Politics

I rang the doorbell on Joan Burton’s modest semi in the Dublin’s North inner suburbs, between Stoneybatter and Cabra.  I had been at a conference at Maynooth, and she agreed to an evening interview to save me a second trip from Galway.  She answered the door herself and insisted I rescue my wife from the car.  She ushered us into the family sitting room.  It was cluttered and informal, looking out on the small garden. Her husband supplied us with tea and snacks. The TD for Dublin West asked for a glass of white wine, but this was put aside, un-drunk, in her eagerness to respond to questions. Have you always been interested in politics? I think I was always interested in debate and discussion and I suppose I had an unusual background in that I grew up in Dublin City Centre in Stoneybatter and Oxmanstown Road which is now very fashionable but was deeply unfashionable then. I had been adopted at the age of two by the Burtons when they lived in Rialto, and then we got a house in the Northside near my mother’s family through the artisans’ dwellings. I liked school and I was always I suppose conscious of looking around me. Nobody in my family was really involved in politics, I mean, obviously, they had political opinions and the one thing they did was to talk and talk and talk! They were all great natural musicians, performers and craftsmen of the old style l. I wasn’t a musician or singer so I think I became a talker so that might have directed me in the way of politics. Imagine that we had a Labour-led government and you are Minister for Finance. What would be your priorities? I think that the major priorities would be to restore a balance to the tax system. Because I have a background as an accountant, I have never been convinced of the value of high marginal rates of tax. I’d prefer to have lower marginal rates but real effective rates which allow people to contribute proportionately with income taxes that are not excessively high. The second thing at the moment would be to find a way of having a stimulus programme for people who have become unemployed. The Department of Finance is notoriously conservative. How would you avoid being dominated by the standard Finance agenda and would you avoid going native? One thing that somebody who has the honour of being a publicly-elected member of government has to have is a clear set of priorities that they wish to see being implemented – because if they don’t, then senior civil servants will fill in that gap and I think it is a question of trying to have a running start. Clearly the department, in recent years, has had some extraordinary powerful ministers, particularly Charlie McCreevy who basically told the civil servants what he thought. I don’t see why the department therefore would not be equally open to people who come from the left of centre having very clear ideas. James Carville said he would like to be reincarnated as the bond markets because everybody would be afraid of him. Are you afraid of the bond markets? Was it Marx who says “Capitalism is not patriotic, it has no home other than profit”? Globalisation in terms like derivatives and in terms of the flow of information has so speeded up that political structures are simply lagging far behind. Yes I think you should respect the bond markets but I think it would be foolish to be too afraid of them and as a consequence feeling helpless. I would like to believe that I am a realist, but that I am not particularly fearful. Do you support a Tobin tax to slow the excesses of global finance? Yes. There was in the 2006 Budget a proposal to introduce a 1% stamp duty tax, same as the stamp duty on share transactions, into stock exchange transactions in relation to specially contracts for difference. Funnily enough, I had a discussion with the current Taoiseach, Brian Cowen. I thought the tax was a good thing and I supported it. There was a lobby, a short sharp lobby and Cowen withdrew it.   In saying so at the time and getting advice from various people they were kind of warning me off in that this was not the appropriate thing to say. I wasn’t to know but that that was one of the vehicles for what happened with Quinn Insurance. In terms of the Tobin tax, yes the party of European Socialists has a kind of standard position now advocating that – a Financial Transactions’ Tax. Building on that, what ideas does Labour have for stiffening the regulation of the Irish banks? My view of regulation is probably very old-fashioned, I think that regulation is about the detail, but it is far more about integrity and the courage to eyeball people who are perhaps very very rich and say what you’ve done is wrong and to be a regulator as opposed to a cheerleader. I mean obviously light-touch regulation failed dramatically partly because the people at the very top of the regulation and Central Bank system, thought that part of their job was to applaud Irish banking and IFSC transactions. Do you think there is a Golden Circle in Ireland? Yes. The Golden Circle was that Anglo Irish was a specialist developer’s bank. Those specialist developers were all Fianna Fáil supporters. The bank was growing at a phenomenal rate  so the bank funded the developers and the developers funded Fianna Fáil. That was the relationship and nobody was prepared to say stop. During the NAMA Debate, the Labour Party came out in favour of nationalising the banks. What are the advantages of this? In March, 2008, when Anglo’s price fell and the highpoint of the boom was over, the Oireachtas Finance Committee actually met the US Fed.  They were kind of saying we don’t know where this