Channelling anger into questions, and vision

14May 2015

INTERVIEWED Catherine

Murphy, Independent TD for Kil-

dare North, in a sunny Dáil coﬀee

shop on May th. She was accom-

panied by her advisor Anne

Marie McNally. They were both friendly,

informed and irreverent. Though she

was due on the Ray D’Arcy show Cather-

ine Murphy appeared relaxed. She used

the term “we” a lot, rarely “I”.

I asked her how she would describe

her political philosophy. “I’m in the

centre, which has shifted, a social dem-

ocratic. I believe in a more equal

society, good public services. I’m pas-

sionate about good-quality institutions.

We’ve never been good at institution-

building. I’m an admirer of [Aneurin]

Bevan [who spearheaded Britain’s post-

war National Health System]. He said:

“the whole point of power is to give it

away”. You’d be picking up bits of

Chomsky”.

So how important is equality and

what does she mean by it? “It’s equality

of outcome very deﬁnitely. Great levels

of inequality preceded all the great

crashes. I’m not saying things should be

perfectly equal”. I push her as to how

much inequality is acceptable and she

says that’s a harder question than she

can answer. “The idea of bankers not

getting out of bed for half a million a

year is on the Richter scale end of it. In

Switzerland they’d a referendum to ban

anyone earning thirteen times anyone

else. I’d go lower”. She won’t say how

much lower. “It can’t be in the begrudg-

ery area if someone has spent a lot of

money and a long time and become

expert. But the returns can’t be so great

as to be oﬀensive”.

What’s the ﬁrst thing she’d do if she

were Taoiseach? “Who said I wanted to

be Taoiseach? I so don’t. My political

priorities are widespread. For example,

on this island we’ve got to deepen

democracy, put institutions in place

based on subsidiarity. Regional govern-

ment is a must”. But national

development priorities can’t be scatter-

gun or ‘one for everyone in the

audience’. “We need three cities outside,

and as a counterbalance to Dublin:

Cork, Galway and to some extent Limer-

ick – competing. They need to attain a

critical mass for public services and

transport etc”. She says she has strong

ideas on planning, transport, transpar-

ency, institutional reform and

technolog y.

Why did she go into politics? “My

motivation was to change things. I’d

been moaning to the editor etc. There’s

no point moaning unless you’re willing

to step up to the plate and do some-

thing. The ﬁrst time I was elected was

after the water charges campaign in the

early s. It can be both frustrating

and rewarding, probably more frustrat-

ing. I can be quite solitary. I like to do

my own research before I open my

mouth and that can be an asset – but it

can also be bad: You can do % of the

work and someone else gets % of the

credit. I’m at my best when I’m angry

but containing it”.

What does she think of the Labour

Party and its performance in govern-

ment? “I don’t notice them. I wish I did.

It looks like a Fine Gael government. A

huge disappointment. I was in them

[Labour] but it wasn’t a happy

experience”.

How has she fared in the technical

group (she’s its whip)? “We exploit it to

the maximum – private members time,

committees, speaking time. It critically

opens up the diversity in the group.

People may have expected more of a

coalition but we’re too diverse for that

ever to have been possible”.

Is she interested in a new political

party? “I don’t dismiss that though I

value and am comfortable with my inde-

pendence. I wouldn’t like to be

controlled by a press oﬃce. The person

you elect should be who you see in Par-

liament. Put it this way I am talking to

people, though nothing conclusive. A

number of things are happening. What’s

happening with the unions the other

day [a Mayday gathering of  politi-

cal, trade-union and community

activists organised by the Communica-

tions Workers Union in Dublin] is

particularly interesting. I was inter-

ested in the Podemos guy from Spain

there. You have to look at where the

people are, though you have to give

some leadership within that and have

an idea of what you want to achieve. I’ve

always seen the positive. I think this is a

great country, despite the political and

administrative institutions!”.

What was the alternative to austerity?

“I’m angry about the debt. Admittedly

She’s strong

ideas on

planning,

transport,

transparency,

institutional

reform and

technology

“

INTERVIEW Catherine Murphy, TD

Channelling anger

into questions,

and vision

Michael Smith interviews Catherine Murphy TD.

The country’s currently most popular TD is involved in

talks about a new political party on the Left

May 2015 15

the tax base collapsed because of the

change in the take from the building

sector. We had to balance the books but

we were sold out on the debt. I’m partic-

ularly angry about the promissory notes

being turned into a sovereign debt and

the amount of money thrown at unse-

cured bondholders. We’re spending the

same servicing the national debt as on

the education system.

We need a debt conference. There are

debt problems all over Europe not just in

the programme countries. We need to

see where we need physical expansion

and in particular deal with climate

change”. She doesn’t accept that most

important reason for the increased debt

and tax burden was the collapse in con-

struction-driven taxes, rather than the

banking implosions and bailout. “Some

of the things we did were stupid. We had

cuts instead of reform. We didn’t look at

who was leaving the civil service”. She

thinks benchmarking when compari-

sons are made with other countries is

good especially with similar European

countries but it’s more expensive to

deliver services when you’ve a dispersed

population. She’s sceptical about its

value if the comparison is within

Ireland.

What are priorities in her constit-

uency? “Housing. We need a rental

model that’s attractive to people across

the income divide and funds are avail-

able for this from the European

Investment Bank. Planning. We’ve been

quite good in Kildare because some of

us have been a thorn in the side. I’m not

against development if it can be linked

to services and decent public transport,

if it can provide local jobs, but we’re

doing it backwards: not co-ordinating

services. And you have to prioritise and

not be all things to everyone”.

Meath, Wicklow and Kildare have

done poorly in terms of distribution of

services but she doesn’t agree that

there’s been too much sprawl into the

hinterland of Dublin. Surprisingly she

agrees, she says, with IBEC that we need

to double the population. Kildare itself

has the lowest ratio of police to popula-

tion, high class sizes in schools,

disability services are not distributed

fairly around the country based on

demographics or any evidence. She

won’t say if she thinks North Kildare is

well represented by its TDs. That’s for

the election to sort out.

What are her biggest achievements in

politics? “There’s a park in Leixlip

which was going to be housing estates,

that we saved. It’s called St Catherine’s

Park! People walk through it oblivious

to how it was saved, by politics”. As to

national politics she’s very proud of a

document she’s produced on genealogy

as rapporteur through the Joint Oire-

achtas culture committee. She’d a piece

of legislation on climate change, “a huge

issue”, and energy security. I note since

it wasn’t passed by the Oireachtas it

wasn’t an achievement, and she says just

publishing it was the achievement. She

thinks the current Climate Bill is so

weak it will cause problems. “We don’t

have a great national ambition and the

sectoral emission plans will be weak

and scattergun”. It’s a favourite word

for her.

Does she think water and property

taxes are a good idea? “In principle yes

but it depends on how they’re con-

structed”. But she’s not embarrassed to

oppose them. She hasn’t said don’t pay

water taxes. Irish Water could have been

more modest and on a regional level.

Some leaks can easily be dealt with. In

Kildare there are few of the Victorian

pipes which generate most of the prob-

lems. Water charges should have been

centred on conservation and an amount

of free water allocated based on inter-

national norms. She’d no objection to

charges for waste. If people had realised

how much the local government fund

had been depleted as part of the Prop-

erty Tax process they’d have been

angry. The property tax should have

given people a return, something new,

if it was going to get accepted.

She’d have focused the taxes that

were needed after the collapse on the

corporate sector – she’d change not the

.% rate but the eﬀective rate. She

thinks we’ve relied far too much on FDI.

We should develop an indigenous indus-

trial base. Even Intel and Hewlett

Packard which are in her constituency

and which she welcomes suﬀer for want

of raw material in terms of education.

So it’s shortsighted even for them to

have low taxes. She likes the idea of ded-

icated taxes. She thinks taxes on fuels

for example should be about retroﬁt-

ting homes. She accepts that there

should be a move away from taxes on

labour though she doesn’t get into it.

PRSI is not too onerous in international

Put it this way

I am talking to

people though

nothing

conclusive

[about a new

political

party]. What’s

happening

with the

unions the

other day is

particularly

interesting

“

Catherine Murphy, TD

16May 2015

terms. As to wealth taxes, at the

moment taxing property is often taxing

the gross value rather than the (nega-

tive) equity. People paying property tax

on a debt should get relief and pay only

on the value net of debt.

I move on to Siteserv the focus on

which is probably her biggest achieve-

ment in politics and which brings

together many of things she claims are

deﬁcient in the political process: trans-

parency, institutional weakness etc. It

has made her one of the most talked

about politicians of the year. What does

think of how she’s been treated by Min-

ister for Finance, Michael Noonan, and

Siteserv?

Siteserv put out a statement saying

they were sick of her questions and que-

rying her motivation but she’s there to

serve her constituents. She wasn’t

impressed by Michael Noonan’s distinc-

tion between a parliamentary reply and

Freedom of Information (FoI), which he

felt required more detail. Parliamentary

replies come back with privilege. FoIs

do not. She accepts that they’re appro-

priate for background information. But

it’s important there’s maximum infor-

mation. “We always felt we were right to

be asking these questions, even though

they were obviously not being answered

by Minister Noonan. We need to know

more about some of the processes. How

was €m paid to shareholders?”.

There may have been an illegality in

trading in Siteserv shares in the run up

to the announcement that shareholders

would beneﬁt, and she’s written to the

stock exchange asking it to explain the

process between it and the ODCE etc,

though the stock exchange is saying

nothing. She’s obviously got damning

information about the share trading,

but she signiﬁcantly doesn’t think the

rest was necessarily illegal. There’s a lot

that hasn’t been answered, she thinks,

but she’s asking more and more ques-

tions. She thinks KPMG are conﬂicted

“all over the place”. Unless they come

back with an adverse ﬁnding no-one

will believe them. KPMG accountants

Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richard-

son, the special liquidators of IBRC are

investigating transactions where IBRC

made big capital losses. We’re only an

hour from London and Dublin is a small

town, she notes knowingly. “There are a

lot of Davy linkages”. The terms of ref-

erence allows the KPMG investigators

to select which cases to look at – a Get

out of Jail for them, she considers. It’s

also not clear if the €m threshold for

capital losses which may be investi-

gated is before any discount is applied,

or after. She goes on about the extraor-

dinary litany of strange conduct. The

relationship between the minister and

his oﬃcials needs scrutiny, she feels.

Turning the promissory notes into sov-

ereign debt and the liquidation of IBRC

may have been done in a suspicious

rush as a consequence of some of what

was going on between the Department

and IBRC. Noonan misled when he

implied in answer to her questions that

relations between his department and

Mike Aynsley, boss of IBRC, were good.

FoI shows they were not. Noonan said

he relied on Dukes’ belief that every-

thing was above board. But his oﬃcials

were advising an independent review

was needed. They should have asked for

more information. The oﬃcials come

out okay from the FoI except that Min-

ister Simon Harris says there was a

two-day meeting in August 

between John Moran, then head of the

Department of Finance, and IBRC, for

which there are no minutes but at which

Siteserv was discussed. Aynsley and

Dukes are contradicting him saying

Siteserv wasn’t even discussed.

If it wasn’t discussed it gives the lie to

the Minister’s claim that he dealt with

the matter by delegating his senior civil

servant to engage with IBRC over it.

Once the bidders were narrowed down

to around  bids they submitted

-page due diligence but Denis only

submitted three pages. Was it known he

was going to win, before? In June 

Sierra, a Siteserv subsidiary which ulti-

mately won the water metering

contract, began hiring in specialist staﬀ

for water-meter installation. They were

ahead of the game. Did they too know

that they were going to get the metering

contract? Sierra wasn’t even formed as

a company when it got that contract.

The competition authority absurdly

looked on the transaction as a media

takeover even though it wasn’t. “IBRC

said the only reason Siteserv won was

price. If it turns out there were other

reasons there’s a real scandal on our

hands”.

She admits she knows lots of things

that she can’t reveal. The bidding proc-

ess was a ﬁgleaf.

Questions. Questions. Questions.

I ask if she enjoys the job: “Look at, I

enjoyed being a county councillor. I’m

looking for tangible results on matters

that are important to me and the people

who elected me. Sometimes those can

be for an individual. For example we

recently matched up a person with a

disability with a journalist, and got a

great result. I get a great buzz out of

that. Isn’t it nice to feel you can make a

dierence?”. •

She thinks

KPMG are

conﬂicted

“all over the

place…There’s

a lot of Davy

linkages

“

INTERVIEW Catherine Murphy, TD

Davy Stockbrokers – in her sights