Politics

People with disabilities in institutions need choices By Niall Crowley

Ireland’s abortion laws in perspective. By Cathie Doherty

By Mark Lonergan Mirroring the recent abolition of inheritance tax on estates below £1m from Britain’s governing Tory party, the latest offering from Fianna Fáil in tax policy appears to be an all-out assault on what it perceives to be an injustice in the form of inheritance tax. It is particularly troubled by the current class thresholds in term of what can be gifted or bequeathed to a child. It feels that the present parent-child threshold of €225,000 is too low, particularly in light of the recent increase in Dublin house prices. Its spokespeople are at pains to give examples which would create a tax injustice as they see it. One particular “harsh” example is the two children inheriting a house in Terenure worth €700,000 and having to pay inheritance tax of €41,700 each. However, the fact the two children had to pay tax on this inheritance presupposes that they own other houses otherwise the dwelling-house exemption would have come into play. In any case a €41,700 tax bill on an inheritance of €350,000 is an effective tax rate of less than 12%. The Irish Independent has also lent its voice to this “fairness” debate. Taxing the inheritance of houses in Dublin as they pass to children (who own other homes) is labelled the ultimate “stealth tax”. FF is in effect calling for an increase in the class thresholds to lessen the burden on children inheriting a valuable house in Dublin from their parents. In support of this change in class thresholds to lessen the tax burden on these multiple-house-owners, they also suggest there is some tangible link between the parent’s hard work and the value of their family home (which is disingenuous in the extreme). FF has costed an increase in the parent-child threshold from €225,000 to €300,000 as costing €36m in tax foregone. There can be no more undeserving recipient of a tax break than people who inherit valuable houses (except perhaps a lottery winner). There also seems to be an attempt by FF to link the bereavement period after the death of a parent to an instant large tax bill, despite the fact that the tax is often paid some years after the death. Attention is also drawn to illiquid assets. A house in Dublin is hardly an illiquid asset, it can be turned into money within a matter of months so there should be no problem in paying any tax bill. The €225,000 Class Threshold per child is more than sufficient to pass on the wealth of the typical Irish family, tax-free. The median net household wealth of the typical Irish family is €109,000; the mean net household wealth is €231,000. This suggests significant inequality in the distribution of wealth. By way of comparison the average industrial wage in Ireland is €34,000. Half the citizens of Ireland do not even make a will, such is their penury. Inheritance tax, also known as death duties, dates from Roman times. Caesar Augustus introduced an inheritance tax of 5% of all estates above 100,000 sesterces, in 6 AD. Capital taxes in Ireland are (and always have been) outliers when it comes to creating a tax yield for the state. Inheritance tax, while on the face of it levied at 33%, in reality is little paid: just €258m was paid in 2013 out of a total tax take of over €38bn. This is a very light imposition compared with €16bn of income tax in the same period. Many of the left-leaning political parties are urging the introduction of a wealth tax such as was introduced in 1975 but only lasted three years – as it was very costly and difficult to levy with yearly valuations and associated collection costs. Reform of inheritance tax in the form of revamping the Capital Acquisitions Tax Act which has been on the Irish Statute Books for the past 40 years is a more practical option. It could widen the tax base and take pressure off the PAYE worker. In essence all that is required is some tweaking and tightening of the over generous reliefs and exemptions that have severely curtailed the tax take. A case in point is a full spousal/civil partner exemption on all assets received from another spouse/civil partner, irrespective of value. Some upper limit on this exemption is surely desirable in terms of estates over (say) €2m. The Irish farming lobby business lobbies have always made sure that the transfer of agricultural and business assets attract a huge 90% reduction in market value to arrive at a taxable value figure. The net effect of this massive beano is that the effective taxable-value figure is covered by the class threshold and therefore no inheritance tax is paid. Surely there is no need to have these reliefs at such a high level. 75% Relief would be still be generous. Also there should be an upper limit in terms of value for this very generous relief. There may be compelling social reasons for allowing smaller farms to pass without much inheritance tax, but surely the ranchers of Kildare and Meath should pay their share of inheritance tax, especially since Irish farmers were something of a tax-free zone until very recently. Our present capital taxation system favours the wealthy over the worker. Because it does not inheritances stringently, the government needs higher rates of VAT and income tax to make up the significant shortfall. The workers of Ireland, many whom are paying income tax at over 50% on modest wages, are subsidising the rich and the lucky, and their inheritances, to a huge degree. VAT at 23% increases the cost of living across the board for all Irish citizens and is extremely regressive. Goldsmith encapsulated it: “Laws grind the poor and Rich men rule the law” Furthermore proper inheritance taxes do very little harm to the economy where most other taxes have a significant economic sting in the tail. Indeed inheritance tax could have the positive effect of empowering children of wealthy parents to

By Gavin Daly and Michael Smith In 2012 Village ranked Colm McCarthy the 22nd most influential person in Ireland. A gruff UCD economist and professional Dub, with the ear of governments and a market-orientation that would pass for Thatcherite were it not for his persona, McCarthy had early stints in the University of Essex, the Central Bank and the ESRI and was the Doyen of the 1980s ‘Doheny and Nesbitt School of Economics’ named after the pub where he drank with colleagues including Seán Barrett, Moore McDowell and Paul Tansey. In his role as chairman of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure (‘An Bord Snip Nua’) in 2009 he proposed swingeing cuts dressed up as common sense. Surprisingly shy in company he is sharp and witty both privately and publicly and will assail environmentalists and progressives as “Commies”. According to the Irish Independent in 2009 he said that there was “something redolent of Soviet-era central planning about Irish procedures for determining public pay … Bolshevik-style central bodies determine the minutiae of pay and conditions for 350,000 employees nationwide”. He believes the markets can determine fairness provided they allow for externalities, such as environmental and social costs. For example his solution to climate change is to put a proper price on carbon. This does not allow for logistical difficulties and delays in dealing with what is an urgent problem, and the risks of mis-pricing or of half-baked systems. Inevitably McCarthy fails to acknowledge the transcendence of physical sciences such as climatology over social sciences like economics. He has focused intermittently on planning and the environment. He was an early antagonist of Dublin’s Rapid Transport (DART) and is a general defender of roads, though DKM with him as figurehead did consider the otherwise-unanalysed turn-of-the-century national motorway programme was an “overprovision”. In recent years he has derided national expenditures on incentivising wind farms, new railway programmes and above all in a thesis that he seems to ventilate annually in whatever national newspaper is affording him space, the system of town and country planning based on zoning – for inflating prices. He is wrong. Provably wrong. For how can underzoning be the problem when there is, in fact, overzoning. McCarthy’s long-standing thesis has been that the planning system (zoning) caused an artificial scarcity in the supply of development land for housing in and around Dublin throughout the Celtic Tiger, inflating a massive property bubble and simultaneously scattering new residential development to the four winds and far-flung corners of the Midlands and beyond. He further maintains that it is these same restrictive practices, with local authority planners and politicians unwilling to confront vested interests and local communities to zone more land, which is the root cause of the current lack of housing supply in Dublin. Instead, McCarthy argues, that the power to zone underutilised land should be removed from local authorities and centralised. While this simple supply/demand thesis may, at first glance, appear convincing, it is undermined by one basic flaw. Throughout the Celtic Tiger period there was in fact an enormous surfeit of zoned residential land within Dublin and its environs. An audit carried out by the DoECLG in 2010 found that a total of 3,302 hectares of undeveloped residential zoned land existed within the four Dublin local authorities. Even with conservative residential densities of 35 units per hectare, this was sufficient for at least 115,000 new homes. Within the adjoining Greater Dublin Area (GDA) counties of Kildare, Meath and Wicklow there was a further 4,120 hectares. Most, if not all, of this land was initially zoned in the late 1990s and early 2000s and remained undeveloped throughout the Celtic Tiger period. For example, the 220-hectare Adamstown site in South Dublin was originally zoned in 2001 and was intended to provide 9,950 homes via a ‘fast-track’ planning scheme approved in 2003. Similarly, large greenfield tracts of land at Carrickmines/Cherrywood, Clongriffin, Pelletstown, Phoenix Park Racecourse and Hansfield were all zoned well over a decade ago and remain undeveloped or only partially complete. The figures above are exclusive of the abundant supply of brown-field development land, infill sites and mixed-use zonings readily available throughout Dublin and which could potentially have provided for tens of thousands of additional new homes. It is evident, therefore, ex facie that a deficiency in the availability of zoned land was not the cause of the extreme property-price inflation in Dublin throughout the Celtic Tiger. Nor is it the cause of new housing undersupply today. The most recent 2014 residential-land-availability survey by the DoECLG shows that there are currently 2,654 hectares of ‘Stage 2’ zoned land available in Dublin. These are lands which have been prioritised as potentially available for immediate development, much of it already benefiting from significant public investment in capital infrastructure and services. This is reported to be sufficient to provide approximately 117,000 new dwellings at modest densities i.e. an increase in the total number of dwellings in Dublin by one quarter. In addition to being zoned and serviced, many of these sites currently also have extant planning permissions. In the remainder of the GDA there is enough land zoned for a further 95,000 dwellings, while zoned residential land nationally could currently accommodate approximately 415,000 units. Indeed, the DoECLG has even gone to the trouble of mapping the precise location of each of these zoned land parcels. Despite the vast array of evidence to the contrary, it is therefore remarkable how the notion persists, particularly amongst leading economists, that an obstructive planning system is hindering the operation of the housing market and was, and remains, a chief cause of the undersupply of new dwellings to meet demand. For example, in his evidence in June to the Banking Inquiry the former chief economist of the Central Bank, Tom O’Connell, submitted that: “the demand mania for property took off against the background of restrictive zoning which limited the supply of housing: the inevitable result was huge property price inflation”. This analysis also plainly overlooks the fact that

By Anthony Coughlan George Gilmore (1898-1985), whom I knew during the last 20 years of his life, was one of the most remarkable people I ever met. The Gilmore brothers, George, Charlie and Harry, fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War. They were unusual in being Protestant Republicans. They grew up in Howth where their mother’s people came from. Their paternal grandfather was land-steward to the Blacker family of Carrickblacker Castle near Portadown. The Blackers helped found the Orange Order in 1795. As children the Gilmores had the run of Carrickblacker while the resident Blacker was away. He told me the castle armoury still had weapons and uniforms of Grattan’s volunteers of 1782. George Gilmore’s first political action was to take down a British Army recruiting poster outside Amiens Street station in 1914. It showed a German soldier bayoneting a civilian against a background of burning churches. Its slogan was: “Join the Army and help defend Catholic Belgium”. He brought it up to Portadown where he pasted it up beside posters with a different appeal: “Join the Army and help defeat Catholic Austria”. It was an early lesson in Britain’s use of religious sectarianism in Ireland. His father was a prosperous accountant, but was so evangelically religious that he would not let his sons have either secondary or third-level education. Instead they joined the Fianna and the Irish Volunteers. Their unit obeyed MacNeill’s countermanding order in the Easter Rising, but George made a one-man contribution to it. Towards the end of the week British soldiers were gathered on the railway bridge over the road at Clontarf, preparing to enter the city. The Gilmores lived nearby. In the early morning George took his father’s hunting rifle and shot at them from behind a tree. The soldiers scattered. His father said at breakfast that there had been some shooting down the road, but he had heard no one was injured. George said he was much relieved at hearing that. Following the Rising his father sent George to Carrickblacker for a year to keep him out of trouble. He got to know several local Protestant farmers who had family memories of 1798. “We are the real Republicans”, one of them said to him. It strengthened his view that Protestant-Catholic unity was the basis of any meaningful Irish Republicanism. A motorbike accident at the start of the Civil War prevented George Gilmore joining the Four Courts republicans. He believed that De Valera, acting through Oscar Traynor, was responsible for preventing IRA reinforcements coming into the city from Blessington to relieve the Four Courts. This was the only step that might have given that conflict a different outcome, he said, for most of the Dublin IRA was then anti-Treaty. “After that it would have been better if we all had gone home instead of continuing the war”. During the Civil War the Gilmores were active in the South County Dublin area – mainly trenching roads to impede Provisional Government troop movements. George was arrested several times and escaped twice from prison. In 1925 he organised a famous prison-break from Mountjoy. He and two colleagues dressed as policemen pretended to be delivering some new prisoners to the jail. They took over a whole section and succeeded in springing 19 Republican prisoners who got clean away. Before De Valera founded Fianna Fáil in 1926 George Gilmore was for a while secretary to Sean Lemass. The IRA sent him to Russia to negotiate training facilities, but the British Government learned about it, so the Russians could not help, but instead gave him a tour of the USSR. “De Valera took the best Republicans with him into Fianna Fail”, Peadar O’Donnell used to say, “and left us with the clinkers”. Gilmore and O’Donnell were close colleagues from the early 1920s. O’Donnell was extrovert, ebullient, the eternal optimist as he launched one political or literary scheme after another. Gilmore was introvert, inclined to political pessimism, the embodiment of austere Protestant integrity. Their politics were those of James Connolly and Liam Mellows. They were socialist Republicans and sought to push the IRA , which in the late 1920s and early 1930s had several thousand members, to the left. In 1934 when O’Donnell and Gilmore failed to get majority support on the IRA Army Council, they left the IRA and set up the Republican Congress. They envisaged this as a rallying point for leftwing Republicans, trade unions, tenant leagues and the Communist Party, which would push the new Fianna Fáil Government into a more Republican and anti-imperialist direction. George went to America to raise money for it. Gilmore often recalled the group of Protestant workers from Belfast’s Shankill Road who joined the Republican Congress contingent at the annual commemoration at Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown in 1934. They marched behind a banner saying “Break the connection with capitalism”. Sadly, they were set upon by the IRA which wanted only their own people to march. When the Republican Congress petered out after a couple of years Gilmore brought the information they had gathered on Dublin’s appalling slums to Frank Gallagher, then editor of the Irish Press. The articles on slum landlordism which Gallagher carried encouraged the Government to start the first schemes of mass slum clearance and Council house-building. George thought that was one positive legacy of the Republican Congress. George met Cora Hughes when she got involved in tenant-league agitation for the Congress. She was the great romance of his life. Her father, Frank Hughes, was an old friend of De Valera’s. Cora was Dev’s god-daughter and he too was very fond of her. She had a degree in Celtic Studies from UCD, where she became friends with the poet Charlie Donnelly, who was killed in Spain. She later transferred her affections to the older George. Once when she was arrested, De Valera, then Taoiseach, sent her books in prison. George believed it was her work in the Dublin slums that gave her the TB that eventually killed

By Gavin Sheridan Two weeks ago the Supreme Court ruled in the case of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) vs Commissioner for Environmental Information. The court ruled that NAMA was a public authority for the purposes of the Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) Regulations 2007/2011. It found that while the High Court had erred in its ruling on the definition of “and includes” in the Regulations, that NAMA was a public authority regardless of this by virtue of having “public administrative functions” as defined by the European Directive that the AIE Regulations had transposed – and was made more clear following the interpretation of this Directive in a significant 2013 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling called Fish Legal and Emily Shirley vs Information Commissioner and Others. The NAMA case traced back to early 2010, when I sent a request to NAMA and Anglo Irish Bank seeking certain information. At the time there was no recourse for the public to obtain information from either body, as then Finance Minister Brian Lenihan had decided that NAMA would not be subject to the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 1997/2003 – the question of Anglo coming under FOI was never really broached. During the passage of the NAMA Bill through the Dail in 2009, Lenihan said: “If the bulk of the information is commercially sensitive, being obliged to prove that in individual cases will, of course, constitute an administrative burden. Virtually all of the information at the disposal of the agency will, in any event, be exempt”. NAMA was then duly established without the scrutiny that FOI provides. So AIE was the only course of action available. Of course I felt that Lenihan’s arguments held no water. The FOI Act provided for commercially sensitive information through one of its many exemptions – and Lenihan’s argument around administrative burden made no sense, given that NAMA was in the process of hiring hundreds of staff, who would be using modern IT systems. The appointment of one or two FOI officers (who were later hired anyway in 2014), utilising those IT systems would arguably impose some but not significant burdens on the agency. Notwithstanding those FOI issues, I believed it was entirely arguable at the time that NAMA and Anglo held significant amounts of environmental information as it is defined in the Directive and Regulations – it is an expansive definition based on the Aarhus Convention (which Ireland subsequently ratified in 2012). Of course my preference would have been that both would have been covered by both FOI and AIE. But AIE was worth pursuing. NAMA after all, is an asset management agency, where most of its assets are properties and land and it itself engages in property development. Anglo admitted in its refusals to answer requests that it also conceivably held large amounts of environmental information. Submitting requests under AIE was the the only path to take – and thus began a five-year battle to find out if they were subject to the AIE Regulations at all – since they denied they were public authorities covered by that law. Over the years, NAMA held firm on its position that it should not be subject to FOI, or to the AIE Regulations, expending not insignificant resources fighting with the Commissioner for Environmental Information in the High Court and Supreme Court. At Oireachtas Committee appearances during those years, NAMA chairman Frank Daly and chief executive Brendan McDonagh articulated their views on why NAMA was a special case, and should not be subject essentially to either regime. In 2012, Daly argued to the Finance Committee that “as chairman, I am a believer in transparency and freedom of information, but the real difficulty in NAMA is associated with its commercial objective. We are akin to a commercial State body, bank or asset management company… we cannot really afford to be hamstrung vis-à-vis our competitors. This is not to say we do not believe in transparency”. It always sounds good when the leaders of rather secretive State agencies say they “believe in transparency”. The problems usually start when they fail to act on those beliefs. There were political promises too, Taoiseach Enda Kenny made commitments to the Dail to bring NAMA under FOI by the end of 2012. This of course never happened – it would be 2015 before NAMA was brought under FOI, and then only partially. Now, more than five years have passed. Much of NAMA’s loan-book is earmarked for sale, and Anglo itself is in liquidation. In 2010 the plan for both NAMA and Anglo was that they would be with us until at least 2020. This is no longer the case. By all accounts NAMA will wind down far sooner, and IBRC sooner still. And five years in, we have now the appearance of significant question marks over the sale of certain assets, the prices paid, the people involved and the lobbying that may have taken place. All of the decision-making happened in an opaque manner – and reasonable questions are now being asked about whether the secrecy surrounding both organisations has served the public well. We have a Commission of Investigation looking into the sale of certain significant IBRC loans/assets in the years between its nationalisation in 2009 and the appointment of a special liquidator in 2013. Moreover, just this week questions have been raised about NAMA’s largest sale to date, the Project Eagle sale in Northern Ireland, and this will be subject to important questions both north and south of the border. Inevitably though, these questions arise too long after the deals are done and the cheques have been signed. Three questions arise: How many more bodies are buried in the corpse of IBRC? How many more scandals will surface from NAMA in the coming years, and could it have been any different? In the original request I sent to NAMA in 2010 (I subsequently narrowed it hoping to expedite the process of deciding if they were subject