented as had the idea of an anti-depressant”. According to support group Aware, 400,000 people in Ireland experience depression at any one time. But the Lundbeck Mental Health Barometer 2011 puts the figure much lower, saying the condition is “experienced by four percent of the population (180,000) directly at some stage”. Meeting the undoubted demand are Seroxat and Prozac, drugs which replaced Valium in the nineties as preferred anti-depressants, and which are part of a new generation of medication known as SSRIs (selected serotonin re-uptake inhibitors). Prescribed for depression, they have also been dogged by controversy since they were first stocked in pharmacies. After raising concerns about the links between Prozac and increased suicide risk, Prof Healy eventually earned himself a New York Times profile as a maverick campaigner against his profession’s overselling of drugs, as he sees it. One drug company described the intrusion as “the Healy problem”. However, a long, international campaign on the possible dangers of taking SSRIs has resulted in wider recognition of their limitations. In 2006, the Irish Medicines Board updated anti-depressant product information, warning of the possible increase in suicidal thoughts during treatment, especially among children and young adults. Prof Healy also warns that so-called “direct-to-consumer advertising” by pharmaceutical companies has given the patient the message that the pill is the solution. “In the face of company marketing, and with the advent of the Internet, clinical judgment has been eroded. Patients going on the internet or faced with drug company materials now all too easily find that they meet criteria for a disorder and there is often nothing or no-one to tell them this is not equivalent to having the disorder,” Healy states. This phenomenon became marked in the UK where it was discovered in a Norwich Union Healthcare survey which questioned 250 GPs and 1,300 parents about teenage mental health. A third of parents surveyed were pressurising GPs to prescribe Prozac for their children  even if they were just unhappy, while 60% said they had to prescribe such drugs because local services were so poor. In Ireland local services, such as traditionally existed, are being pulled back in the face of economic recession, leaving GPs with few options and built-in patient expectations that a pill should be prescribed. Prescribing psychiatric drugs for want of an alternative was recognised by the Joint Committee on Health and Children in 2006: “the patient presenting with symptoms expects some tangible form of treatment and the practitioner feels under pressure to respond… It is in the absence of a full range of counselling and psychotherapy services that many medicines, intended for

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    Nama: Forgiving big developers; ignoring other distressed borrowers

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    Illustration: Phil Connors. [Archive, October 2011] Gary Fitzgerald on how and why the public interest has been hijacked. From 1995 until 2007 Ireland experienced one of the largest asset-price bubbles in the history of the world. We are now living with the fallout: negative equity and huge personal indebtedness. Recently there have been growing calls for a personal-debt forgiveness-scheme. However, the decisions taken by the Irish State in response to the end of the property bubble make it very unlikely that any such scheme will be implemented. When the bubble burst in 2007, the first part of the Irish economic system to feel the pressure was the banks. Almost every bank in the State had loaned large sums of money to developers, secured on land. As long as land kept going up in value then everything was fine. But once the inevitable happened and land fell in value almost every Irish bank either became insolvent or flirted with insolvency. The government’s response was to save the banks at all costs. It may be that this was as a result of an order from the European Central Bank (ECB), but the decision was taken by the government. The bank guarantee of 2008 turned private banking debt into public debt. It tied the banks and the State together. Following quickly after the guarantee came the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA). NAMA was to take distressed property loans of the major developers off the banks’ balance books at a discount and work those loans out over time. For example, let’s suppose that Mr Builder owed Bank of Ireland €100 million. NAMA bought that loan from the bank at a discount of 70% – and then stepped in to the shoes of the bank. The bank got €30 million in cash and had to make provision for €70 million in bad debts. NAMA was then supposed to recover as much of the €100 million as possible from the developer. The impression was given in 2009 that NAMA would be aggressive in pursuing this money. But now NAMA acknowledges that it will only look for the discounted value of the loan. In other words it has finally, in the teeth of earlier protestations from Brian Lenihan, become clear that Mr Builder has had his €100 million loan reduced to €30 million. Why then can a similar scheme not be put in place for people with smaller debts to the bank? If some of the richest citizens in the State can have taxpayers’ money used to reduce their debt, why not the ordinary citizen? The answer is simple, because the State cannot afford to do both. Back in 2008 and 2009 it was clear that the banks faced two problems. The first was bad debts on loans to developers. As a result NAMA bought €72 billion worth of loans for €30 billion. The banks booked a €42 billion loss and many had to be recapitalised by the taxpayer as a result. The second was bad debts on loans to ordinary borrowers. According to the Central Bank personal debt in Ireland is over €390 billion, of which mortgages account for just over €109 billion. Both of these problems were clearly identified by the banks, politicians and the media. Yet the government chose to save the banks and developers at enormous cost. Now even if there was a political will to introduce a personal-debt forgiveness-scheme, the money is not there to do it. Once the banks start writing down personal debt to any significant level, they become insolvent again. This would require a further injection of capital by the State, resulting in higher taxes and cuts in public expenditure. With the State on the brink of insolvency itself, it is simply not in a position to do this. Is there another way that the State can assist those in debt? Debt can be eliminated in one of three ways. Either it can be forgiven, or it can be paid back, or inflation can reduce the real cost of the debt. Since we are members of the Euro, we don’t have the economic tools available to control our inflation rate. In any case government policy is to drive costs and prices down to make Ireland more competitive. This “internal devaluation” will worsen the problem of personal indebtedness, making it harder for those struggling to pay down debts incurred during the boom. Neither the banks nor the State can afford debt-forgiveness. Government policy is to deflate the economy and individual borrowers can’t repay the debt. What then does the future hold? What are the consequences of the State’s decision to protect the banks and developers and ignore the plight of the ordinary citizen? There is no simple answer to this, but it is clear that the future is bleak. Without personal debt-forgiveness there will be a large section of society who will feel betrayed by the State, who will have no incentive to participate in the State and who will have no economic future in the State. This may lead to a level of social disunity that Western Europe has not witnessed since the late 1920s. The acts of the Fianna Fail/Green coalition and now the Fine Gael/Labour coalition are nothing more than a betrayal of the ordinary citizen and the consequences could be terrible.

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    ‘The bogs are gone’

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    [October 2011] Commissioner Potočnik hauled in Minister Deenihan and made it very clear that Ireland would indeed face an eye-watering daily fine if the turf-cutting didn’t stop, writes Tony Lowes In the ongoing turf wars, Ming the Mendacious and his followers were struck what may be a fatal blow last month. Minister for the Environment Big Phil Hogan told his Fine Gael Councillors at a meeting in Sligo that “the bogs are gone”. No way, he explained, was Ireland going to expose itself to daily fines of €27,000. “How would the Troika like that?” Pandering to the rabble, he meant, would stop. The Merciless One and his populist followers had been staging mass meetings across the midlands, inflaming hatred of the environment, the Government, and Brussels over the ‘bog evictions’. Behind the scenes, they have been planning ‘flash mobs’ for the cutting season next year to challenge any efforts to deny them ‘their rights’ – going as far as claiming that the protected bogs were their “Gaza Strip – we are the Palestinians”. Ming told the TV cameras “This is the equivalent of the state saying they’re going to take your kids off you and give them to a lunatic”. His supporters cheered in the background as he concluded “They’re not getting my bog any more than they’re getting my children”. Exposed face at Ming’s ‘closed’ Cloonchambers bog. The stick measures 2 metres. The machines eat into the ‘cake’ for ‘domestic use’ by 2 to 4 metres a year. Michael D Higgins, who signed the Habitats Directive in 1997 elegantly side-stepped the pressure when a crowd descended on a fundraiser: ‘I retain an interest, of course, in this matter and if I was to be able to be of assistance would hope to do so; however, as you will appreciate, I have my hands full at the present time!” Nevertheless, he is reported to be absent from the hustings in Roscommon and East Galway. But in Europe pressure to preserve a habitat ‘epitomic of the Irish landscape and rural culture’ and the Report featured in the last Village Magazine of the wide-spread devastation perpetrated in 2011 finally triggered action. Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik called in Kerry-born Minister Jimmy Deenihan and in an hour-long session made it very clear that Ireland would indeed face an eye-watering daily fine if the turf-cutting didn’t stop. He also made it clear that Ireland was not being singled out and that Malta – wild birds, and Sweden – wolves, were going to find themselves with daily fines unless they enforced the Habitats Directive, and controlled their citizens as well. Minister Hogan’s Sligo pronouncement followed Potočnik’s intervention. New European Communities (Birds and Natural Habitats) Regulations were then signed into force by Minister Deenihan on 21 September. No Press Release was issued. An outraged Ming failed to raise the new Regulations under the Dail’s Order of Business. “They can search your house”, he squealed, omitting to mention that they had to apply to the District Court for a Warrant, just as for every other Search Warrant issued in Ireland. Fuming about ‘duplicitous behaviour’, the representatives of the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association walked out of the September meeting of the Peatlands Council, established to mediate the Turf Wars. “We were told we wouldn’t be interfered with”, they complained. The new legislation allows An Garda Síochana, under the Minister’s direction, to enter on the bogs with “vehicles, equipment, and materials as may be appropriate for that purpose”. It also allows the Minister to apply to the Courts to issue a “restoration warrant” to require that “the owner, occupier or user of the land or the person who carried out the activity” restore the land. More devastatingly for Mick Fitzsimons, the leading turf-cutting Contractor and their vocal spokesman, before deciding to seek a restoration warrant “the Minister shall consult with the Environmental Protection Agency regarding liabilities that may arise under the Environmental Liability Directive”. Commercial turf cutters – even when cutting for ‘domestic’ clients – could find themselves facing large bills for restoring the protected sites they have damaged. Meanwhile, the National Parks and Wildlife Service – which is in part to blame for the crisis because of its pusillanimous behaviour during Peatlands Council meetings – continues to drag its heels. It is refusing to stop the damage caused by the continuing drainage of the remaining bogs by blocking the drains until ‘further studies’ are undertaken. The nail in the coffin, however, may be the EPA’s just-released Report: ‘Boglands: Sustainable Management of peatlands in Ireland’. As a contributor on the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association Facebook page said – ‘were [sic] stuffed, if the EPA get there way all bogs not just the SAC bogs will come under the protection of the EPA’. Perhaps.

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    EU club lowers standards for Balkan members

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    [October 2011] In the current economic climate, the Commission’s progress report needed to deliver good news to avoid ‘enlargement fatigue’, writes Garret Tankosić-Kelly On the 12th of October the European Commission flashed a green light at two of the possible six Balkan candidate countries hoping to become our newest EU neighbours. It may have passed the Irish by (Ireland has no embassies in these states) but, as the Presidential candidates slugged it out again on TV, the results of the ‘Progress Reports’ for the aspiring EU member-states were announced in Brussels. For the remaining countries of Former Yugoslavia, plus Albania, these Progress Reports are the equivalent of the school report for the year gone by. Slovenia is already in, as part of the last round of candidate countries, and Croatia just got approval. This year’s ‘winners’ were Serbia and Montenegro, the former being recommended for Candidate Status – without a date for opening of negotiations – and the latter being recommended for a date to actually open the Negotiations; the penultimate step to Accession. Drive-by: Belgrade graffiti of former Bosnian-Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, saluting For Serbia the political heavy-lifting that was required to deliver wanted war criminals Mladić and Hadžić to the Hague Tribunal all but guaranteed a shoo in. Never mind that in the intervening period there has been open conflict, leading to deaths, on the Kosovo border. Or that Serbian politicians including the President and the Minister of Foreign Affairs – who was recently given a much-deserved grilling by an Oireachtas Committee – have regularly been active in the Majority Serb part of Bosnia, in a manner which is at best unhelpful, if not actually destabilising for the very survival of the Bosnian state. Or that in mid September President Boris Tadić said that a Gay Pride parade was being prohibited in Belgrade “to protect LGBT persons” -though one had been held and well protected last year, when Serbia was badly in need of some political gesture to burnish its ‘European values’ in the absence of the hotly-demanded arrests of Messrs Mladić and Hadžić. Montenegro was, less than a year ago, given a check-list of seven criteria which had to be met, High on the agenda were rooting out high-level corruption; freedom of expression; and independence of the media. The current Progress report for Montenegro almost glows about the advances that have been achieved, but surprisingly fails to mention a video tape which recently surfaced showing a state official from the national intelligence agency and the ex-Prime-Minister Milo Đukanović’s head of security, fraternising at a wedding with some of the most notorious drug mafia figures from the region. Or the continuing low-level state intimidation of NGO watchdogs, or the on going – and unsolved – attacks against journalists and media. Perhaps most significantly of all the Progress report lauds the arrest of a Montenegrin Municipal Mayor and his colleagues for charges of “High Level” corruption, without making any reference to the fact that ‘every dog on the street’ down Montenegro way knows that this case had more to do with former Prime minister Đukanović neutralising an internal political rival than with a new-found thirst for tackling high-level corruption. But the Commission is a funny old beast and the very title of its yearly review “Progress Report” has a quasi-communistic “Five-year plan” feel about it. Having lumbered themselves with a reporting mechanism that always looks on the bright side of life, this year’s report necessarily – in the current dire climate – needed to deliver some good news somewhere on the European radar to avoid “enlargement fatigue” if nothing else. The problem for the EC bureaucrats was that amongst the ranks of those who might “Progress” we had Macedonia hampered by an almost certain Greek veto over a name dispute; Albania, whose opposition had the temerity to question election results and boycott Parliament; Bosnia, whose political system is in a terminal spiral as the EU has taken its eye off the ball and Kosovo…well that’s another story. This has left Serbia and Montenegro as the only possible candidates for progress. No doubt realpolitik drives much of this but what message is the Commission sending to countries in the Balkans when Serbia – the architect of ethnic cleansing in the region, and Montenegro – arguably one of the most corrupt countries in the region, alone are moving forward in the EU accession stakes? Garret Tankosić-Kelly lives in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has worked in the region for 15 years.

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    Constantin Gurdgiev: our celtic unicorn economy

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    Competitiveness, fiscal austerity, skilled labour, capital investment, resilience: all myths. The key, under-recognised factor is private debt Irish elites, to the right, left and centre of the political spectrum, are completely dependant on the kindness of foreigners. Approval of ‘our European partners’, ‘foreign analysts’ or ‘leading international academics’ and editorial praise from foreign publications are sought as the signs of modernisation of the state, and progress. The latest instalment in this Irish version of Stockholm Syndrome is the idea that Ireland is a European poster boy for austerity-to-growth theory. In the real world, Ireland is witnessing neither a return to economically (forget environmentally or socially) sustainable growth, nor the real structural fiscal adjustments on the scale needed to achieve public-sector sustainability. Instead, it is an economy slumped at the bottom of the Great Recession with superficial signs of viability provided by the multinationals. Our austerity drive has been nothing more than the ages-old redistribution of pain – the policy of robbing productive Paul to pay largely-unproductive John, an approach that is more economically internecine than any real contraction in public expenditure can ever be. The latest headline figures for economic growth, referring to Q2 2011 are less than convincing of the case that Ireland’s economy is back on a growth path. Using current market prices, Irish GDP has shrunk, in H1 2011, by 0.84% on 2010 figures; Similarly, GNP has fallen 1.76%. Compared to the first half of 2005 we are now 2.3% worse off in terms of nominal GDP and 8.63% worse off in terms of nominal GNP. Looking at the underlying components of economic activity, year on year, H1 2011 saw a 5.83% increase in exports and a 2.78% increase in corporate profits expatriated abroad. Compared to H1 2005 the same two figures were 27.23% and 33.58%. This really means that the historically-unprecedented rise in exports has done its job of providing at least some growth momentum, but this growth momentum has been erased by the comprehensive collapse of the domestic economy, as well as by the boom in the expatriation of profits by foreign firms. Almost 4 years into the crisis, Ireland Inc is comatose, while Ireland, as MNC, is powering ahead. Preliminary Q2 inflation-adjusted GDP growth of 2.3% conceals a number of worrisome facts. Firstly, the largest sector of the economy in terms of both contribution to GDP (41% of total economic activity) and employment (over 60% of the workforce) – Services – continues to contract, posting annual inflation-adjusted rate of growth of -0.7% and a quarterly drop of -1.3%. The second-largest sector – Industry – accounting for 21% of economic activity in the country and only around 15% of employment grew by 7.5% year on year in Q2 2011. However, this growth was concentrated in one sub-sector – pharmaceutical and chemicals. Incidentally, the latest trade statistics show that this sub-sector accounts for 90% of our entire national trade surplus – a number so staggeringly high, that we might just rename Ireland Inc, with its inflated economic ego, Viagra Inc. Irish growth figures through Q2 2011 show the pattern of an economy consuming itself from inside. Personal consumption is down 1.3% year on year, and gross domestic capital formation has fallen 17.1%. The only two categories of economic activity up are the value of physical stocks of goods, and net exports. Domestic deflation and exchange-rate movements, not more output or higher value added, are driving the inflation-adjusted growth figures cited as the evidence of Ireland’s ‘recovery’. Similarly, contrary to the assertions made by Irish officials, the unprecedented boom in exports is not being driven by gains in competitiveness or by smart policies. Instead, it is driven by tax arbitrage. The result is amplified recession of the real domestic economy, manifest as follows: The official unemployment rate is now anchored at 14.2-14.3% (compared with 4.2-4.4% pre-crisis) and conceals youth unemployment running at over 46% for 19 years old and younger, and almost 34% for 20-24 years old, as well as a shrinking labour force, rampant emigration and growing state ‘training’ schemes generating no real uptake in jobs. The widening gap between GDP and GNP, currently at a historical high of 20.4%, accounted for by transfers of profits abroad by the multinationals. The extreme dependance of Irish economic activity on pharmaceutical exports that will be subject to severe pressures in months to come, as blockbuster drugs produced in Ireland come off patent, resulting in a rush to book profits by the MNCs today, but threatening a collapse in activity in 2012-2013. Combined public and private investment in the economy today no longer covers depreciation and amortisation of the capital stock accumulated during the Celtic Tiger years. The recent gains in competitiveness and cost-of-business reductions, so often cited as the ‘success story’ for Ireland, are mythology. Firstly, compared to other euro countries, measured by the harmonised competitiveness indicators (HCIs) which are referenced to the unit labour cost, Ireland remains the worst performing core euro-area country. Despite having improved in this metric by 19% relative to the peak, Ireland’s HCI remain 17% less competitive than the euro-area average and 35% behind Germany. Secondly, many of the gains in competitiveness to-date were not driven by growth in productivity, but by wholesale destruction of two labour-intensive sectors of the Irish economy: retail and construction. Thirdly, the Irish economy has not been sensitive to competitiveness metrics since at least 2000-2001. Much of the economic growth that we witnessed over the last 20 years was driven by transfer pricing by multinational exporters, or the 1998-2001 dot.com or the 2002-2007 property, bubbles. Tax arbitrage and cheap credit were the core ingredients of our past ‘successes’ – not a vaunted smart workforce or great entrepreneurial prowess. This explains why Irish unit labour cost-based HCIs were worse than the euro area average in every year after 1996, And why they were the absolute worst of all core euro area countries from 2004 to 2007. All this while the economy was booming. This also explains why the

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