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    Cerberus conflicts are biggest financial and political issue facing NI Executive

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    An investigation by BBC’s ‘Spotlight’ programme broadcase on, 29th February, into the sale of NAMA’s huge property portfolio in Northern Ireland has revived an embarrassing issue for the outgoing government. Village readers will recall how distressed commercial and residential properties, previously valued at £4.5 billion, were sold to US vulture fund Cerberus, for just £1.2 billion in April 2014. An article in December documented how the sale was now the subject of investigations in the US and the UK and by the Law Society and the Stormont finance committee in Northern Ireland. At the centre of the controversy is former NAMA official, Ronnie Hanna, who resigned as the agency’s Head of Asset Recovery six months after the sale of the portfolio known as ‘Project Eagle’. Hanna was named in the Dáil by independent TD, Mick Wallace, as one of a small group of people who met multi-billion-dollar-backed US investment funds to promote the sale of the portfolio, accompanied by Frank Cushnahan, a former member of NAMA’s Northern Ireland Advisory Committee. It was also sensationally claimed at the Stormont hearings in September last that Cushnahan; Belfast accountant, David Watters; former partner in Tughan’s solicitors, John Coulter; property developer, Andrew Creighton; and former DUP leader, Peter Robinson, were to receive substantial sums from the Project Eagle sale. All denied the allegations. Cushnahan and Coulter, along with US law firm Brown Rudnick, were to take €15 million in fee payments from another US investment fund, Pimco, if its bid for the property portfolio was successful. Pimco withdrew from the process in early 2014 after its compliance officers advised that such payments would be illegal, under US law. In March 2014, NAMA informed finance minister, Michael Noonan, of the dodgy fee arrangements being offered in connection with what is the largest ever disposal of public assets in the history of the state. Instead of calling an immediate halt to the bidding process the finance minister advised NAMA to plough ahead with the sale. Noonan seemed implicitly to consider that the ethical problems were at the other end, in Belfast. And that the Belfast office didn’t really reflect on the Dublin office. The problem for Noonan and NAMA is that if Hanna is involved in wrongdoing that brings the culpability right back into the Dublin office and the remit of the Irish government. Cushnahan and Coulter then encouraged Cerberus to enter the race in the clear expectation that fee payments would be made if its bid was successful. The Spotlight programme revealed that Cushnahan misled his former colleagues in NAMA by continuing secretly to work on the Cerberus deal without their knowledge. Cushnahan confirmed in a clandestinely recorded discussion last year with Belfast property developer, John Miskelly and accountant David Gray, associate of Waters, that he was due to get a “ fixer’s fee” from the Cerberus deal. He said that he and Coulter had done “all the work on the deal” but his role was kept secret because of objections from NAMA to his involvement. Cushnahan said that Coulter moved £6 million into a holding account for him so he could be paid. During the recorded discussion, reference is made to assistance provided by Ronnie Hanna to distressed developers. There is also a description of how Peter Robinson’s son Gareth advised Miskelly to go to Cushnahan about his NAMA-controlled debts. Miskelly confirmed to the BBC that the recordings were an accurate reflection of the lunch meeting with Cushnahan and part of an effort by him to expose the financial misconduct surrounding the sale of the Project Eagle portfolio which is under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Crime Agency in Britain. Miskelly claims he has handed evidence of wrongdoing to both. Cerberus has denied any wrongdoing in respect of the purchase, while refusing to provide answers to detailed queries due to the ongoing criminal inquiries. Similarly, Cushnahan; Hanna who runs a private consultancy in Belfast; and Robinson, have declined to comment further. Robinson surprised many when he announced his retirement as first minister as hearings into the Project Eagle sale were taking place last Autumn. Village documented in January how Gerry Adams had in effect telegraphed Robinson on his need – in the context of ethical issues relating to the NAMA debacle of which Adams was apprised – to reinstitute the then suspended Northern Executive. Robinson and former finance minister, Sammy Wilson, were involved in discussions with Noonan and NAMA to try to minimise the exposure to personal guarantees of a number of prominent developers in Belfast and across the North in respect of their debts taken on by the agency. Last year, it emerged that Robinson held meetings with former US president Dan Quayle, chairman of Cerberus, and had discussions on the sale with Noonan, without disclosing them to his deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness. It now transpires that Cushnahan was on three sides of the deal having worked for NAMA, some of the bidders as well as for the distressed developers. The latest explosive revelations prompted Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, to repeat a call for a Commission of Investigation into the NAMA sale. Frank Connolly

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    Villager March 2016

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    LAUNDERING HISTORY Deep in the heartland of Donnybrook, hidden in a crescent behind the fire station, surrounded by houses and leafiness there sits, intact, a building which embodied part of our cruel social history. Known locally as the Donnybrook laundry, but more widely known in subcultures and State reports as the Magdalene laundry of the Sisters of Charity. No mention is made in the Colliers’ brochure for sale of the site of its former use. No mention of the many women who toiled there, scrubbing shirts, washing socks, endlessly ironing, endlessly starching, endlessly washing. Nor of the clients that came from the affluent families in the surrounding areas, nor that Áras an Úachtaráin was a client too. The labelled basket that carried the laundry – pressed, starched, immaculate spotless – now lies discarded with a pile of others, rotting and abandoned. According to Dublin City Councillor, Mannix Flynn, who served time in an industrial school in Letterfrack which has been turned into a wood-turning school (to eradicate the memories he says), this is the real thing. If ever there was to be a memorial, a gesture, an acknowledgment – this is it. This is a place of anger and atonement. A place of loss and maybe a place to be found. “FAILURE”? So last month Villager predicted there’d be a hung Dáil: “Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will struggle to work out whether they should coalesce risking their exposure as ideological charlatans and the long-term growth of Sinn Féin. Another election within a year”. Village’s twitter account now features two dinosaurs, rutting. But what is the correct term for a coalition of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael? We’ve seen Fianna Gael and Fine Fail. We’ve seen Tweedlegael and Tweedlefail. Tweedle Dummer. And what about an election slogan for them? “Let’s keep the doing going”. FAMOUS Bargaintown is a faintly tacky furniture store on Queen’s Street Bridge on the quays in Dublin. The late Terry Wogan (much missed by the TV generation) once voiced an ad with the stage-Irish slogan, “the prices are only famous”. The tightarses in Bargaintown used his recording for a decade or more. Anyway Bargaintown which was once in fact a cinema, the Phoenix picture house, is now the name of a movie which showed at the Irish Film Centre before Christmas. It’s an evocation of Dublin in the 1980s, a meditation on urban decay made by then teenage German film-maker, David Jazay, in Dublin in 1988. Featuring interviews with antique dealers, barbers and barmen – it is a record of the lives and opinions of a vanished Dublin, before the Celtic Tiger overhauled its fabric and its atmosphere. Highlights include an animated auction at Tormey Brothers, a night of song and dance at the old Workingmen’s Club on Wellington Quay, and performances by out-of-key blues-man Frank Quigley. The highlight for Villager was the piece on Dick Tynan, featured playing jazz drums in a run-down building on Ormond Quay and bemoaning the fire in his building that precluded re-opening his Essex guest-house. There once was a famous picure on the gable wall of the Ormond Hotel with a picture of Tynan looking like a 1970s Elvis proclaiming “I can get it for you wholesale”. When the sign was removed in the 1990s it revealed a picture of Tynan delivering the same message, but this time as Elvis circa 1960. Villager’s interest was piqued because Tynan is shown playing the drums in what is now the Village office. The only difference is seems to have been in better shape in 1988. MISINFORMATION DRIP, DRIP The abolition of Irish Water by a new government would cost the State up to €7bn over the next five years, according to its own – unreliably inflated – internal estimates. Losses are envisaged under four heads: cash costs, sunk costs, benefits forgone and the lost possibility of getting its debts off the exchequer’s books. The actual cash costs, it says, would be around €100m, and largely involve paying off staff who would not be transferred to local authorities. It would also include the cost of breaking leases and contracts, and the costs of transferring back the property already put into Irish Water ownership. The concept of a one-stop shop for Water is a good one – it works in Scotland and, though Simon Coveney and the EU, among others, seem to have seen it as a vehicle that could be privatised that need not have been the case. It is also desirable to spread the tax base, to see what your lifestyle costs, and to pay the environmental and economic costs of water, partly on the basis of the polluter-pays principle. The Social Democrats unwisely proposed its abolition and stated it would cost nothing as the administrative costs were greater than the revenue from the charge. This failed to account for legal and logistical difficulties. Now as part of its hermaphrodite mating ritual it seems Fine Fáil may simply suspend payments for a few years. CLIMATE DEBATES An Taisce has complained to RTÉ and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland that the recent ‘Prime Time’ programme on climate change gave a voice to Ray Bates, a professor of meteorology whose expertise is weather – day-to-day climate events, not climate which deals with the long-term. An Taisce says it is aware of at least two academic specialists who were invited to participate in the panel, but who declined to do so citing concerns that the presence on the panel of Bates, who chairs the Royal Irish Academy’s climate committee, would very likely result in a “false balance”, so undermining public understanding and “promoting a perception of doubt around what are, in fact, extremely strongly established, robust, results from state-of-the-art climate science”. At the time of writing RTÉ was late in replying to the complaint. LABOUR LEADER Alan Kelly went ape went he won the last seat in Tipperary. Villager wonders how he’ve have taken it if he’d lost. PRESIDENTIAL Miriam O’Callaghan dodged dealing with her

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    Post-election 2016

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    The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the election and its participants were a two-out-of-ten failure. Commentators from the equally idea-free media have interpreted the results in heterogeneous ways. Every sort of theory and cleverality was deployed to describe the drearily and precariously hung Dail: a triumph of democracy, a triumph of social democracy, the end of the civil war, the end/beginning of the beginning/end of the civil war. The perennial smart view that the electorate has failed the parties got several outings. If the second-rate sages had been able to they would have loved to interpret it as a triumph of angry white men. They couldn’t. Some saw it as a victory for the small parties and independents. But the Social Democrats did not increase, Renua was wiped out, the Greens gained only two seats in an era of climate-apocalypse. The People Before Profit/ Anti-Austerity Alliance finished up with only one more seat than they had before the election, and Direct Democracy did not gure. Before the election these were the only small parties. The truth is that this election was a triumph of the interchangeable FF/FG (FG/FF) duopoly, though its trajectory has been definitively defined as downward. Ideology is what political parties apply when they run out of policies. Since most of the parties’ manifestos are short and the events to which policies must be applied are unpredictable it is reasonable to expect that your candidate will have an ideology to guide her. Village for example favours an agenda of equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability. The ideology is comprehensive, it provides a solution for any situation, and a template against which policy formulation can be benchmarked. Candidates shouldn’t have to reflect Village’s ideology, but they’d be better having some sort of one. Neither civil-war party has an ideology. It is impossible to know what they will do once elected. How, therefore, could anyone who does not live under a stone be enthusiastic about a government of FF and FG? FF is a conservative party that believes in so little that it surrendered its entire ethos to a culture of provincialism and cronyism, last time it was in government. It believes in no more now so, though it is touting a centre-left agenda there is every danger it will return to populism, short-termism and promoting the only agenda it understands – the interests of the people its representatives actually know – a cronyist populism that always finishes up favouring those who shout loudest. It is naïve to think of FF as Micheál Martin and when it is the movement it has always known itself to be, of Eamon OCuív, of Barry Cowen, of Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher; and tens of marginally more presentable sons and daughters of best-forgotten FF dynasts. Kevin O’Keeffe, son of Ned O’Keeffe, anyone? FG is a conservative party currently dressed up as a Christian Democrat party. The ethos is exible enough that under Garret FitzGerald it was in effect Social Democrat. In its latest incarnation it has been right of centre, at a time when most people want fairness and an improvement in services. It failed to deliver an agenda of accountability and its representatives seem to believe in little beyond sound money, ‘Europe’ and law and order. Having once appeared to be purer than FF it is now tainted by the Moriarty Tribunal report and a perceived ongoing proximity to Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, as well as by its large number of low-grade County Councillors, whose corruption record is a hairsbreadth from as bad as FF’s. Though essentially conservative, both FF and FG contain some social democrats and liberals in their midst. These aberrations and those who vote for them are delaying the day a real Social Democratic party with coherent left-of-centre platform can become a force that could anchor a government. On the other hand it is clear that more people than is desirable voted FG in 2011 to get FF out and then FF in 2016 to get FG out. These people need to acknowledge that they are forces forconservativism. The incarnation of this is the dangerously articulate Éamon Dunphy who apparently voted FF in 2016 because he really believes in People Before Profit (or Sinn Féin. It isn’t clear). Anyone who thinks that FF was the solution to our problems in 2016 is part of the problem. So what next? FF and FG should merge as a conservative party though even coalition is for the moment some way off. FF is tactically sharper than FG and FG is in retreat so it is likely FF will tantalise FG to weaken and demoralise it during this Dáil. Nevertheless the (non-)ideological compatibility of the parties has been exposed and will generate its own momentum. While allowing this momentum its space the Left of all hues must use the logic of the momentum against FF and FG, and social democrats must colonise some of the space the dinosaur parties have occupied for tragically long.

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    Anti-bloodshed brothers

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    Much is made of the choice made by James Connolly to join the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) with the Irish Volunteers led by Pádraig Pearse for the Easter Rising in 1916. Across the British and European Left, notably but not exclusively among those on the side of the allies in World War I, there was a mixture of horror and disdain at the Irish merger of socialism and nationalism into a revolutionary force. Within the ICA itself there was some opposition to any collusion by socialists with the nationalists with one of its founders, Sean O’Casey, to the fore in condemning Connolly whom he described, retrospectively, in 1919, as having “stepped from the narrow byway of Irish Socialism onto the broad and crowded highway of Irish nationalism”. For many years since, and particularly since the outbreak of conflict in the North in the late 1960s, Connolly’s decision to join the military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and to set a date for the Rising after a three-day secret meeting with Pearse, Sean MacDiarmada and Joseph Plunkett in January 1919 has been the subject of much criticism, including by many on the Left. However, in the light of so much recorded material including the invaluable statements of participants to the Bureau of Military History becoming available since then, the rationale behind Connolly’s decision, however reluctant, has become much clearer. Equally, the motivation and coherence of Pearse and his comrades in the Volunteers in striking a blow for freedom is also now more credible than many of their detractors would allow. In 1915 Connolly did use the words “blithering idiot” to describe anyone who would celebrate the “red wine of the battlefields” – comments widely believed to have been in response to Pearse’s exhortations. He said: “No, we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching and the world is sick of such teaching”. He was referring to a Victorian tradition in literature and poetry which was widespread in Ireland and Britain as well as in mainstream, including socialist, European thinking which glorified blood sacrifice and martyrdom. What is more important though is the practical opposition of Pearse and Connolly to the actual blood sacrifice which saw hundreds of thousands of young men wasting their lives on the killing fields of Flanders and beyond in an imperialist war. For this was the central reason why both men found common cause in the Spring of 1916. As President Michael D Higgins said at a commemoration for the ICA in Áras an Uachtaráin at Easter: “The suggestion that, when WWI broke out, James Connolly scrapped his faith in socialism to embrace pure nationalism is contradicted by Connolly’s writing and journalism both before and after 1914. James Connolly was deeply concerned with the context of turmoil in Europe and the world, whose revolutionary potential was, in his view, being squandered in defence of imperialist adventurism. In Connolly’s estimation, a blow against Empire was a clearing of the ground for future socialist struggle. It is important, therefore, not to rush to judgement on what James Connolly’s motivations were for orchestrating a joint action with the Volunteers. One can understand how, in despair at the collapse of his and other socialists’ internationalist hopes after the outbreak of the War, appalled by the breakdown of the international proletariat into nationalities which were slaughtering each other on the Western Front and in the Middle East, James Connolly resolved to seize the opportunity of the war to strike a blow again the British Empire”. At the secret meeting in January 1916, Connolly accepted an invitation to join the IRB council and agree a date for the Easter Rising while conscious of the ideological differences that existed between the ICA and the nationalists of both the Irish Volunteers and the larger force of nationalists under John Redmond. Connolly had worked with the trade union movement against the capitalists in the US, and on return to Ireland led the Dublin workers against the brutal onslaught by employers, some of whom were prominent in the nationalist movement during the 1913 Lockout. That struggle led directly to the creation of the ICA the constitution of which influenced key sentiments of the 1916 Proclamation including its call for equality for women and children and “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”. Further, Connolly was an internationalist who understood that the world war was essentially a contest between the great powers over global resources. Pearse clearly shared more in common with this perspective than many of his former nationalist allies as he agreed to include the progressive thinking of the ICA in the Proclamation he drafted and read at the GPO, a document that had of course been printed by union labour in Liberty Hall the night previously. Redmond on the other hand was prepared to encourage tens of thousands of young, mainly impoverished, Irishmen to their deaths in the imperialist war in order to gain advantage for his wealthy compatriots through the fading promise of limited home rule. As President Higgins remarked, “the ranks of mainstream nationalists, and particularly those of the Irish Parliamentary Party, comprised a significant number of industrialists and graziers who were happy to secure the advantages of a political independence within the Empire but who would resist economic, social, or as both O’Casey and Synge would learn, cultural, innovation”. Many of those who fought heroically with the Irish Volunteers during Easter Week went on to reveal just how divergent their view of the type of Ireland they were ghting for was from their comrades in the ICA, and indeed many in Cumann na mBan. Some of those drafting the 1922 Constitution of the Free State just six years later described how the proposed inclusion of Pearse’s words on equality was dismissed as “Bolshevist” by the British authorities

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    Democracy and war

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    DEMOCRACY AT HOME General Election 2016 has thrown up an utterly unpredictable result with Fianna Fáil in the ascendant. At the time of writing the consequences of the vote including who will survive as leaders, who will be in government and who will lead the government could not be less predictable and, without resorting to metaphysics, will reflect only opaquely the will of the people. Yet we carry on as if this did not reflect in any way on the integrity of our democracy. DEMOCRACY ABROAD The Brexit referendum should have been framed on whether the UK will be in the EU, in EFTA, or independent. But, as always in these islands, the third option, the middle one, has been omitted. The outcome, therefore, is bound to be inaccurate. And given the divisive nature of the in-or-out, stay-or-leave question, it is highly likely that the ‘leave’ option will win. In a three-option poll, the ‘leave’ option will probably lose. On 20th Dec last year, Spain went to the polls… and two months later, Spanish politicians are still arguing about who should be in government. But this is par for the course. As happens in so many democracies, open and transparent elections are followed by closed and opaque discussions, as various parties wheel and deal behind closed doors, trying to concoct a majority coalition. In 2013, Germany’s four parties took 67 days to sort something out. In 2010/11, Belgium’s dozen took 451 days! Will Ireland have the same sort of uncertainty? Democracy is for everybody, not just a majority. Conflict zones like Syria and Ukraine need inclusive governance, governments of national unity. Inter alia, this should mean that elections are preferential and proportional; that power is shared in both joint presidencies and all-party coalition cabinets; while the third ingredient is preferential voting and collective responsibility in parliament. Sadly, while we preach at least some of these ideals abroad, we practice the very opposite at home: majority rule in the Dáil and the Commons, and divisive majority voting both in parliaments and national referendums. Before the Scottish referendum of 2014, it was widely assumed that ‘devo-max’, the middle option for maximum devolution, would get about 60 per cent. The ballot, however, included only the two other options, status quo and independence. The result, therefore, was a highly inaccurate nonsense. There are times, as with the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, or our own recent referendum on same sex marriage, when democracy is wonderful. On other occasions, as in the Balkans, it was downright dangerous: the 1990 elections there were little more than sectarian headcounts and “all the wars in the former Yugoslavia started with a referendum”. (Oslo- bodjenje, Sarajevo’s main newspaper, 7.2.1999.) It must also be remembered that Napoleon became the Emperor by a popular vote, one in which he, literally, dictated the question. Hitler, too, came to power ‘democratically’. In the 1924 elections, the National Socialists won just 14 seats but, in the wake of the great depression, this rose to 107 (17.6%). The subsequent history consisted of weighted majority votes in parliament (like the Enabling Act of 1933), simple majority votes in referendums in which, again, the dictator di tated the question, and war. DEMOCRACY AND WAR The focus of this article is Westminster’s democracy and the decision to go to war in Syria. Would the outcome of the debate on bombing in Syria have been different if the chosen methodology of decision-making in parliament were not majority voting? In other words, would the House have made a different decision if the procedures had allowed for a more pluralist decision-making methodology? First of all, a little background. In 2002, in the UN Security Council debate on Iraq, Resolution 1441, both France and Germany objected to the phrase “serious consequences” in Clause 13. Yet both voted in favour of that resolution. The outcome, described as “unanimous”, was (not the but) a cause of war, of the invasion of Iraq on 20.3.2003, and of the sorry story since, not least in Syria. But that outcome – 15-nil – was not unanimous! France and Germany did indeed object to the above clause, and perhaps would have objected to other paragraphs if but the procedures had catered for such criticisms. Maybe other Council members, one or other of the ten temporary non-veto powers, which at the time included Ireland, might have had policy proposals worthy of consideration. Unfortunately, binary voting means questions are dichotomous. So countries vote in favour, perhaps because the resolution is better than nothing, perhaps because of the need for international solidarity, we don’t know. There is the main resolution; there may be amendments to this clause or that, or even perhaps a wrecking amendment; but everything is yes-or-no; it is this methodology which is at fault. Majority voting was, yes, a cause of war. A MORE INCLUSIVE PROCEDURE A more accurate methodology would allow the UK and USA to propose one draft Resolution 1441; option A. If France and Germany objected to Clause 13 or whatever, they could propose an alternative wording, even if only for this one clause, whence their preference would be a slightly revised but nevertheless complete package, option B. Syria, then a temporary member of Council, might have preferred another complete package, option C. Ireland could have preferred a more obviously neutral option D, and so on. Naturally enough, countries might seek to come together in groups to favour this or that option but the first principle would remain: everything should be on the table, (computer screen and dedicated web-page). The subsequent debate would allow for questions, clarifications, composites and even new proposals (although of course, at any one time, any one country could sponsor only one motion). At various stages, participating countries could express their preferences, so to indicate where the eventual consensus might lie. Then, at the end of the debate, all concerned would cast their preferences on a final (short) list of about five options. The winning outcome,

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