Editorial

  Village champions equality: equality of outcome It was pleased to see gay people advance one step towards a particular equality with straight people, obtaining  the equal right to marriage. Ideally Village would take that equality further and extend it not just to the family based on marriage, gay or straignt, but to all families. That seems fundamental. Indeed, though people must make whatever private domestic arrangements best suit their circumstances, Village does not favour special state support for married people (as opposed to for children). There is no reason to favour families by taxation for example, especially if all they represent is a union based on love, as opposed to a commitment to open  a baby-making factory. The real issues that needed addressing  are the stresses that are placed on young  people between the  ages of 12, when, on average, gay people realise they are gay, and 21 when, on average, they ‘come out’. Anti-bullying campaigns and civic education are a crucial part of this. Certainly the juggernaut that  drove the Yes campaign will have helped generate discussions and an aura around homosexuality that can  only help to undermine such stresses. Important too  is  to inculcate in parents the importance of making it clear to their children, as a component of the love all parents feel for them, that they are as worthy and as loved whether  they are gay or straight. Particular efforts should also be put into campaigns to eliminate prejudice against lesbians and trans people. For Village the campaign often seemed intolerant. Of course it is good to be intolerant of intolerance. But it is a respectable, if – for this magazine – unattractive component of  many religions, including Catholicism, to elevate the roles of the family, of children and of procreation and to denigrate sex without marriage.  Nevertheless, civilisation does not require that Catholicism immediately surrender the integral edifice of Thomistic thinking that underpins it and move on an onward journey via tolerant Anglicanism to an admirable liberalism and onward to equality (of outcome, mind). No. Religion may be wrong-headed but democracy requires it be  tolerated. It was wrong for many liberals to impute homophobia as the driving motivation of the likes of the Iona Institute. Indeed it was suffocating to see that the Catholic Church seemed so fearful of defending its traditional Aristotelian, teleological view of Nature. In many ways indeed it seems the old societal certainties of Catholicism have been replaced with more practical though none the more compassionate certainties of Anti-Catholicism. The most important egalitarian imperative is to ensure that every child at two years of age has the prospect of being anything he or she wants to be. It is important that excellent education is available for all to compensate for, and help eliminate, the unfairnesses of background. Childhood deprivation and unequal opportunities should be eliminated as a priority by any regime for which this magazine would have any respect. Yet it is the priority for none of our political parties. Beyond this, Village believes that every policy and every institution should be assessed (‘equality-proofed’) for the extent to which it contributes to equality. The state’s principal role is to provide for equal quality of life for all of its citizens (and through sustainable development for that of future generations). The best method for evaluating equality is the Gini coefficient and it is shocking that so little is heard about it in the discourse in 2015, even from the parties of the Left. If Labour could point to year-on-year improvements in the Gini coefficient during its periods in government, there might be a reason to vote for it. Equality-proofing would be useful for any policy: for example the national development plan, departmental strategies and policies, local authority development plans, and all town and country planning decisions should be assessed for their impact on equality of outcome; and if they do not conduce to it , they should be changed. Institutions from the Trade Unions to Nama to Sinn Féin could usefully subject their policies and actions to a rigorous scrutiny as to what they tend to achieve for equality, as registered by the Gini coefficient. Finally. of course there must be practical application of abstract theories of equality. Certain spheres must be priorities. Any sector that has been discriminated against deserves measures to protect it against prejudice and indeed positive discrimination to reverse the prejudices of the ages. It is exciting to live in an age when so  much progress has been made on women’s rights, the rights of ethnic  minorities  and in rights  for gay people.  But there remains a slate of actions to right historical wrongs for these and other sectors. For Village the most  important sectors for attention are those  that get it the least. The rights of Travellers, of people with disabilities, of asylum seekers, of trans, of fathers, the standard of living of the working poor and the unemployed, and the rights  of future generations faced with  climate change and species collapse. Because it converges on, though never meets, a great human goal  the agenda of equality of outcome is a comprehensive one. Sadly the recent economic displosion and oncoming environmental cataclysm should have catalysed a radical shift towards more egalitarianism, and ultimately towards equality. Stringency, education, compassion, imagination and rat cunning are necessary virtues in its promotion, overt and otherwise. •

The Equality Agenda

The case for gay rights, pioneered in this country by David Norris through the courts and the European Convention on Human Rights, is unanswerable. Everyone has the option – philosophically – to believe the equality of gay people or to deny it. But the fact is that if people chose – in a practical or political way – to register their offence at what others get up to where no nuisance is caused to third parties, there would be no end to the asymmetrical busybodiness that would undermine public and individual welfare. For this reason society is best served by freedom for consenting adults to exercise whatever sexual preferences best fulfil them. Village feels no more need to indulge the preferences of gawkers that others should deny their sexuality – the Iona Institute’s Breda O’Brien recommends gay abstention – than it feels the need to indulge the preferences of bigots that seek to count people as inferior by virtue of their race, sex, able-bodiedness or any other accident of birth. Indulgence of such bigotry would be a charter for Nazis and eugenicists. Village is driven by an egalitarian approach to  rights. It is not impressed with assertions of rights to property by those with lots of it for example (the O’Donnells and the Quinns), or noisy campaigns against property taxes, at least fair ones, or against capital acquisitions and gains taxes. It treats very seriously the ordinary right to life, as the most fundamental manifestation of the  equality of humans; it promotes equality of education and equality of health treatment. It believes in equality of quality of life. And Village considers that future generations have an equal right to the fruits of the earth giving rise to an obligation to care for the environment, sustainably. Equality is Village’s stringent thing. Equality of rights is not something to be casually touted around. If something should not be a right then there should not be equality of the right. For example, Village would not acknowledge the right of a ethnic minority to form a gentlemen’s club that excluded women: there should be no right to form clubs that exclude women so there should be no equal right for that ethnic minority to do so. Against this background while it takes gay rights very seriously, it is much less impressed with the case for marriage, even gay marriage. Marriage should be an emotional and social privilege not a legal right. A right is something that everyone can avail of. Marriage is something that only people who are linked through love can avail of. Furthermore, marriage discriminates in favour of the fortunate (those lucky enough to be linked through love), including through tax advantages. Egalitarians would ideally indulge only institutions that promote the less fortunate, not institutions designed to enshrine iniquity. The understandably fraught debate on marriage equality in 2015 has been remarkably unphilosophical with the Yes campaign absolutely ascendant in the media and amongst decision-makers but characteristically driven by emotionalism, a visceral and right-on sense of the modern and, for the most part, a freedom-dressed-up as-equality-agenda which says if straights have a right to marry then so too should gay people – without ever questioning whether straights should indeed have that right, whether marriage serves the vision of a progressive society. This unradical view of society begets a politics that wishes to get the state off the back of the citizenry. Village’s agenda is for the state to be active in promoting the needs of all the oppressed. Agendas rooted in freedom and liberalism rather than equality are less likely to see opportunities for solidarity with other oppressed groups. So there has been little common purpose made between the gay-marriage campaign and those fighting for unfashionable rights for Travellers, asylum-seekers in direct provision, or (most controversially since they are disdained as being counter to the still substantially unrealised feminist agenda which like wise can be rooted in either freedom or equality) fathers’ guardianship rights, for example. Hopefully this common purpose will evolve in due course. Being moved by recent celebrations of legislative change in the US and France and an underlying visceral preference for the views of the LGBT movement rather than those of the Iona Institute is simply not enough to justify affording marriage a status it does not deserve. Certainly as was recently underlined by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the US Supreme Court marriage has moved on from the era, only a generation ago, when it was a capsule within which men could treat women as chattels. Nevertheless at its essence it defines, patriarchically and Thomistically, a relationship centred on a woman’s utility as a child-bearer and primary rearer. A radical and egalitarian agenda is to undermine state support – including financial support – for marriage, not to extend the numbers who can benefit from the unfair privilege. Equality of access to marriage would extend it to people in polyamorous relationships, housekeeper and housekept and indeed to all singles, in love or not. That is not envisaged so the issue in this referendum cannot truly be said to be one of equality, either. Perversely, perhaps undermining it is the best thing gay marriage can do to this complacent institution. Moreover, you do not of course need to advantage the married in order to generously and directly support children. Supporting children is a separate issue from supporting marriage. It is an imperative which the State can address without buoying marriage. Assuming gay marriage becomes constitutionally possible, the best interests of the children should be the overwhelming, overarching guide to parenting and adoption. There is no evidence that gay couples, married or unmarried, provide inferior parenting. Or that well-supported parenting by good single parents cannot serve the best interests of the children. Therefore gays should have equal rights to adopt, but so too should well-adjusted loving single people. All that said, in a society that elevates marriage, and where the options are Yes or No, it would be terrifying to vote

EDITORIAL  One of the biggest scandals in the history of the state, one of the greatest injustices, is now becoming manifest. The National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) which Brian Lenihan then Minister for Finance who established it, assured us would be a bailout of the (largely taxpayer-owned) banks is in fact a bailout of developers.  This is a massive corruption of fairness and a sign of just how little progress has been made in eliminating the attitudes that led to our boom, and bust. It is a pity the left has not made it the centrepiece of its campaigning, instead of the small and diminishing issue that is the water tax. For the rebooting of the speculators who cost us a decade is at the heart of the inequality that drives this country, an inequality that favours those who know enough to buy a few apartments – in Ballina or Bucharest, who vote Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and know their way around the development flanks of those two dinosaurs, to the detriment of the little people. “Nothing in the proposed Bill will provide a bailout for borrowers, whether builders, developers or otherwise . . . anyone who owes money before NAMA, continues to owe it and is expected to repay the full amount of the debt”, proclaimed Lenihan in 2009. His master, Taoiseach Brian Cowen, a few days later laid down that while NAMA would acquire loans from the banks at a discount, the developers who had borrowed from the banks would still have to pay back to NAMA the full value of the loans they had taken out. Writing in the Irish Times, John MacManus noted: “Nobody suggested that NAMA was going to involve anything other than huge write-downs of the loans given by the banks to property developers. And, likewise, anybody who was paying attention knew the bill for the write-downs was always going to be borne by the taxpayer, who would have to re-capitalise the banks – to the tune of €65bn – in order to allow them absorb these and other losses. But what did turn out to be at best a fib was the claim that NAMA would operate in a way that would make it impossible for the developers who took out the loans to benefit from the write-downs. The NAMA legislation did include a clause that the developers could not buy their loans back from NAMA but, as we have seen, it was not possible to prevent them having a continued interest in the underlying business and assets once the debt had been written down and sold off by NAMA”. Nor, as the dust settles on the Great Recession, do we any longer hear anything of the fifteen transfers from developers, including the majority of the top 30 developers in NAMA, to their wives, three reverse-transfers from wives to husbands and eight NAMA registrations of charges against property associated with the wives of developers that occupied us five years ago.  No punitive action was ever taken. Can we be confident that none of it was done to avoid the rigours of the law: The central point is that while the likes of Ray Grehan, Bernard McNamara, Tom McFeely, John Fleming and Paddy Shovlin more or less put their hands up and declared themselves bankrupt, developers who made a fist of their position and co-operated with NAMA by selling assets and paying down debt are back; as are developers like Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett of liquidated Treasury Holdings, who retained property in their own personal names, outside their principal operating companies. Treasury Holdings went belly-up with debts of €2.7bn, €1.7bn of which was owed to NAMA, on foot of an action taken by KBC Bank Ireland. But it was more serious than that: the liquidator, Michael McAteer of Grant Thornton, accused Ronan and Barrett of carrying out two asset-stripping transactions – as Treasury writhed in its last throes leaving behind its giant debt – that in effect defrauded the company’s creditors. One of these involved the sale by Treasury to Barrett of two other companies which managed its Chinese properties for something around a fifth of their real value. McAteer ended up agreeing to a proposal to repay him €47m, with Barrett bagging €5m for putting the deal together, and he and Ronan getting €36.3m each in cash from the sale of the shares they held directly in Treasury’s Chinese operation. Judge Peter Kelly in the High Court approved the deal as being in the best interest of creditors but ventilated disquiet at payments to Barrett who he described as “ a defendant against whom there is an allegation of fraud”. That allegation appears now  to have  been dropped. Meanwhile Ronan has recently finalised a deal with two multi-billion dollar funds, Colony Capital and M&G to secure his leave-taking from NAMA. Between them they will pay over €250m to buy out Ronan’s personal debts of over €290m. The Sunday Independent cannot get enough of it. But nearly all of the boomtown boyos are back, one way or another – in the Sindo and, even worse, in reality. NAMA has recently written off €300m in debts for 23 major property developers, we hear. It has been reported that representatives for the Quinn family and the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) are currently negotiating a settlement of their €4.5bn case against the former Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish state. The family might drop its €4.5bn claim arising from the seizure of the Quinn Group in 2011, a claim already found by the Supreme Court to be partially infirm, and the liquidators might drop the so-called conspiracy case against members of the family. According to the Sunday Business Post (March 29th) the Quinn family could, under the terms of the negotiations, resume control of hundreds of millions worth of property and other assets, though the Irish Times subsequently reported that there was no question of the family ending up with any of the

Vote yes for gay rights, but stay reserved about state support for marriage

Last year the prosecutions of Anglo Irish bank bosses fizzled out in community service for Pat Whelan and William McAteer, guilty of 10 counts of providing illegal loans to the group of investors known as the Maple 10 to prop up the Anglo share price. Sean FitzPatrick, the bank’s former chairman, was acquitted of engaging in an illegal share-support scheme. As the ‘Ansbacher’ tax scandal took briefly again to wing in December, the outgoing chair of the Revenue Commissioners, Josephine Feehily, reminded us again that although 289 cases of illegality were identified in relation to the largest tax evasion scheme in Irish history, not one person has been prosecuted over Ansbacher. In July 2013 the DPP withdrew corruption charges against four county councillors and a businessman ending a 21-year saga of the rezoning of lands at Carrickmines in South Dublin because of the medical condition of former government press secretary and lobbyist Frank Dunlop who was the chief prosecution witness. Corrupt ex-planning official George Redmond  won his legal battle last month to have all  adverse findings against him removed from the planning tribunal report following a Supreme Court ruling on the evidence of whistleblower, James Gogarty. Tribunal findings of corruption against (corrupt) former Minister for Justice, Ray Burke, and (corrupt) businessmen Michael Bailey and Joseph Murphy Jr were quashed for the same reasons. Findings that they hindered and obstructed the tribunal were rescinded. Mr Redmond was convicted of corruption in 2003 and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment following a majority jury verdict. That conviction was overturned on appeal as unsafe and he was released after six months. He was retried in 2008 on two separate corruption charges but the jury failed to reach a verdict on the first count and he was acquitted on the second. Sean Quinn is back at his glass plant though his family seem to have hidden €500m in assets all over Europe.    So far so bad. However, there has been some ambiguous momentum. Sean FitzPatrick still faces 12 counts of failing to disclose to auditors Ernst & Young the true value of loans worth at least €139m given to him or people connected to him, by Irish Nationwide Building Society from 2002 to 2007. The Garda are finally considering a file concerning the  Ansbacher accounts, after “a delay in the system”. The State has sought the extradition of former Anglo CEO, David Drumm. Democracy is subverted by the flagrancy and impunity of white-collar crime. At every level the criminal system has been set up to ensure maintenance of the status quo, and certainly not to challenge the privileges of the wealthiest or most powerful, who ravaged this country. For example, since its inception, the Competition Authority – now the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission – has secured 33 convictions against companies and individuals, but the yield has been low: €629,000 in fines and no one sent to jail, though nine people were given (suspended) custodial sentences. The ODCE has secured around 300 convictions, mostly in the District Court where fines and penalties are derisory. In its 14-year history, the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) has never secured a single prosecution for insider trading or market abuse, though in 2012 it did finally secure a three-year prison sentence arising from a company law conviction and in 2014 it secured the convictions of Whelan and McAteer, though Sean FitzPatrick was acquitted. The only convictions related to the drawn-out tribunals have been of Ray Burke for tax evasion, George Redmond (eventually overturned) and Frank Dunlop for corruption, and Liam Cosgrave for offences under the ethics acts; as well as of Liam Lawlor for blatant obstruction of the Planning Tribunal. More are needed. The idea that Bertie Ahern’s digout story which the Planning Tribunal discounted, was never looked at for possible perjury or obstruction of the tribunal, is inflamingly iniquitous. Comparisons have inevitably been drawn with the US where $65bn-Ponzi-scheme supremo, Bernie Madoff, is serving a 150- year jail term.  But, even there, though over 800 bankers served jail time for the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, not one was imprisoned for the sub-crime crisis of 2007-9. The US prosecutor’s panoply of wire-taps, plea-bargaining, monetary incentives for witnesses to testify against former colleagues and the wholesale removal of discretion in sentencing from judges are alien to the Irish judicial system. The recent protected disclosures bill ushers in US-style immunity from prosecution to corporate whistleblowers, though in the US they are now even offering enormous financial rewards to whistleblowers. It is also time to consider introducing pre-trial hearings that would force prosecutors to show their hand at an early stage, flushing out frivolous cases, and reducing delays. This would undoubtedly have helped with the first Anglo prosecutions. But above all we need a change in the ethos of the criminal justice system. A rigorous programme of training for judges, lawyers, Gardaí, ODCE, Central Bank, Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, Revenue and DPP must be prioritised. Eighteen months ago Village announced, in frustration, an initiative to promote private prosecutions of tribunal villains and corrupt bankers. We pursued the matter with banking whistleblower Jonathan Sugarman.  After some frustrating false starts, lawyers – including senior counsel Michael McDowell and Newry-based solicitor Kevin Neary who handled the £10,000 reward that ultimately led to the instigation of the planning tribunal – generously undertook to provide their services for the initiative. However, Mr Sugarman, whose career was devastated by his bravery in disclosing breaches of banking regulations by Unicredit Bank, decided in the end not to pursue his commitment to the case. This was a pity as a senior figure in the enforcement apparatus had made contact about the matter. After this Village has had to deal with four separate and unlikely defamation cases, which it has dispatched. It all sapped our energy for the private prosecutions. That energy has now returned. Village is looking for another case to pursue and will return to this issue over the next