A senior member of administration at NUI Galway has made a complaint under the 2014 whistleblower Act about alleged irregularities in the appointment of people to senior teaching and administrative positions. The controversy is the latest in a succession of rows between staff and management at NUIG which has seen the Equality Tribunal make serious findings of gender discrimination against the college. Other cases by women alleging discrimination are making their way through the tribunal and at least one has been lodged with the High Court forcing the embattled NUIG president, Jim Browne, to issue a statement in recent weeks insisting that he has no evidence that discrimination is widespread within NUIG. He was responding to a letter from the vice-president of SIPTU, Gene Mealy, which represents more than 700 workers in NUIG, claiming that “widespread problems of discrimination persist across all grades of staff” and that there has been “a proliferation of precarious employment contracts which we believe are inherently discriminatory”. The union criticised management for failing to engage with the State’s industrial relations machinery. Browne rejected the assertions by Mealy and urged the union to “bring any evidence of discrimination to the attention of our director of HR and organisational development, Chris McNairney. I am sure he will investigate them thoroughly and professionally”. Regular reports in the Connacht Tribune posed questions over the appointment of consultants, Results Through People Ltd., at a cost of €180,000, by the School of Law for just 22 months work. Last year PR firm Drury/Porter Novelli, was commissioned to supplement the five person NUIG communications department when the college became the centre of an international media storm over a health questionnaire for job applicants which included questions about women’s menstrual cycles, and gynaecological and prostate problems. The union committee has also expressed a lack of confidence in the independence of the newly appointed vice-president for equality and diversity. Ann Scott, formerly of Dublin City University and Liverpool John Moore University, who was appointed to the position in recent months at an advertised annual salary of between €106,000 and €136,000. The remuneration also annoyed lecturing and other staff who have witnessed a sharp growth in contract-based, low paid employment since Browne took up the president’s position in the late 2000s. Suspicions of an “old boys club” at NUIG emerged in a survey last year which found that male and female staff used terms such ‘misogynist’, ‘aggressive’, ‘toxic’, ‘bullying’ and ‘cronyist’ to describe the culture at the college. Similar allegations of discrimination and improper promotions have been made at UCC, DCU and UL as third level administrators pursue an aggressive embrace of the corporatist model so widespread in British and US colleges.
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
Electi On Right, Villager thinks there’ll 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. The prognosis is tentative since around here there is no worse crime than a discredited prediction. Quite a bit at stake In which spirit… so Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump come out punching from New Hampshire and it’s cockle-warming to see the Bush and Clinton dynasties with their inequality-indulgent ideas formed a generation ago, in serious trouble, even if it does signal the return of the Angry White Man, and his supporters. Sanders’ agenda, of course, has obvious appeal in the right-on Village while Trump is dangerous in an old-fashioned FASCIST way. Assuming for the sake of mischief a Sanders-Trump election-off, for Villager the victor can regrettably (and terminally) only be Trump. Sanders is too ugly and Trump too rich for any other upshot. So what happens then? The only force in global volatility that is more unhinged than Trump is Islamic State whose principal religio-geo-strategic goal is dooms-day precipitated by a battle in Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome (ie the West) will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo. After its battle in Dabiq the caliphate, already in 2016 nicely ensconced under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, will expand and sack Istanbul. An anti-Messiah will come and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s ghters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Then Jesus (Jesus!) – the second-most-revered prophet in Islam – will return to Earth, whack the anti-Messiah, and lead the Muslims to victory. After a series of domestic putsches and foreign-policy cataclysms Villager foresees an insurgent Trump, toupée to the sun on a white charger leading the Crusaders into battle at Dabiq. He will lose but be revealed as the Anti-Messiah before final wipe-out at Jerusalem. It is not clear whether the Donald will consider the big new status recompense for the loserism. Jesus and Mohammed will together sort out the souls and the Bushes’ and Clintons’ Wall Street millions will be useless to them. Hello you Former Anglo CEO, David Drumm, is to wing his way back from breaking rocks in a Federal penitentiary, with Fintan O’Toole’s misplaced endorsement for a man incarcerated in the lucre-lionising country to which he has fled, blowing up a tail wind. Drumm has announced that he hopes to wear a tag rather than go to prison here. Villager has an idea. How about wewear the tag and he gives us back the money? Valentine wishes The words ”My heart is, and always will be, yours” from ‘Sense And Sensibility’ have been voted the most romantic line from romantic literature, film and TV drama. They are uttered by Edward Ferrars to Elinor Dashwood in director Ang Lee’s 1995 screen version of Jane Austen’s classic novel with Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay,. It was the top choice of 2,000 inane British women who were polled for the cliché-blind TV channel ‘Drama’. Villager resolves to try it out on Mrs Villager. The scene in the 1997 epic ‘Titanic’ where a frozen, fearful and (Villager was happy to note) doomed Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, tells his effervescent Rose played by Kate Winslet, ”promise me you’ll survive” (inevitably) came third. Bliss and the insolvent luxury-car company ‘Former Model’ Glenda Gilson opened up to ‘VIP’ in a February cover photoshoot about her life a year since marrying ‘Rob McNaughton’. The cover (Villager claims never to get beyond it) gushes: “After 18 months of wedded bliss the gorgeous star of Xposé reveals that staying in is her new going out”. Admittedly the former vainquese of bearded developer Johnny Ronan has a lot to stay in from. Gilson mystifyingly fails to mention that during her blissful year she was barred from acting as a company director for five years. Glenda and her brother Damien were in charge of Gilson Motor Company Ltd until 2011 when it was wound up by the High Court for failing to pay €141,937 to the Revenue. Judge Paul Gilligan said Glenda was “deceived” by her sibling in the “improper way he ran the affairs of the business” which traded in high value vehicles and operated a car parking and valeting service at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Some of the money is owed to Ronan, who has – in other news – expressed the view that NAMA operates on the spiffing principle of Arbeit Macht Frei. you get the Tsar you deserve Ronan and his former business partner in Treasury Holdings, Richard Barrett, are back in business and back in the media, as if they had never cavorted malignly around boomtown threatening all-comers (Barrett once said he “had his foot on the throat” of poor Chicago-nurtured Garrett Kelleher) and in the end cost us all a packet. Barrett was even allowed to drawlingly pontificate on the Marian Finucane radio programme, about his vision for social housing something he has in the past been very reluctant to provide in Treasury schemes. He told Marian, always agog at a bit of developer vim, “There is an enormous humanitarian crisis of epic proportions which is causing a great deal of human suffering. It is proportionally much larger than the Syrian refugee crisis” with up to 300,000 people on the housing list. Barrett also tells a provocative anecdote of a local authority renting “a house at €8000 a month on one of Dublin’s two best roads to house a homeless mother with four children, costing the state a fortune”. But, intriguingly, he has the answer: “I have formed a series of investment companies, (in Housing, Social Housing, Health Care, Renewable Energy) [all, for some reason, called Bartra]. We will build these facilities renting them to the Irish Government”. He sees it as a sort of “social
Spit on fingers Who is that shorn and beardless gent on the streets of Dublin 2? Why it’s old Michael Fingleton heading off to the Banking Inquiry to undo some of the unfairness done to him by the media. Without the beard and hat you might confuse him with an honest person, or a competent one, or one who wasn’t largely responsible for the worst bank in history, one which cost Ireland €5.4bn. If you look carefully you can still tell it’s him from his watch and his pot (in which he keeps his €27m pension) and his barefacedness. The only way – unless he opens his mouth – you know what he is capable of is from his moustache. The tragedy is that the disguise means that the citizenry don’t get to exercise their expectorant rights as is so temptingly the prerogative with Ahern, Cowen, Fitzpatrick et al on the mean streets of wised-up Ireland. Going to Town? Village is reinventing itself. That could mean it’s quietly selling out or changing. But unfortunately as far as Villager is concerned, it doesn’t. It’s just going to concentrate more on getting out there, and marketing. The Board have been ensconced for the last week in bonding and brainstorming sessions with relays of men with clipboards. Apparently even the name is up for grabs. Ideas have included Incite, Town, Village Eye, Angle, In Fairness, Magwell and New Village (Villager especially liked that one. He could become New Villager. On the other hand, where would he go in a magazine called ‘Town’?). Joint the dots, lads The latest tax defaulters’ list shows Ireland’s most ostentatiously and oleaginously corrupt man, lobbyist Frank Dunlop, made a settlement with the Revenue totalling €429,198 for under-declaration of income tax and VAT. Now where did he get an income that would tax at that amount? Turns on terms Rory Mulcahy SC is to look into Gerard Convie’s allegations of planning corruption in Donegal, The terms of reference for a ‘review report’ [by god is this not an Inquiry or Tribunal] expressly allow the Minister, slippery Alan Kelly, or his successor not to publish its findings, and exclude An Bord Pleanála from the scope of the ‘report’. Lack of clarity and too much discretion to malleable ministers is what you get when, as here, an investigation is ‘non-statutory’ ie the Minister’s civil servants has made up its workings as he has gone along. It is not clear if it will address impropriety or just ‘bad practice’’ though if it does not address impropriety it is possible that Convie whose allegations have already been actionably pooh-poohed by a Minister, leading to a payment to Convie, may consider he has again to return to court to defend his name as a serious complainant in view of the fact he has raised allegations that indubitably are about corruption or impropriety. Convie worked in Donegal County Council as a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He has claimed, in an affidavit opened in court, that during his tenure in the Council there was bullying and intimidation of planners who sought to make decisions based exclusively on the planning merits of particular applications and that planning irregularities were perpetrated by named officials at the highest level in the Council. He claims these included former Manager Michael McLoone – who has initiated defamation proceedings against Village magazine – as well as named county councillors. Convie had a list of more than 20 “suspect cases” in the County. Don’t mention the ‘local produce’ thing Is Ballymaloe relish in McDonalds’ burgers not a sellout? For McDonalds like. RIAI Graby train leaves station What a year in the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI). Last September saw a fractious AGM, followed by resignations en masse from the board due to governance issues and dark clouds gather around veteran ‘CEO for life’ John Graby. At the AGM Graby defended his position of keeping his remuneration package confidential from the treasurer and the RIAI Board, his employers. One in a long list of remarkable revelations on the night was the untendered payment of €500k for services, to his son’s company Bluebloc over a five-year period. Under questioning from the floor, Kathryn Megan (RIAI deputy CEO) confirmed that the organisation did not have a procurement policy. The official account just released states “The Deputy CEO also advised that the current procurement policy is based primarily on the requirement to obtain value for money. The RIAI had a detailed Procurement Process”. Less than 12 months on from the AGM, and two days after publication of an external governance review, Graby announced his retirement from a role he inhabited for 28 years having turned 70 over the summer. Apparently contracts with Bluebloc will not be renewed and joint roles held by Graby as CEO and statutory Registrar of architects, are soon to be separated and advertised separately. RIAI President Robin Mandal recently said the RIAI was beginning “a new spring”. The jingle jangle – of cash Meanwhile, architects are having to adapt to the “new reality” and grow business in the most unlikely of surroundings. Whispers in social circles are that architect-about-town Neil Burke Kennedy has attended meetings in Mountjoy Jail. The client? Tiernan O’Mahony, jailed ex-Anglo Irish Bank Executive and failed financier. Apparently he is keeping busy in lock-up by working with his architect, planning a 15,000 sq foot €3m home for when he is released. Mr O’Mahony certainly does not work on a small scale. He still holds the record for the largest ever Irish corporate cash loss. His International Securities Trading Corporation (that he set up after leaving Anglo in 2005) left investors nursing losses of €820m. It made Anglo look frugal. Bambi no more As Britain’s Labour Party was pushing ahead with electing Jeremy Corbyn (someone who at least wanted to do things differently), John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister, had occasion to reprimand his former boss, Tony Blair. Blair had denigrated a lurch to the
Picking at Piketty “What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is in fact the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt, neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French State suffered for decades under this debt. The history of debt is full of iron” – Thomas Piketty interviewed in Die Zeit Villager loves Piketty and likes Germany (as they might say in an Aldi ad). But it’s a little unfair of the Frenchman not to note that there is a big difference between debt legitimately accrued and reparations. And Prussia is not Germany. Keeping up with the changing Times Villager is looking for an advertising slogan for Village. The Irish Times has some really horrible new ones starting with ‘You are what you read’. That certainly isn’t anywhere close to true, and saying so is bound to annoy readers none of whom can be that enthusiastic about the product now. It succeeds the 2013 campaign with the nice man in the dated jacket putting his hand through Kevin O’Sullivan’s wall: ‘The story of Why’. Worse still is the totally mundane audio-campaign featuring chief sports writer, Keith Duggan: “It’s a privilege to write about different sports”; and Róisín Ingle (who print ads tell us “writes about the things that speak to her; she takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary”): “When someone comes up to me and says you really made me laugh or they say I was cryin’ and everybody was looking at me. There’s something really amazing about bein’ able to do that”. And then: “Even though they’re very much about me, they’re my stories… if I’m enjoying written’ it then I kinda know that that’ll be one that’ll – touch people”. Villager is not open to being, and has not been, touched in this way. Summer love-in This year’s MacGill summer school will look at our governance and the need for longer-term planning. Was that not last year’s theme, and the year’s before that? Fair and accurate Séamus Dooley, Irish Secretary of the National Union of Journalists has asked Village to clarify the NUJ’s position on the Binchy High Court judgment on the Catherine Murphy/Denis O’Brien Dail reportage debacle. Its statement read “This is an unambiguous ruling in favour of democracy. The right of parliamentarians to speak under privilege is a cornerstone of our democracy and the right of the media to fairly and accurately report such proceedings is fundamental”. Village reported that the phrase “the right of the media to fairly and accurately report” implied that the media has no right to report “wrong-headed contributions”. Dooley points out that in fact: “On the contrary the NUJ believes in the right of the media to fully report what is said in parliament. The public has a right to know what’s said, regardless of whether it’s wrong-headed or not. It might even be argued that the public has a particular interest in knowing that a TD or senator has gone off on one and gone things totally wrong! Saying reporting should be fair and accurate is not the same as saying the comments reported upon should be fair and accurate”. Very Important, the Presidency Miriam O’Callaghan, presenter of Ireland’s flagship current affairs programme, ‘Prime Time’, has allowed it to be spread that she wants to be the next President. How compromising! And she’s told VIP magazine whose cover insinuated itself into Villager’s glance in Spar (he was looking without avail for Village), that she wants her epitaph to say that she was a good mother. This presumes she is entitled to an epitaph. Villager prefers presidents and prime-time broadcasters who at least rate the job in hand. Beit bitten The proposed sale of €20m of Old Masters paintings from the Beit collection at Russborough, Co Wicklow – in contradiction of the express wishes of the deceased Beits who bequeathed them – has been postponed, probably indefinitely, but it has yielded casualties. The Georgian Society’s representative on the Beit Foundation which promoted the sale, Robert O’Byrne, fell on his 22-carat sword to be replaced by senior counsel Jerry Healy, though the soi-disant ‘Society’ is said to be in turmoil, with President Patrick Guinness denying he had, as a release had stated, “deplored” O’Byrne’s approval of the sale. An Taisce has replaced Consuelo O’Connor, its one-time chairwoman, who also approved the sales, with Ian Lumley, its heritage officer. An Taisce is taking a case against the sales that have already gone ahead and as preemption of any attempt to revive the suspended sale of the paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger and Francesco Guardi if their mooted purchase by an Irish collector stalls. An Taisce’s ground is that the National Gallery doesn’t have authority to grant export licence – it was simply never delegated the power by the Department of Arts. Brutal Beloved former Taoiseach John Bruton of the IFSC (annual pension variously reported as €125K, €134k or €141k; first pension paid aged 35; retired from Dail aged 57) writes in the Irish Times castigating Greece’s “completely unsustainable pensions regime” (annual average pensions €9,996; average retirement age now 61). Blood out of Labour’s stone Labour sold its headquarters on Ely Place for €800,000 and has moved to the spiffy top floor of the Bloodstone building on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, built by Sean Dunne’s Mountbrook and owned by Blackstone. Labour pays rent of €212,625 a year. It will run out politically before it runs out financially, then. EqualiTU Newish ICTU General Secretary, Patricia King has told its bennial conference that the greatest friend that inequality and those who perpetrated it had was a weak trade union organisation. Ms King told the conference that the introduction of a living wage of €11.45 per hour would
