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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
July 3
T
he most widely supported form of equality
is equality of opportunity. Even Mararet
Thatcher believed in it. But it has more of
the qualities of “freedom” than of “equality”.
Village has always tended to support a
vision of equality that contemplates equality
of outcome/condition – distributin ‘oods’/resources in
inverse proportion to the bestowals of fortune and
history on individuals. We are all equal from birth and
ethically. Society’s oal is to reconise that, by
distributin ‘oods’ to reinforce that equality.
If the aenda is imperative it needs to be facilitated.
The first thin is to have the information - the data - to
show from what basis you need to bein redistribution.
But the reatest conspiracy of them all distorts the reality
of inequality. Because those who benefit from inequality
often want to keep it that way.
For example, inconveniently, apparently, for
thorouhoin ealitarians, it has lon been the case
that data from the ESRI show that the post-redistribution
Gini Co-ecient (a statistical measure of overall income
distribution that is used as a measure of inequality) is
improvin in Ireland. Havin disimproved in the early
years of the boom, the Gini Co-ecient in Ireland
narrowed durin the economic crisis and overall from
to . On the back of this accordin, for instance,
to the Irish Times, the Republic is one of the few
developed countries that has avoided an increase in
income inequality over the past three decades.
As pointed out reularly in this maazine and
forensically by Unite the Union, in particular, this fallin
inequality has been presented as a “fact” but is not.
•
The ESRI methodoloy skews the result because in
Ireland the Gini Co-ecient shows income inequality
fallin while the other standard measure of income
inequality (the share of income to the top %) shows it
risin.
• The Gini Co-ecient is peculiarly unreliable in Ireland,
not bein based on information on the . million
households in the state but on a small sample of them
– , to be exact (around . per cent of the total).
The survey is voluntary. In the CSO invited over
, households to take part in the survey but in the
end only % areed.
The CSO employs around people to carry out its
work, but often they call to a house and not everyone
is at home. They then conduct interviews “by proxy” -
that is, information is provided by “another resident of
the household due to unavailability of the person in
question”. Up to percent of all interviews for the
income survey are by proxy, which ives rise to issues
“with the quality of data for proxy responses for certain
variables”, accordin to the CSO itself.
Left think-tank TASC has said that such surveys “have
well-known limitations. Bein voluntary, non-response
is a problem amon the rich in particular, and hih
incomes tend to be underreported when they do
respond”.
Because of all this, in the case of the Gini Co-ecient,
the raw data collected by the CSO are subject to a
series of statistical weihts, measures, and uesswork
to compensate for aps in the interviews.
A more universal set of fiures based on actual taxation
levels is more accurate. The ESRI did indeed look at
data from tax returns which duly confirmed increases
in the share of income oin to the very top. However,
this doesn’t form part of the final output.
• Income inequality itself does not suce as a measure
of economic inequality (and economic inequality is not
the full measure of inequality anyway). It is but one of
at least seven, accordin to TASC. These are: income;
wealth; public services; tax; capacities; family
composition; and the costs of oods and services. If
economic equality does not measure full economic
capacity then what is measured is meaninless.
•
In particular wealth is obviously an even more
important component of richness than income, since
it includes the total of previous income.
• Equality embraces social, environmental and cultural
matters as well as economic ones. Access to services,
education, healthcare, leisure facilities and a ood
environment constitute equality of outcome/condition
at least as much as money. They are inored by income
(or even wealth)-driven assessments.
•
There are serious issues with some of the historic data.
Other data which Unite present show “zero real income
rowth” from to but are inored by the ESRI
and in the reportae, even thouh the source of the
data is relied upon in other ways.
We are told that, reardless of our own experience,
thins have never been better.
Ocial and establishment complacency is lethal to our
society and our democracy. Unaddressed inequality
always ultimately enerates demaouery.
Anyone who cares can see that the richest have never
had it easier but that many people strule to survive in
an extraordinarily pressurised society. Everyone can see
that people in their s and s will be the first eneration
to be worse o than their parents.
We need to analyse the trajectory and act on it as
appropriate.
The least our public service and media owe us is to
ensure the time-bomb of risin inequality is properly
monitored in the first place.
Equality of Outcome: an ethical imperative
that crucially needs to be measured
EDITORIAL
Issue 74
July 2021
Chllenging he endemiclly
complcen nd ohers by
he cue promoion of
equliy, susinbiliy nd
ccounbiliy
ONLINE
www.villgemgzine.ie
@VillgeMgIRE
EDITOR
Michel Smih
edior@villgemgzine.ie
DEPUTY EDITOR
J Vivin Cooke
INTERN
Nimh Alexnder
ADVERTISING
sles@villge.ie
DESIGN AND PRODUCTION
Leonore Rooney
PRINTERS
Boylns, Droghed,
Co Louh
VILLAGE IS PUBLISHED BY
Ormond Quy Publishing
Ormond Quy Upper,
Dublin
FFG ‘Equlity’ Equlity of Outcome/Condition
4 July
EDITORIAL
Equlity of outcome: n ethicl
impertive tht crucilly needs to
be mesured
NEWS
Toisech lied nd Tniste
covered-up by Frank Mulcahy
Cover Story Geoghegn
Dublin By South Byelection
by Michael Smith
The importnce
Stte Interventionism
by Ivana Bacik
Ulster sys Noh by Michael Smith
A mence in the District Court
by Michael Smith
Hs Fingl County Council met its
Trflgr? by Maeve Hosier
Conflict of interest in Meth
Council by Frank Connolly
Profile: Eoghn Hrris
by Frank Connolly
The stte of ply with Edwin Poots
by Anton McCabe
CONTENTS
POLITICS
The British Spy, Sor Eire, nd the
murder of Grd Richrd Fllon
by David Burke
Civil Service Interview bord lcks
independence nd imgintion
thinking by J Vivian Cooke
The problem with…Bnkers
by J Vivian Cooke
Conor’ Skehn Profile: Nerly
lwys Wrong
by Michael Smith
Supply, nd Student Housing
by Niamh Alexander
Norm Foley Profile
by Kevin Higgins
OPINION
Agri-culturl chnge by Holly Cairns
Housing of Crds by Lorcan Sirr
Eco-footprint = Popultion X
Affluence X Technology
by George Monbiot
Equlity of outcome is Top Dog
by Michael Smith
MEDIA
New Audio Bill is mess
by Gerard Cunningham
Which is better The Thick of It or
Yes Minister? by J Vivian Cooke
CULTURE
Jeff Bezos in the Sky, poem
by Kevin Higgins
ENVIRONMENT
Limerick environmentlists mull
legl chllenge to tyre-burning
fcility by Angus Mitchell
Plnning nd Economic chllenges
for Cork by Michael Smith
Cross-border dul-crrigewy pln
rubbished by Anton McCabe
Ple Blue Dot, heting
by John Gibbons
INTERNATIONAL
Conor Lenihan reviews ‘From
Whence I cme - the Kennedy
legcy, Irelnd nd Americ’
Nothing chnges s Isrel gin
pummels Gz by Clare Holohan
Profile: Kml Hrris
by J Vivian Cooke
VILLAGE IDIOTS OF THE MONTH
John Wters nd Gemm O’Doherty
Villge Mgzine subscribes o he Press
Council code of conduc. Complins bou
he conen of he mgzine my be mde o:
Office of he Press Ombudsmn,
Weslnd Squre, Perse Sree, Dublin
July 5
News Miscellany
Villager
Ó Dúnáin and Ó Ceallagh
clans, not Doonans or
Kellys. The Doonans
of Fermanagh were
‘Erenagh’, or hereditary
stewards and guardians
of Roman Catholic church
lands
Her family tree, which
Villager climbed, also
demonstrates how the
overwhelming majority
of her ancestors lived and died in the Barony of
Clankelly in Fermanagh.
Biding Biden
The reasons for warming to Biden start with
his stimulus. But he’s also reset Trump’s anti-
environmentalism. He has set a target for
reducing American emissions by 50-52% below
2005 levels by 2030 and a clean-electricity
standard requiring the power system to be
emissions-free by 2035. The problem is that his
legislative agenda is now in trouble, threatened
by the filibuster and Democrats’ lack even of a
Senate majority. His plans to spend $4tr and to
tax the wealth and business are now aground.
The President has oered to cut proposed
spending on his proposed American Jobs Plan
and American Families Plan from $4tr to $1tr,
and suggested junking the proposed corporate-
tax rise (from a current rate of 21% to a proposed
28%). “An infrastructure package that goes light
on climate and clean energy should not count on
every Democratic vote”, says Martin Heinrich, a
moderate Democrat Senator from New Mexico.
Setting aside CETA
CETA promotes global trade, a dubious
goal perhaps, but is pretty irrelevant to the
environment. It’s only about trade which isn’t
as important as the Climate Act which is about…
just climate. And it’s only trade with one country,
Canada. And it’s already being implemented,
albeit without the system for investor courts
which Green Party TD Patrick Costello may be
about to find out is indeed unconstitutional for
usurping the role of our national courts. And
CETA requires to be read as compatible with EU
Law (which the European Court of Justice found
it was) and with the Paris Agreement on Climate
Change. And investors can’t sue just because
a country has improved its environmental or
social standards, provided it hasn’t behaved
discriminatorily. Environmental NGOs ludicrously
suggested the main problem was a “chilling”
eect the Agreement would have on countries
terrified of international investor litigation; and
Senator Lynn Boylan had noted that investors are
five times as likely to win in the investor courts as
in domestic courts.
Sixty shades of Greenhouse gas
emission
Meanwhile Ireland’s Greenhouse gas emissions
declined in 2020 by 5.9 per cent mainly due
to Covid-19; the biggest annual fall since the
aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, The
economic rebound from the Covid-19 crisis is
likely to bring emissions back to previous levels
unless additional action is taken, the EPA has
warned. It won’t be.
Greens meaning green
Village has always argued that the key to reducing
emissions was to have justiciable (i.e. legally
enforceable) targets of 7% reductions annually
in a Climate Act – conducing to 51% reductions
2021-2030. The targets need to be susceptible
to challenge by third parties in case, as seems
overwhelmingly likely, we get o to a slow start,
the Greens lose their fragile nerves and we get
another less ‘green’ new government, grounding
it before it’s taken o.
Vegetable-free zone
Villager had to suspend the animal/vegetable-
themed US Presidential attacking intros to this
column with Trump’s demise. He had planned a
sort of gaes of the month section for Biden. But
he’s turned not as bad, hokey or even doddery as
we’d anticipated though he could usefully refrain
from citing the most clichéd lines of Yeats and
Heaney. Nevertheless Villager has a weakness for
poetastrical Presidents.
Bats
Villager always found an animal likeness -
gorilla or whatnot – for Trump and so as not to
disappoint so early in the column he’s detected
definite chiropteran traits among two of our most
forthright leaders, Poots of the DUP and Barrett
of National Party. Villager wonders if they fly from
the same belfry.
Gone
Fostered-out
And farewell then, Arlene Foster: she wasn’t
much good at politics but at least the seemed to
believe the Stone Age existed.
The inevitable Irish language Act was a hurdle too
far for her but Foster actually has a rich and ancient
Gaelic heritage with a family tree dominated by
two august Irish surnames – Doonan and Kelly.
Her more distant ancestors, who spoke Gaelic,
would have considered themselves part of the
6 July
No, green meaning foolish
Interesting to see three academics with
associations with An Taisce, Barry McMullin,
John Sweeney and Andrew Jackson, have serious
concerns about a central provision of the Climate
Bill: namely the transposing into the Bill of the
near-term (2021-2030) emissions reduction
commitment agreed by the three Government
parties in the Programme for Government 2020.
If you start reducing slowly you finish up injecting
more carbon than if you start fast and the Greens
don’t seem to care when the reductions occur.
Indeed if they start o slowly there’s every
danger someone else will…continue slowly. This
is illustrated in this chart. All these emissions
pathways (and more) meet the stated requirement
for annual emissions in 2030 to be 51% of annual
emissions in the baseline year (2018). The Climate
Bill as constructed only says 51% by 2030. It
doesn’t say 7% “per annum” as in the Programme
for Government. Little action could happen until
2029 and there would be no legal recourse.
The equivalent (“average”) rate of reduction in
annual emissions could still - legally - vary from
the -7% of the Programme for Government down
to zero (or even become positive!). All of the
pathways are consistent with the Bill while only
the orange path is consistent with the Programme
for Government’s 7% p.a. (average).
Nevertheless the newly reckless Greens have
refused to take amendments to their weak Bill.
When they were
green in judgement/
Eamon Ryan’s salad days
It all reminds Villager of the Greens’ last time in
government when they failed even to introduce
a Climate Act and the Bill they proposed was
absolutely toothless. In 2008 Ireland committed
to the most ambitious climate targets in Europe
and by 2020 missed that target by the largest
amount of any member state. Before the last
election, Village uniquely predicted Green history
would repeat itself.
The Greens’ reputation has now again collapsed
with their renewed incompetent idealism and
tendency to over-compromise.
Green and Red bogey
Lorna Bogue, leader of An
Rabharta (meaning ‘Spring Tide
or swell’ Glas, the new Green-
Red political party should have
the answer to all this since she
seems to be the only politician who understands
the Climate Bill. Village’s agenda is Green and
Red. Nevertheless Bogue seems have long since
committed to dodging, or at least ignoring Village.
In July 2019 the editor asked her for a piece about
why the Greens should not go into Government
with FF/FG; she couldn’t do it in the end. In
June the magazine again asked her, this time as
one of the leaders of the new party. But again
nothing from her or the party’s ‘Comms’ person.
Meanwhile their obscurely named new initiative
has produced the world’s worst introductory
video, half of which is upside-down.
Inept Councillors and
pro-development Management:
Limerick
Curragower House was finally demolished on 12
June. It’s on Clancy’s Quay in Limerick opposite
St John’s Castle so nobody really noticed. A few
councillors purported to get enraged but then
they failed to order the recalcitrant manager to
protect/list the building as they are entitled under
s 140 of the Local Government Act 2001. A motion
from then-Councillor Brian Leddin of the Greens
was withdrawn in 2019 after the CEO inaccurately
said it was up to him to decide whether to list the
building. Council planner Stephane Duclot said it
did not merit protection
Councillors don’t have much power but they can
order the CEO do do whatever he’s entitled to do
under Section 140 of the Local Government Act
2005.
Inept Councillors and
pro-development Management:
Dublin
In May, Bartra, the developers of O’Devaney
Gardens came back to Dublin City Council with a
scheme for the site that’s much bigger than the
Councillors had, in November, asked the CEO to
go out and negotiate with them. Bartra, the bane
of Pat Kenny in Dalkey, controlled by Richard
Barrett, formerly of extravagantly-bankrupt
Treasury Holdings, got the package to develop
the site which, crucially, is owned by Dublin City
Council.
Councillors should order the CEO, Owen Keegan,
under Section 140 of the Local Government
Act 2005 to require the developer to submit an
application for the scheme Councillors authorised
him to agree or to sue Bartra for breach of contract.
Mannix
Mannix Flynn is up in arms over the Sandymount
Cycleway and with a local resident, has gone to
the High Court. Villager likes cycleways and so
couldn’t support such an action but he does agree
that it is inflaming that the City CEO, Owen Keegan,
is so inclined to flout the rules and push well
conceived but poor quality, infrastructure through
without Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).
The problem is that EIA requires assessment of
alternatives to whatever is being proposed. That
Curragower – the future development
Curragower in its heyday – Photo Rob Cross
Curragower during demolition
Future of O’Devaney Gardens
July 7
English Class
Barry English gave €5k to Bertie Ahern’s digout in
1994. In 2016 the Winthrop Engineering founder
was found by the High Court to have been a willing
participants in an unlawful scheme designed to
defraud Revenue by incorrectly claiming capital
allowances for investment in fishing vessels.
However, the ruling was notably overturned by
the Court of Appeal and English sued the Irish
Times for not adequately reflecting this fact
in its court reporting And now in June another
High Court judge, Denis McDonald has rejected
claims he made an error in his judgment in a case
concerning an associate of English, Irish architect
Jeremiah Ryan, formerly the principal of Horan
Keogan Ryan Ltd, a Dublin architectural firm who
tried to hide assets worth millions of euro from his
creditors before his bankruptcy in 2012.
While Ryan’s Irish business collapsed, a company
based in the United Arab Emirates that he
controlled, secured a contract in Kazakhstan,
for which the initial design fee was about €34
million.
Ryan then sold this company to English “at an
artificially deflated price” as part of a scheme
by Ryan “to conceal his ongoing interest in the
company from his creditors”, the judge said.
After Ryan emerged from his one-year bankruptcy
in England in 2013, English sold the company
back to the architect. €6.5 million belonging to
the company had meanwhile been transferred
to an oshore bank account which was in turn
controlled by a trust established for the benefit of
English and his family.
Winthrop Engineering’s website notes its
founder’s versatility: “When required Barry
provides a very hands on approach when
dealing with key clients. He provides a trifecta of
market experience, commercial astuteness and
engineering knowledge”. When required.
Mother and Baby Homes
In 2009, Judge Yvonne Murphy’s unflinching
report examined the abuse of children by priests
in the Dublin diocese.
After this, Murphy was asked to examine the
abuse of children in the Cloyne diocese.
Between 2009 and 2014 other reports, - the
Martin McAleese-chaired Magdalene ‘inquiry ‘and
the Seán Ryan-chaired Child Abuse/Residential
militates against the shoddiness of the plastic-
bollarded cycleways rising all over Ireland. The
EIS would require consideration of better quality
separators, leading to their introduction. EIA also
requires consideration of cumulative impact,
which seems to have been ignored in this case.
The case will be heard before Judge Charles
Meenan in late June.
Village People
Mannix Flynn, Lynn Boylan and Ivana Bacik have
all contributed generously to Village over the last
years.
We wish them all well in #DublinBaySouth. It’s a
pity Chay Bowes failed to pursue his early interest.
He’s the ultimate anti-Fine Gael candidate and if
the mediocre James Geoghegan is to be beaten it
will be by someone who rallies all those who’re
sick of the current government.
Save €5 million
Villager works on the basis that if something
wasn’t worth inventing in the first place it should
not be unnaturally and expensively perpetuated.
The Poolbeg towers. Or Liberty Hall and Stobart
Air, for example.
Transfers?
Villager stays awake at night wondering what the
Boylan-O’Broins, who rent a house in Clondalkin,
spend all their spare Oireachtas earnings on.
Shinning up the polls
The NI Executive will continue on, after Sinn
Féin accepted the exciting assurances of Boris
Johnson that he’d legislate for an Irish language
Act if the DUP didn’t. Now the latest Irish Times,
MRBI opinion poll shows Sinn Fein soaring to
31%. As Village went to press the Irish Times’
Pat Leahy was sermonising that its “move to
the mainstream seems inexorable”. Standards,
chaps.
Féining interest in equality
Mary Lou McDonald says her party wants the
Local Property Tax abolished. She told 6:1 News:
“I don’t accept that a tax on the family home is
fair, and it’s certainly not aordable for many
many people”.
All the arguments - every single one - the anti-
property-tax heads make about the unfairness
of taxing the family home as wealth have been
income overcome by allowing the possibility
that the tax be levied when the asset is sold, or
on death. The arguments come from those too
unimaginative to link wealth to fair tax.
Parties including Sinn Féin and People Before
Profit that don’t understand the need to include
houses in taxation, and yes that includes the
family home, even in Ireland, are not delivering
the left-wing agenda as understood worldwide.
More Homes
Moore Holmes is the dashing
new firebrand Loyalist. He
may loathe Sinn Féin but
Moore Holmes is consistent
with the Shinner housing
policy.
Fine Gaelness
So when Leo Varadkar sought to ease Fine Gael
fears that property tax changes could damage
their Dublin Bay South bye-election hopes he
noted that some homeowners in south Dublin,
including those in houses worth over €1m,
will see their LPT bill reduced. This nasty little
anecdote sums up the essence of FineGaelness.
But...the ugliness of the ideology is lost when it
is doubtful there is any Irish political party that
believes those in houses worth over €1m should
pay a lot of tax for the pleasure.
The Government should make the property tax
fairer by recasting it to take account of mortgage
debt and financial assets, according to Thomas
Piketty, the bestselling expert on global wealth
inequality.
8 July
Institutions inquiry which was so circumscribed
that its conclusions could not ground criminal
prosecutions - reported less satisfactorily under
other tutelage.
Now acclaim has also deserted Murphy and her
remote committee colleagues Professors Mary
Daly and William Duncan, none of whom seem to
understand much of what it is to be at the wrong
end of the establishment.
Campaigners have called for repudiation of
the report of the Commission of Investigation
into Mother and Baby Homes. The commission
severely limited the number of survivors who
could attend its all-important Investigation
Committee, by not advertising its existence and by
directing survivors to an alternative Confidential
Committee whose findings were misreported
and not fully embraced indeed sometimes,
according to Mary Daly, in an academic webinar
she disrespectfully took part in, deliberately
excluded.
How could the Commission state that women
in the institutions were not forced into them,
that there was no harm done to children used in
vaccine trials, or that the women were “doing the
sort of work that they would have done at home”
when a woman recalled: “During the summer
months my job was cutting the lawn with scissors.
I did this every day in a line, with a group of other
women”?
And how did it find “very little evidence that
children were forcibly taken from their mothers”
when the Confidential Committee report says:
“Many mothers told the committee that their
most searing memory of their time in a mother
and baby home was that of the screams of a
woman looking through a window, through which
she could see her child being driven away to a
destination unknown; for many, there had not
been a chance to say goodbye”?
Murphy has defended herself (“hitting back
hard”, according to the Irish Times which usually
gives judges and professors a good crack of the
whip): “In the absence of evidence that would
withstand scrutiny and cross-examination,
the commission was unable to reach factual
conclusions that many people apparently wished
that it had reached”.
The Commission’s respect for the confidential
part of the inquiry is somewhat belied by its
willingness to destroy all its testimony.
Key is what the Commission wrote to Hogan
Lovells solicitors in 2015: “Not everyone who
expresses an interest in giving evidence to
the investigation committee will be invited for
hearing”.
In turning down the invitation to the Oireachtas
committee, Murphy said: “The independence,
procedures and safeguards under which the
commission carried out its investigation and
its carefully considered conclusions would be
set at nought by an appearance before your
committee and in circumstances especially where
prejudgment is already manifest”. For Villager it
seems like post-judgment. Which is dierent.
Why did the government choose Commissioners
none of whom has experience of being at the
wrong end of an oppressive state.
There are at least eight judicial reviews pending
with the first hearings scheduled for June 22.
Village cover then political death
The political arc takes you from Cover of Village
to banned on twitter to endless litigation to…
Villager is looking at you Donald Trump, Gemma
O’Doherty, Naomi Wolf, Nigeria (actually Nigeria
is more banning than banned but same trajectory,
and never appeared in Village).
Professional racists
Whatever they think about where anyone else
should be, O’Doherty and Waters, this month’s
Village idiots – disgusting people, should be in
jail for repeated incitement to hatred.
Litigation
Nothing has been heard in years from Gemma
O’Doherty who pretended to sue Village in 2018
after a cover story claimed she was a racist. Nor
from Michael Colgan who lodged proceedings
in the HIgh Court after an editorial in Village
referred to harassment of Gate Theatre actresses
in the same breath as Harvey Weinstein’s serial
rapes – the article
was not asserting
an equivalence.
Nor from Michael
McCloone, former
Donegal County
Manager, in the
six years since
he initiated
proceedings in the
HIgh Court against
Village and the
editor for allegations
of corruption in the planning process made by a
former Chief Planner in Donegal in proceedings
that had been opened in court elsewhere.
Nor from Leo Varadkar who only threatened to
sue.
Garda interviews: Varadkar
In June Web Summit’s CEO Paddy Cosgrave
gave a statement to Garda who are taking
noteably longer than envisaged with their
investigations into Tánaiste Leo Varadkar’s leak
of a confidential contract to a friend. Village’s
editor Michael Smith was interviewed a second
time in May, and is expected to talk to Garda
once more later in the summer.
Carrion not quite tender to fork
The solicitors’ firm Eversheds Sutherlands, in a
blog posted last year, noted that a “necessary
consequence of loan sales by banks means
that, increasingly, cases are being pursued by
regulated financial service providers and credit
servicing firms with…evidential issues they
face in proving debts assigned to them”.
“Regulated financial service providers and
credit servicing firms”… yes they’re the ones
that dine on carrion.
Legislation for vampire squid
In April 2020, a creditor plainti (Promontoria/
Goldman Sachs) lost a case in the Court of
Appeal because its evidence was all hearsay.
One of the judges helpfully suggested the
problem could be solved with legislation.
Judge Maurice Collins stated: “The continuing
vitality of the hearsay rule in this context is,
[as Judge Dónal O’Donnell said in a Supreme
Court case] almost always unhelpful to the fair
resolution of cases and, when circumstances
permit, it clearly deserves the attention of the
legislature”.
For once this vulture didn’t go back to court with
a better idea. It went instead to the Government
and got an urgent listing for a new law changing
the law on hearsay.
It seems likely somebody must have called in a
promise since Ireland Inc rallied.
The legislation was voted through in one day in
July 2020, three months after Collins’ judgment.
The Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous
Provisions) Act, 2020. Section 16(3) in eect
provides that if a business record looks
business-like, the court can presume that the
contents are true. The presumption is deemed
to be a “reasonable inference” from “all the
circumstances”.
The Explanatory Memorandum accompanying
the Bill stated that the amendment had been
proposed by the Law Reform Commission but
that’s demonstrably untrue. The Law Reform
Commission warned that its (2009) proposal
to create a new “business records” exception
to the rule against hearsay “shouldn’t be seen
as promoting a supposition that the document
should be prima facie evidence of proof of its
content”.
Colgan
