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Former head of IDA calls for IFSC-style enterprise-generation model

Person of the Year As Time magazine names Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman its person of the year – famously with no comment on whether the winner is a good or bad force, Villager bestows his Irish honour on Brian Lenihan.  Lenihan topped Village’s most influential person list last month and is clearly the driving force behind much of what passes for politics in this jurisdisdiction. He will probably be proved injudicious with the bank guarantee and again overgenerous to the Banks and developers through his vision of NAMA.  His recent budget will be remembered for savaging public-sector pay. It also finally  introduced a carbon tax (ironically, days after gas prices went down).  Villager thought the  self-justifying post-boom ultra-rich could have had a few more Euro extricated from their shaking fists in income and capital taxes; and was reminded of the anti-public-interest excesses of Charlie McCreevy with the nonsensical anti-environmental car-scrappage scheme. Interesting too how no employment-creating measures emerged. Overall Lenihan, on grounds of straightness alone, is one of Villager’s favourite FFers – and certainly his favourite Lenihan. Doing a lot So Fianna Fáil have dealt with Lisbon, NAMA and spending cuts. The dream team delivering the dream platform. And unemployment only up 75.5% year on year.  Brilliant. Villager’s amnesia about FF causing all the problems in the first place has set in again – as it always does mid-term and he reckons he’s good to vote  FF in 2012.  When he gets into the polling both he always remembers what his auntie (the one with the Ansbacher account who used to pass two and a half hours every morning in confession with Father) said about this country needing strong government (and fairness waiting for the after-life).  She would have loved Brian Lenihan, Villager sometimes fondly thinks. Heaping fact upon fact Alternatively the budget could have focused on some of the facts central to an agenda based on fairness.  Equality think-tank TASC and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions recently launched the Hierarchy of Earnings, Attributes and Privilege (HEAP) report, designed to present the facts about income inequality in Ireland in an accessible form. The report – which was authored by NUIG academics Professor Terrence McDonough and Jason Loughrey – comprises a poster illustrating the numbers of households at different income levels, broken down by occupational category and household type, together with an explanatory booklet. The report shows that: Five per cent of families live on incomes exceeding €134,000 58 percent of families live on less than €40,000 26 percent of families live on less than €20,000 When analysed in terms of occupation, only the managerial/professional occupation category makes its way to the very top of the HEAP (an annual income of €600,000) Income distribution became more unequal between 1987 and 2005. The distance between those at the top and those at the bottom widened. Conventional measures of income inequality, such as the Gini Coefficient or quintile share ratios, fail to capture the increase in inequality Relative poverty levels before Social Welfare transfers increased from 35.6 per cent to 41 per cent from 2001 to 2007. Social Welfare played a critical role in reducing poverty levels from 21.9 per cent in 2001 to 16.5 per cent in 2007 Women’s income was around two-thirds of men’s income; adjusting for differences in hours worked, women’s hourly earnings were around 86 per cent of men’s. Women were also more likely to be at risk of poverty. There is a striking ‘education premium’: the median gross income of those with no formal education, or primary education only, was €13,489, while those with a university degree had a median income of €45,707. 9/11 24/7 Governor  of the Central Bank, Dr Patrick Honohan, has called for an inquiry into the causes of the banking crisis similar to a US congressional hearing into the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Villager suggests that we may as well take a look at the church crisis, the planning crisis, the corruption crisis, the environmental crisis, the fairness crisis and the general political crisis at the same time.  Or we could look for a bit of leadership. Dublin to become Belfast Villager always tried to like Dublin City Councillors even if he could never really like Dublin.  He always liked the stance of the management – most of whom come from Villager’s neck of the woods but who now live in Dublin’s suburbs – which was to leave development to the private sector. The builders have done so much for us. Anyway … after years of cat and mouse when it appeared the councillors (scared of the electorate who viciously opposed it at a series of meetings held before the local elections) were not going to go for management’s increasingly deranged attempts to foist Belfast-style high-rise on an unyielding human-scale centre, Fine Gael and Labour Councillors have voted to run with the Bladerunner vision. This would allow future developments in excess of 16 storeys in three city-centre locations – at Heuston and Connolly railway stations, and in  Docklands. Villager doesn’t mind that too much, though  more care was needed with the details. More problematic is that “mid-rise” buildings of up to 16 residential storeys would be allowed in Phibsborough and residential developments of up to eight stories would be allowed across the inner city. That seems bonkers to Villager, though fine in a taller city like say Madrid. Blanket heights are silly in a city like Dublin of variegated heights. In the outer city, residential developments would be up to six storeys for residential and four storeys for offices. However, developments within 1km of a mainline, DART or Metro station could have an extra two storeys. Er .. Villager thought most of the city is or will be within 1km of these transport delights (even if the Economist Intelligence Unit has just pronounced Dublin the worst city in Europe for public transport).  Make no mistake this is a charter for an incoherent city-centre skyline. Where it fits – including in