Politics

By Tony Lowes. Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney is at war on behalf of big agri-business. Simon of course is brother to Greencore’s dynamic CEO Patrick, recently in the news for spurning shareholders’ objections to his €1.4m annual remuneration. Greencore long ago shut Irish Sugar, its then only product. It makes nothing in Ireland, though it is the world’s largest sandwich maker, and in early February moved its stock exchange listing from Dublin to London. Simon is son of the late Hugh, surveyor, yachtsman and well-got Cork businessman who was demoted from Ministerial rank for improper contact with businessmen and who held a $175,000 Ansbacher account, according to the Moriarty Tribunal, though his son vigorously denied it. On land Coveney, who is Minister for Agriculture, Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, plans to increase agricultural exports by 42% by 2020. On sea, he is planning three mega fish-farms. The first, in Galway Bay, will produce 15,000 tons a year, more than the whole of Ireland’s current production. Simon Coveney is fighting the European Commission on both fronts, assisted by twelve (sometimes conflicting) State Bodies, including Coillte, the Aquaculture Licensing Appeals Board (ALAB),Bord Bia. Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the Marine Institute, the National Milk Agency, the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority (SFPA), and Teagasc. On land and on sea, his ambition is global. FARMING On land, the European Commission is intent on reforming the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) so that the astonishingly high headage grants available are capped and the grants become based on the land farmed, not the number of animals held. In a revealing debate in the Senate this January about proposed changes to the CAP, Coveney was concerned that they would mean the “most productive farmers at present would lose an average of 60% of their payment while farmers in less productive areas would gain an average of approximately 85% in their payments. This level of switching resources will, in my view, significantly damage the productivity of Irish farming in terms of the capacity of the productive sector to invest and expand as we would like it to do. This is not in the interests of productivity or of the agrifood journey we want to create, which is around growth and jobs and expansion”, he said. Nor does he welcome the proposals to have 30% of the overall payment applied to greening or the apparently not-so-onerous rule that prohibits claims for a farm more than 80km from the farmer’s own farm. The EU Court of Auditors, when reviewing the system of CAP payments across the EU at the end of April, warned that under the current system “payments will continue to be made even when beneficiaries do not exercise any activity on their land”. The EU seems to be concerned about situations such as that of Pádraig Flynn’s wife’s who claimed to be a farmer for a forestry grant on the basis of a single invoice for hay sold. Ireland seems less concerned. Another example of the conflict between Ireland and the EU is the pitched battle which began before Christmas over the grant conditions for aid in Disadvantaged Areas, almost 75% of the country’s farmland. At stake is Coveney’s plan to eliminate the 40% of Ireland’s farms which Teagasc has categorised as unviable. On the grounds that there were those ”who really are not farming at all; they are putting stock on land in order to draw down payments”, he retroactively doubled the stocking level required to qualify for aid for the remainder of the current CAP program – the next two years. Given the established legal principle against retroactive decisions affecting property rights such as those to grants, it is hard to see how Coveney can sustain his decision. His focus on stocking numbers over quality or environmental concerns ignores analysis of farming’s contribution to the economy through preserving biodiversity, estimated by the Heritage Council to be worth €2.6 billion per annum to the Irish economy. In any event, the Minister’s breezy replies to questions last year assuring forthcoming EU approval for his stocking changes are now notably more guarded while the IFA is increasingly concerned at continued delays in resolving the situation as time runs out for 2012 applications. In another regressive move Coveney announced in late April that apart from breeding establishment horses would no longer [always] qualify for headage grants. The bloodstock industry is hardly the most deserving sector in hard-stretched Ireland, particularly when the country is awash with unwanted horses. In monetary terms Coveney’s plan to trim €30m a year off the €310m CAP bill is a smaller saving than the tab the state picked up because Ireland lost the 75% EU funding in 2007 due to Ireland’s failures to meet basic environmental standards. Making that up will cost the State €42m this year alone. Coveney had fought hard in Europe to have the ‘tie back’ year for grants in the 2014 CAP proposals put back from 2014 to 2011 implying only those who were farming in 2011 could seek grants in 2014. This was ostensibly to ensure that there was no ‘land grab’ by rich foreign interests but in fact was to keep the pot safe for the lads with their feet under the table already. This has met with resistance from the EU Court of Auditors, who have challenged the proposal on the grounds that they “undermine its own effort to encourage young people to become farmers”. FISH FARMS Wearing his marine crown, prince Coveney faces even greater frustrations in trying to rejuvenate the salmon-farming industry, where fish farms have halved production in the last ten years. While the global market is a mouth-watering €1 billion euro, he recently whined to the Senate that he was frustrated, that the “Commission is literally holding a stick over our head in asking us to put in place a gold-plated system for accepting applications for aquaculture licenses”. Since 2007, 520 aquaculture licence applications have stacked up awaiting a new process that Minister Coveney called in a

By Jarlath Kearney. A key theme at the Northern Ireland Civil Service’s annual corporate gathering last month, entitled ‘NICS Live’, was the need to start “getting with devolution”. It’s exactly five years since stable devolved government was delivered in the north by the DUP and Sinn Fein’s historic rapprochement. What then has the north’s bureaucracy – particularly the elite Senior Civil Service cadre – been doing in the interim? Certain structural changes have, of course, happened quickly and easily. The British direct-rule Northern Ireland Office (NIO) has reprised some of the characteristics it displayed at its formation in 1972. Notably, the recent promotion of British Foreign Office diplomatic influences at the slimmed down (and latterly strategically-focused) NIO should be seen in a longer-term historical and political context. Alongside that, with Westminster’s devolution of substantial policing powers to the northern Assembly in 2010, British Home Office-oriented tactical security and intelligence structures essentially migrated en masse from the NIO into the newly-formed, locally-accountable Department of Justice (DOJ). This is important because DOJ is an integral element of the northern Assembly and its Executive Committee structures in the context of the all-Ireland Ministerial Council. DOJ’s senior civil servants should thereby routinely conform to locally-accountable demands and objectives, and be at the vanguard of promoting radical democratic reform. Instead, some observers now argue the local Senior Civil Service has been polluted and tainted by the cross-over of these career ‘securocrats’. Comparisons have been drawn to the diminishing but influential role of some old-guard RUC political detectives who are trying to damage new democratic policing by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). However, that view is too simplistic. The substantive institutional difference between the north’s Senior Civil Service and the PSNI is that the latter has been subject to substantial organisational change and cultural reform. This has opened space for genuine PSNI modernisers to assert their commitment to the north’s new democratic dispensation and challenge the old order. It has created baselines and standards against which progress can be measured and monitored. In turn, these have become crucial campaigning reference points on which democrats are relying, for instance at the Policing Board, the Assembly’s Justice Committee, in the courts and in wider civic society. That’s why a hearts and minds battle, between hawks and doves, is now an omnipresent tension within the PSNI’s most senior levels and wider criminal justice system. The 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement stipulated a range of measures to ensure the fundamental transformation of policing, criminal justice and political institutions. Central to this transformation was the programmatic creation of a critical mass of inclusive and representative public legitimacy based on equality statute and human-rights mechanisms. This was founded on a self-determination model in which the British government uniquely ceded to one “region” of the “United Kingdom” an unqualified right of secession from the “national” territory to the Irish state, subject only to the majority vote of its inhabitants. In turn, this all-Ireland (not all-British) self-determination model was conjoined with a new framework for political equality and parity of esteem. Irish national and political rights were enshrined as entitled to co-equal legitimacy in the institutional fabric of the northern state, albeit within the finite context of extant British constitutional jurisdiction. The institution responsible for implementing (and often obstructing) large parts of the 1998 Agreement’s reform agenda was the north’s Senior Civil Service. Yet, arguably, the Belfast Agreement’s biggest blind spot was its failure to target the Senior Civil Service for institutional transformation. Fourteen years later this elite state bureaucracy, numbering less than 300 top officials, still hasn’t even reached full compositional representativeness (in terms of religion and gender) of the community it purports to serve. The prospect of a politically-representative Senior Civil Service – with republicans and unionists proportionately employed throughout – remains a distant mirage. This is striking, given how relatively reasonable it would have been to impose equality on a workforce of less than 300 over the course of 14 years by employing modest affirmative action measures alongside creative structural reforms. Of course, it is equally noteworthy that (alongside other anomalies, such as still appointing ex-civil servants to the north’s Human Rights Commissioners and Equality Commissioners) the NIO singularly appoints the influential Civil Service Commissioners who oversee recruitment to the north’s Senior Civil Service. In addition, a range of specific measures for compositional equality which were recommended by the independent Ouseley Report in 2002 (commissioned by the local Executive’s first Programme for Government) were fudged by the NIO, and never seriously implemented by the System. In this context, is it any wonder that the north’s Senior Civil Service is only now struggling to start “getting with devolution”? This is partly why there has been no kickback from within the north’s Senior Civil Service against the efforts of DOJ’s ‘Japanese soldiers’ to damage key aspects of democratic accountability over policing and justice. In short, there is no nucleus of committed Senior Civil Service modernisers in the north determinedly driving a radical change agenda. Even if there was, they don’t have any reform programme to propagate. Of course, the north’s Senior Civil Service has always seen itself as an organic limb of British security and intelligence interests in Ireland, rather than as the impartial and politically neutral public service institution it often proclaims. During the conflict, key sections of the Senior Civil Service became part of the ‘big boys club’ with MI5, MI6, Military Intelligence and Special Branch. Senior civil servants, inter alia, signed intelligence and surveillance warrants; authored and implemented media-censorship laws; wrote parades policy to promote Orange marches in nationalist areas; directly oversaw brutal prison regimes; provided political rationale and press cover for state shoot-to-kill strategies; vigorously opposed non-violent civil rights efforts like the MacBride Principles for Fair Employment; and introduced community vetting frameworks to exclude deprived nationalist communities from public funding. Such activities collectively intensified realities of political, social and economic exclusion from the state. The detrimental cost to the human rights of those affected by such