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Uncontroversial appointment
to High Court
Villager wishes Colm MacEochaidh well on his
happy appointment to the High Court, which
he says was uncontroversial. The judge was off
before Village could officially announce he’d been
serving on Village’s editorial board – Ormond
Quay’s equivalent of the Trilateral Commission.
Replacement needed.
Treasured
The action by Treasury Holdings aimed at over-
turning Nama’s decision to call in its loans and
appoint receivers over its properties opened at the
beginning of July before the Commercial Court.
The Treasury group with its glamorous pro-
tagonists, the ineffable Johnny Ronan and Richard
Barrett, is insolvent with overall debt of around
€2.7 billion. NAMA acquired some €1.7 billion
of those loans in 2010 and the loans called in by
it amounted to over €1 billion.
Nama, which provided more than €100m
working capital to Treasury after acquiring its
loans, has particular concerns about the “TAIL”
transaction, under which €20 million in shares
was transferred by Treasury’s Board, when it
knew its loans were being transferred to Nama,
via a series of transactions to Barrett and Ronan
in return for €100,000 and an unsecured €20
million loan note.
Treasury’s moaning on about how NAMA failed
to properly consider proposals from Macquarie
and Hines with attractive phased payments and
‘management fees’ but you’d need to have eyes in
your pockets with the sorts of deal Treasury might
lump you with, if the arrangements they operated
for ‘management fees’ for Ronan and Barrett on
Real Estate Opportunities effort or indeed the
terms they negotiated with CIE for its lands in
Docklands and the government for the National
Convention Centre are anything to judge by.
Meanwhile Treasury, whose litigations seems
to be being treated unusually seriously for such
unserious spendthrifts, is countersuing NAMA
for £5bn - we pay the bill if they win. Technically
this is the biggest suit in the history of the state,
of course, but then in 1998 Barrett threatened
to sue the Sunday Business Post for €15m if it
printed a story about him ‘having his foot on the
neck’ as he termed it, of a rival developer. The
threat simply evaporated. He also said he’d “sue
the pants” off the developer who was the source
of the information. Classy.
Boson
Villager welcomes Cern’s probable finding of the
Higgs’ boson. Now if he could just fine his biro…
WE’RE GOING TO BE INCINERATED
China’s carbon emissions could be nearly 20%
higher than thought. The national statistics
show 7.5% annual growth from 1997 to 7.69
billion tonnes in 2010. In contrast, aggregated
emissions of Chinese provinces increased 8.5%
annually to 9.08 billion tonnes in 2010. An
impossible discrepancy from the world’s biggest
carbon polluter.
Craic City at risk from
unexpected tyranny
Galway city has been warned a proposed statue of
revolutionary Che Guevara will be a deep insult to
many Americans – by the influential head of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee Congresswoman
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. “Whether or not
the city council of Galway, Ireland, constructs a
much-discussed monument to Che Guevara, the
possibility that it might occur ought to insult all of
us who care about the cause of democracy and his-
torical accuracy”, Ros-Lehtinen wrote in NJ.com
the online arm of the Star-Ledger newspaper, the
largest publication in New Jersey.
Ros-Lehinten wrote that the upcoming Galway
Arts Festival will be damaged by the proposed
statue.
“Galway’s beautiful beaches and vibrant arts
festival will be marred with a memorial to a man
who wished to end their way of life and violently
replace it with tyranny”. In sympathy, Villager will
not be wearing his collection of Che T-shirts this
summer. They only make him look old anyway.
Dependent
With effect from Monday 2nd July, the full edi-
tion of the London Independent will cease to be
printed in the Republic Of Ireland and Northern
Ireland. This decision has been made in the lights
of extremely high costs of printing and with the
newspaper selling so few copies in Ireland. Pity
because Villager thinks a merger with Village
Villager
ÄóÝ
MacEochaidh - too good for Village
14 — village July - August 2012
ÄóÝ
could have brought synergies and opportunities
for mutual cost-base reductions going forward.
Village’s editor recently narrowly also missed out
in a behind-the-scenes indeed below-the-radar
bid for the controlling stake in INM, Dependent
Newspapers. Timing is everything for media bar-
ons, he says.
Glasloughed out
If you are reading this you are probably not from
Glaslough, Co Monaghan. Following our last edi-
tion which trumpeted the right to abortion, the
newsagent there wrote announcing it would no
longer stock Village.
Oisin Quinn
Good to see Dublin City Council and the best boy
in the class, Councillor Oisín Quinn, SC, are tak-
ing a joint case against the Standards in Public
Office Commission (one of the notice parties is the
Village editor, Michael Smith who with Councillor
Cieran Perry brought the case to SIPO in the first
place). Judicial reviews like this one rarely come
in at less than €500,000 so it’s bound to be fun.
Undermining the standards in Public Office with
ratepayers’ cash when they’re closing libraries and
swimming pools suggests a certain remoteness,
Villager reflects, but may be related to the slap on
the wrist officials in Dublin City Council implicitly
received from SIPO for recklessly advising Quinn
that he didn’t need to make a declaration about
his ownership or indeed absent himself from pro-
ceedings that affected his office block. The City
Council feels SIPO’s judgment was unworkably
general and lacked reasons. The case will be heard
in October.
Fearless legislators
A Government politician has revealed that he is
“too afraid” to walk down O’Connell Street on his
own because of the extreme level of drug dealing
and violence.
Veteran Fine Gael senator Tom Sheahan
believes the city’s best-known street has “gone
to hell” and is no longer a place for “tourists and
families”. Gardai on patrol admitted that they are
forced to wear stab-proof vests because of the
dangers posed to them by out-of-control junkies
and alcoholics. Gotham.
Pond life burps
Addressing discontents in his party’s ranks,
the Slug Berlusconi proposed a cheeky counter
model for European politics: a euro-zone minus
Germany, the country that blocks everything.
At least that would change the general po-faced
agenda to who’s in and who’s out of the VIP room
in Europe. The idea is that the European Central
Bank could provide Italy and other countries in
need with enough liquidity to lead them out of the
crisis. Berlusconi issued new PM, Mario Monti, a
thinly veiled threat, saying that if Monti did not
succeed in persuading the German chancellor to
change course at the Brussels summit, he would
be held accountable. That would have meant new
elections in October. What is going on? Is this the
senile chatter of a nearly 76-year-old billionaire,
who was forced to leave office in disgrace last
November? Or is Bungaman seriously thinking
about a comeback?
Murphy, Discriminator
An employment tribunal in Belfast ruled recently
that while he was Northern Ireland’s regional
development minister, Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy
discriminated against Alan Lennon, a candidate
for the post of chairman of Northern Ireland Water,
because Lennon was a Protestant.
Murphy decided to appoint a Catholic, Seán
Hogan, on the basis “he was not from a Protestant
background”. The tribunal also found that before
making his decision, Murphy had consulted his
former Sinn Féin ministerial colleagues Michelle
Gildernew and Caitríona Ruane and added new
criteria to the selection process “in order to secure
Mr Hogan’s appointment”.
According to the tribunal, this was not an
isolated incident. It found that during Murphy’s
time as development minister, between 2007
and 2011, within his department there was a
“material bias against the appointment of candi-
dates from a Protestant background”. Murphy has
rejected the tribunal’s findings, and his former
department may appeal.
For whom the bell Tols
Just when we though he’d left the building, a post
on right-wing blog irisheconomy.ie by Aedín Doris,
Donal O’ Neill and Frank Walsh, seems predicated
Irish weather
15
(unnecessarily in Villager’s
mind) on an actual reading
of what Richard Tol said, in
this case in his horrible ESRI
paper about feckless unem-
ployed people. Unlike Tol,
they are all labour econo-
mists. They’re also very mean
about Tol’s methodology:
“The basic approach of the
paper [authored by Tol and
others] is as follows: it uses
Household Budget Survey
(HBS) data to examine the
consumption patterns of
different types of house-
holds. HBS data is collected
at the household, rather
than the individual level so
the analysis distinguishes
between households whose
chief earner is employed and
those whose chief earner is
not employed. In particular,
it examines the consump-
tion patterns of these two
household types under
four headings: transport,
childcare, heat & light, and
takeaway food. To the extent
that the amount spent by
these households differ, the
difference is designated a
cost of working.
Without going any further, the problems with
this approach are clear. Households headed by
earners would have higher expenditure than
households headed by unemployed people even
if the earners incurred zero costs of working, sim-
ply because they have higher incomes. If you have
a higher income, you are more likely to go for a
spin in the car at the weekend, to buy a takeaway
on Friday night, to employ a nanny rather than use
the local childminder, and to leave the heating on
if it’s chilly. It is therefore very important to take
this income eff ect – which is going to be substan-
tial – into account before labelling the difference
in expenditures as working costs.
This is actually very tricky to do at all, and even
trickier to do well. However the approach adopted
by Tol et al is not statistically valid”.
Not statistically Valid. Sorry Tol: Wrong Again.
And Villager again has avoided having to read what
the peripatetic attention-lover actually said.
In the Middle of our Street
After 14 years of campaigning, the people of
Ireland finally have the same environmental
human rights as the rest of Europe now that
the final ratification process for the Aarhus
(pronounced Our House) Convention has been
completed with the deposition of Irish ratifica-
tion papers at the United Nations in New York
yesterday.
Irish citizens will now have access to environ-
mental information possessed by any government
agency, and many private bodies, made available
at a ‘reasonable’ charge, and generally within one
month of receiving the request.
These bodies must proactively provide envi-
ronmental information to the public and also
inform them what information they hold, and how
to access it. In emergency situations, such as a day
of unusually bad air pollution, or a flood, authori-
ties must immediately distribute all information
in their possession that could help the public take
preventative measures or reduce harm.
The right to participate in decision-making
gives citizens the opportunity to express their
concerns and opinions when authorities make
plans that could affect the environment in the
knowledge that the authorities must take their
inputs into account, and give reasoned arguments
for the decisions arrived at.
Finally, it places importance on environmental
justice - a crucial factor in the drive to empower
people to seek a good quality of life. Access to jus-
tice must be easy, inexpensive, timely, and provide
effective remedies.
Faughnan’s Hegemony
Villager’s mailbox has just filled with Joe Higgins’
travel expenses for the first half of 2012. It’s
impressively dull and thankfully shows a prefer-
ence for train over car but what’s this? The fuel
claims are based on the AA ‘fuel cost reckoner’.
How humourless, how bourgeois, how Dort. If
the AA and all they stand for is not comprador
latifundism, Villager does not know what is.
Pariahs
Niall Collins, of the partisan FF ‘don’t burst the
party apart’ Collinses, now spokesperson on the
environment has done extensive research prov-
ing that the er nonsense on local authorities,
Forsey and all that, is the responsibility of FG
and Labour, who have dominated them since the
2009 elections.
Thing is, no media want to publish his research.
That’s because it’s tainted, Niall.
Everyone deserves a holiday
As Villager battles in the raging sleet to churn out
his essential miscellany, he wishes well to Ireland’s
elite across the holiday hotspots of the globe. To
Mick Wallace, Seanie Fitzpatrick (how DID you
get the assignee in bankruptcy to release your
passport?) and Denis O’Brien in Poznan and at
every major international sporting beano he says
“Olé” and he bids Martin Cullen well in his new life
operating an art gallery in Florida, with a new love.
Enjoy the sun on your face and all that taxpayer-
funded leafiness, Martin, you deserve it.
Roadwatch - everywhere
16 — village July - August 2012
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