Posted in:
Village Idiot June 2017
Dublin
-
-
As a younger, and perhaps wiser, Leo Varadkar once said: there is no messiah who will lead Fine Gael from the desert into the promised land. This did not prevent him from presenting a decidedly messianic image as he posed for the cameras following his decisive victory in the party’s leadership contest on 2 June. Since then politics and the media have obsessed over his choice for cabinet posts with one potential appointee after another scrambling for pole position beside the new leader to confirm their adoration for the man who holds their future in his hands. Soon forgotten was the uncomfortable truth that most of those among the party membership allowed to vote chose Simon Coveney from Carrigaline ahead of the man from Castleknock, and that Varadkar was elected through the over-whelming support of the parliamentary party and local councillors for the sole reason that they believe he is the most likely leader to ensure their re-election. The wider party it seems judged the candidates on policy, rather than geography or dare we suggest because the average blue shirt just is not ready yet for a gay man whose father comes from India as their particular cup of Barry’s tea. This is not to suggest that Fine Gael people are more likely to be homophobic or racist than any other group of political supporters but that they simply have not got their head around the rapid change in attitudes of a population with an average age of 38, which also happens to be Leo’s. For all this, Varadkar is as cautious and conservative as most in his party on both social and economic matters and is more likely to upset the wider LGBT community than endear himself to them. After all, he only came out as gay during the marriage equality referendum which many gay people saw as the culmination of decades of campaigning for their rights from which the young Leo had been silently absent. More importantly however, as Taoiseach, he is unlikely to deliver on a repeal of the eighth amendment which adequately meets the progressive demand for an end to church and State interference with reproductive rights or to tackle the huge range of discriminatory measures the State employs against women, children and minorities in health, education and social provision. There is little question that Varadkar will improve on the future prospects for his party colleagues and that they will go into the next election with greater expectations than if enda Kenny was still in charge. But that does not say much and neither does it take into account the harsh realities facing Fine Gael as it stumbles from one crisis to another while feeding from the life support provided by Fianna Fáil in government. Fianna Fáil is now looking at a general election next year and possibly ahead of the third budget it agreed to allow under the confidence and supply agreement which was negotiated by a less than enthusiastic Varadkar. His tendency to speak first and ask questions later will almost certainly cause some rocky moments over the coming months while his need to satisfy the many competing demands within his own ranks will also hinder any desire he may have to make innovative, not to mind radical, change. Varadkar will be really tested when it comes to the bigger issues facing the country and the first challenge he faces is how to deal with the ongoing and apparently unceasing crisis within the leadership of the Garda. He was among the first to criticise former commissioner, Martin Callinan, for describing the actions of whistleblower, Maurice McCabe as “disgusting”, and almost certainly precipitated the end of his long career in the force. Now he has to decide whether to allow the beleaguered Noirin O’Sullivan to remain in position. Varadkar will be happy to see the public service pay and pensions issue sorted before he takes full hold of the reins but the challenge posed by Brexit and its implications for the border and peace process would have been well outside his previous comfort zone. As to the insuperable health crisis as a medical doctor he might have been expected, when Minister for Health (2014-2016) to have led the delivery of the party’s plan for a universal health service to which he pays lip service, but there is a suspicion he ran out of ideas and little cause to think he will apply swift effective medicine as Taoiseach. Ultimately it will be his willingness to stand up to the vested private interests that sustain and feed the housing crisis, the rise in economic and tax inequality, precarious work and poverty that will test his imputed qualities as a radical young visionary. However, his party promotes the low tax, poor public service model that appeals to the very people he needs to survive in the cruel world of politics. Let’s call it Leo’s paradox. Frank Connolly
-
In any discussion about Mayoral governance’ in Dublin there are assumptions: firstly, that it is a good thing, that it will solve lots of problems in the city; and second, that the mayor should be directly elected. We usually hear the paraphrased quote – ‘who do I ring if I want to talk to Dublin?’. We want to be able to identify who runs the place. We want someone to be running the place. Directly-elected mayors give us that. The ‘direct’ in direct election, a bit like in direct democracy, is a ‘Yay’-word. It is seen as an unarguable good. Who could not be in favour of giving people a direct say in, a direct link to, who runs the city? These assumptions ignore the relationship between central government and city government and what competencies are appropriate for the mayor, what geographical area the mayor might rule over, and the central issue of funding. They also ignore the fact that we can and do have strong political leaders who are not directly elected. There are broadly three models for city governance. One is the Council-Manager system we currently have – where the mayor has no executive powers. There’s an assumption that it is a bad thing. It certainly isn’t very democratic: it is not responsive to voters’ wishes and there are no clear links between the vote in local elections and local government policy. It’s also not very transparent – though that might be due to the absence of real media reporting of city government. It in turn might be a function of the lack of clarity in decision-making. The second model is the directly-elected mayor or Mayor-Council system. It is used in London, some other European cities, such as Rome, and about half the big US cities, including New York and Chicago. Probably because our nearest neighbour and biggest influencers adopted and use it, we naturally assume it is the one for us. But within this system, things aren’t uniform. They can be strongly mayoral or weakly mayoral – so the Council’s control of the legislative and financial functions can vary considerably. There is a third model. It is a Council system. The elected councillors appoint a mayor, who has executive functions. As with the directly-elected mayor, depending on rules, the mayor’s power can vary quite significantly. The system is quite common, used in many northern European cities, such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm and Paris. So which works best? Well I’m not an expert in local government, but even the literature doesn’t have a clear conclusion. So the short answer is, we don’t know. But I am interested in the functioning of central government, and we can think of the two models, the directly and indirectly-elected executive mayors as functional equivalents to the presidential and parliamentary systems at the national level. And there is a long debate in political science about the relative success of the two systems at delivering democratic stability, human development, and a range of other indicators of a country’s success. So which should we choose if we are to be guided by the relative performance of presidential or parliamentary systems? The presidential system, which is the system analogous to directly-elected mayor, has some advantages. Candidates are required to present a vision to the public. It puts power in the hands of one person, on the basis of popular election. That means the presidential system is clearer and appears fairer. We all know who we vote for; and the person who gets most votes becomes mayor. Unlike in parliamentary systems, there is no messing about with coalition-building based on backroom deals that aren’t transparent and over which the voters have little control. Much of the debate in parliamentary elections is about who will coalesce with whom, a debate that could be avoided in presidential-style systems. Instead the rival candidates for mayor could debate the issues facing Dubliners. The presidential system also weakens the power of parties. Many people dislike parties, and regard them as gatekeepers of political ambition. With a presidential system new leaders can emerge without having to be sanctioned by a party. This is much less likely in a parliamentary system. And at a time when people complain that government is unresponsive to their needs, and lacks leadership, the mayor could have clear lines of power to deal with the big problems. A suitably empowered mayor might be able to deal with the housing crisis in a way that the local authorities, minister and agencies can’t. The parliamentary system, that is the indirectly-elected mayor, however, has some advantages of its own. One might seem a weak one, but it might be important. We are used to parliamentarianism – it’s in our political culture. Political culture governs how we behave and are expected to behave. It changes slowly and doesn’t always respond to institutional changes – perhaps not at all, or perhaps not in predictable ways. This is important because picking systems that we are used to means we are less likely to get nasty surprises. A stronger argument in favour of parliamentarianism is the way it divides power. Politics is meant to do at least two things. It should solve collective action problems: those that make us collectively better off if we are guided to behave in certain ways than if we were left to act individually. The classic example is fishing. Individually we have an incentive to extract as many fish as we possibly can from the seas. We would over fish, making us collectively worse off when fish stocks are depleted. So we are made better off being forced to restrict our fishing. Politics is therefore also a mechanism for the resolution of conflicts, such as the fishing one. In parliamentary systems the mechanism for the resolution of conflict is negotiation, and parties representing different interests compromise, strike deals and build consensus, embracing a wide range of views in the decision. This manifests itself in coalitions, with a formal opposition offering alternative policies. In presidential systems conflict
-
Former County Manager of Donegal, Michael McLoone, is continuing with his High Court proceedings for defamation against Village. In 2014 the magazine printed allegations which it claims were both true and contained in an affidavit opened in court proceedings, by former Donegal senior planner, Gerard Convie, an employee of Donegal County Council for 24 years. McLoone claims he has been massively defamed. Meanwhile Convie’s allegations are being assessed by a senior counsel appointed by the Department of the Environment. Convie has consistently, in court and elsewhere, claimed that during his tenure there was bullying and intimidation within the council – of planners who sought to make decisions based exclusively on the planning merits of particular applications. He claims one councillor constantly referred to him as a “wee shit from the North”. In the opened affidavit, Convie alleges McLoone: 1. Recommended permissions that breached the Donegal County Development Plan to an extent that was almost systemic 2. Submitted planning applications to Donegal County Council on behalf of friends and associates 3. Dealt with planning applications from submission to decision, including some from friends, family and associates 4. Ignored the recommendations of planners 5. Destroyed the recommendations of other planners 6. Submitted fraudulent correspondence to the planning department 7. Forged signatures 8. Improperly interfered as described in a number of planning applications 9. Was close to a number of leading architects and developers in Donegal, including the head of the largest ‘architectural’ practice in Donegal, with whom he holidayed but the relationship with whom was undeclared. Convie made a number of complaints dating from 2006. He had a list of 20 “suspect cases” in the County. As he later reverted to private practice he claimed to have discovered many more, perhaps hundreds, “a cesspit”. In 2006 he complained to the Standards in Public Office Commission (which ruled the complaints out of time). That same year the Council sued Convie for his allegations, but dropped the proceedings after a fractious four years, without any damages or costs award. In another case McLoone won damages from a local newspaper which had printed some of the allegations but which did not fight the case in a full hearing. Following complaints from Convie after the Greens got into government Environment Minister, John Gormley, announced ‘planning reviews’ in 2010, not of corruption but of bad practice – in seven local authorities including Donegal. Convie’s case studies comprised all the material for the review in Donegal. But when the new Fine Gael and Labour government took over they very quickly dropped the independent inquiries. A lazy 2012 internal review by the Department of the Environment stated of Donegal – according to Minister Jan O’Sullivan in the Dáil, that: “… the complainant [Convie] has failed at any stage to produce evidence of wrong-doing in Donegal Council’s planning department”. Convie felt this left him in an invidious position and he successfully sued. In the High Court Order, all the conclusions by the Minister were withdrawn and an apology issued. Counsel on behalf of the current Donegal County Manager, Seamus Neeley, objected to the decision as it did not know why the case had been settled, though Convie’s barrister noted that the Council was a notice party that had played no active part in the case. There appear to have been no ramifications for the civil servants who concluded that Convie’s complaint did not constitute “evidence”, less still for the ‘progressive’ Minister who accepted the conclusions. The government was forced to reinstate the planning enquiries and found maladministration but not any sort of corruption in the cases outside Donegal. After the ‘RTÉ Investigates’ programme which apparently uncovered examples of corruption in planning last year, the government sheepishly announced a package of ‘radical’ planning measures which included the belated publication of the independent review which uncovered considerable evidence of malpractice throughout the planning system and includes 29 recommendations to improve “standards of transparency, consistency and accountability” which the Department says it will implement. The Convie file was referred to the Attorney General for direction and in the end senior counsel, Rory Mulcahy SC, was appointed to look into it. Convie by all accounts engaged with Mulcahy over the issues which were the subject of the complaints, but has now withdrawn from the process. Mulcahy has spoken to the Council and informed Convie that he would be seeking to interview other relevant parties. He is around half way through the exercise. In February this year Alan Kelly, the then Minister for the Environment, claimed, “this independent process underway remains the priority of the Minister, his Department and his officials”. However, though in general content with the process – which being non-statutory is precariously ‘open-ended’, Convie has some particular concerns. He considers the Minister changed the terms of reference for Mulcahy by re-inserting a confidentiality clause, which unlike an earlier version omitted to state that the provision would continue in force “notwithstanding the termination of this contract by either party for any reason”. In the end the Minister partially reinstated the term relating to the confidentiality of his work. Moreover Convie wants the process to embrace An Bord Pleanála to which he claims improper representations were made. He claims that in the 1990s he bid on a site in Magheraroarty, Co Donegal, never trying to hide anything. His bid was accepted by the owner but on reflection Convie says he felt it was far too much land which his family could not afford. He was approached by a builder in Donegal, Patrick J Doherty, and was delighted when he agreed to take the land and Convie bought a site from him. This posed potential conflicts of interest for Convie. However at all stages of the multifarious transactions, Convie made the necessary declarations of involvement in the land. Doherty made a pre-planning application to determine the attitude of the planning office to the development of the site. As the relevant planning official was on leave [and Convie was dealing with his work as well as his own] he says
-
The recent General Election was a very good one for Sinn Féin. We increased our number of TDs from 14 to One thing is clear: the after-math promises to be far more interesting than the insipid election campaign, a campaign defined by the monotony of the government’s ‘Keep the Recovery Going’ message. It may have resonated with the select few, but most reacted with an incredulous, ‘Are you for real?’ The employment figures may be up, but the people in jobs are still feeling the pinch eight years after the crash. Meanwhile, our public services appear to be getting worse. Most people – even those with private health insurance – have experienced the horror of watching a loved one on an A and E trolley. The opposition parties sensed that change in the public mood. Fianna Fáil, with its finger back on the public pulse, devised a set of policies that reflected people’s concerns. To be fair, this wasn’t just Fianna Fáil focus-group politics. Micheál Martin, as comes across in his recent Village interview, does have a commitment to social justice and has steered the party to the left of Fine Gael. The ideological differences may be slight but they are discernible and make a coalition less likely. There are, of course, other mercenary reasons why the grand coalition may not happen. Fianna Fáil won the election. It wasn’t a knock out, but it had/has Fine Gael on the ropes. A rematch at its time of choosing would suit it much better than it would a demoralised, soul-searching, Fine Gael party, which has fundamental problems. Inevitably, there will be a simplistic focus on the party leader. In post-election interviews pledges of allegiance to Enda from cabinet ministers have been noticeably absent or halfhearted. Big Phil, his protector in chief, is no longer around to sort out any of the renegades. The heave seems inevitable. Will it come to that? Or will it be a dignified resignation like Eamon Gilmore’s. The former Labour leader was treated mercilessly by Joan Burton who in turn will find her leadership questioned by the party faithful. The Labour Party’s mauling by the voters was entirely predictable. Bleating on about having to make hard decisions doesn’t win you much sympathy, as the Greens discovered last time out. Labour calculated that, having lost the working class vote to Sinn Féin and left-leaning parties, it could count on the socially liberal middle classes for support. The fact is that abortion has been shown not to be a defining issue either way. Those who wanted to repeal the eight amendment didn’t get a tail wind, and those vehemently opposed to abortion, like Lucinda Creighton, were kicked out. Likewise, the marriage referendum was seen as eaten bread. Fine Gael and all other parties had managed to appropriate that liberal space effectively – sure we’re all liberals now, some having got here a bit later than others – but who cares. Other electoral tactics back red. The political Banking Inquiry simply muddied the waters and showed that the last government had few options, and that the same pro-cyclical expansionary policies were advocated by all the parties. The Green resurgence owes much to the hard work and unstinting optimism of Eamon Ryan. Not even his narrow loss in the European elections could stop his gallop, and indeed it proved to be a blessing in disguise. He and Catherine Martin are the dream team: a moderate, articulate and photogenic pair, who have the capacity to provide a platform for further green success. Like other newly elected candidates, the Greens will hope that another election won’t happen too soon. But the signs on that front are not good. The rejection of Eamon Ryan’s proposal for co-operation amongst the opposition parties means that the new dawn for Irish parliamentary democracy will have to wait. Those who think that this election will result in a new Borgenesque Danish parliament of progressive legislators are delud-ing themselves. Instead, we may revert to the worst type of parish-pump horse-trading that the country has ever witnessed. We don’t have a Scandinavian list system; we have proportional representation with the single transferrable vote, an electoral system that has resulted in an array of independent political efs. Right now, shopping lists the length of your arm (in the case of the Healy Raes – the length of two arms) are being prepared for the highest bidder. It all promises to be unseemly and retrograde, and will be, perhaps, the best reflection of where we are as a nation in the centenary of 1916. John Gormley
-
The general election was tedious and it’s not really clear what message it purveys. The electorate seemed jaded and the politicians delivered no memorable new policies, apart from Renua’s utterly regressive at tax proposal. Village believes that elections should be all about ideas, ideology, policy (and how best to implement them). In these terms the election and its participants were a two-out-of-ten failure. Commentators from the equally idea-free media have interpreted the results in heterogeneous ways. Every sort of theory and cleverality was deployed to describe the drearily and precariously hung Dail: a triumph of democracy, a triumph of social democracy, the end of the civil war, the end/beginning of the beginning/end of the civil war. The perennial smart view that the electorate has failed the parties got several outings. If the second-rate sages had been able to they would have loved to interpret it as a triumph of angry white men. They couldn’t. Some saw it as a victory for the small parties and independents. But the Social Democrats did not increase, Renua was wiped out, the Greens gained only two seats in an era of climate-apocalypse. The People Before Profit/ Anti-Austerity Alliance finished up with only one more seat than they had before the election, and Direct Democracy did not gure. Before the election these were the only small parties. The truth is that this election was a triumph of the interchangeable FF/FG (FG/FF) duopoly, though its trajectory has been definitively defined as downward. Ideology is what political parties apply when they run out of policies. Since most of the parties’ manifestos are short and the events to which policies must be applied are unpredictable it is reasonable to expect that your candidate will have an ideology to guide her. Village for example favours an agenda of equality of outcome, sustainability and accountability. The ideology is comprehensive, it provides a solution for any situation, and a template against which policy formulation can be benchmarked. Candidates shouldn’t have to reflect Village’s ideology, but they’d be better having some sort of one. Neither civil-war party has an ideology. It is impossible to know what they will do once elected. How, therefore, could anyone who does not live under a stone be enthusiastic about a government of FF and FG? FF is a conservative party that believes in so little that it surrendered its entire ethos to a culture of provincialism and cronyism, last time it was in government. It believes in no more now so, though it is touting a centre-left agenda there is every danger it will return to populism, short-termism and promoting the only agenda it understands – the interests of the people its representatives actually know – a cronyist populism that always finishes up favouring those who shout loudest. It is naïve to think of FF as Micheál Martin and when it is the movement it has always known itself to be, of Eamon OCuív, of Barry Cowen, of Pat ‘the Cope’ Gallagher; and tens of marginally more presentable sons and daughters of best-forgotten FF dynasts. Kevin O’Keeffe, son of Ned O’Keeffe, anyone? FG is a conservative party currently dressed up as a Christian Democrat party. The ethos is exible enough that under Garret FitzGerald it was in effect Social Democrat. In its latest incarnation it has been right of centre, at a time when most people want fairness and an improvement in services. It failed to deliver an agenda of accountability and its representatives seem to believe in little beyond sound money, ‘Europe’ and law and order. Having once appeared to be purer than FF it is now tainted by the Moriarty Tribunal report and a perceived ongoing proximity to Denis O’Brien, Ireland’s richest man, as well as by its large number of low-grade County Councillors, whose corruption record is a hairsbreadth from as bad as FF’s. Though essentially conservative, both FF and FG contain some social democrats and liberals in their midst. These aberrations and those who vote for them are delaying the day a real Social Democratic party with coherent left-of-centre platform can become a force that could anchor a government. On the other hand it is clear that more people than is desirable voted FG in 2011 to get FF out and then FF in 2016 to get FG out. These people need to acknowledge that they are forces forconservativism. The incarnation of this is the dangerously articulate Éamon Dunphy who apparently voted FF in 2016 because he really believes in People Before Profit (or Sinn Féin. It isn’t clear). Anyone who thinks that FF was the solution to our problems in 2016 is part of the problem. So what next? FF and FG should merge as a conservative party though even coalition is for the moment some way off. FF is tactically sharper than FG and FG is in retreat so it is likely FF will tantalise FG to weaken and demoralise it during this Dáil. Nevertheless the (non-)ideological compatibility of the parties has been exposed and will generate its own momentum. While allowing this momentum its space the Left of all hues must use the logic of the momentum against FF and FG, and social democrats must colonise some of the space the dinosaur parties have occupied for tragically long.
-
MoJoCon – the Mobile Journalism Conference which debuted in Dublin last year – has its roots almost a decade ago, when Glen Mulcahy, then working with RTE Nuacht, began experimenting with the camera on his Nokia N93 smartphone. “Video quality was atrociously bad, photographs were tiny, 1Mb was seen as huge, it was very much in its infancy”, recalls Mulcahy, now RTE’s head of innovation. “We were experimenting with that around the time Reuters had deployed the same tools to their journalists in the UK to create content for websites”. A handful of stories was produced to an acceptable broadcast quality using the mobile devices, and Mulcahy started keeping track of other broadcasters who were doing the same.“I thought, we need to bring everyone together, talk about what we’re doing, and that was the birth of MoJoCon”. From those beginnings, and networks built up through Circom, the European Association of Regional Broadcasters, MoJoCon has evolved into a “leading international media conference focusing on mobile journalism, mobile content creation, mobile photography and new technology all in one event”. Mulcahy may be an advocate for new technology, but he doesn’t expect RTÉ reporters will be carrying smartphones and selfie sticks by the end of the decade. “People still expect a particular kind of look when they turn on the television. You can’t do sports coverage on mobile, for example – you need those broadcast cameras, powerful zoom, all those expensive things. That said, there is very interesting case study, a station in Luxembourg, Léman Bleu, uses mobile to create content for their TV news. I think they are very brave to go this early”. “You will still see cameramen, you will still see satellite trucks in five years time, not journalists with selfie sticks. There are times when mobile works, but mobile is not mature enough yet to do 100% of the work”. Where he does see openings for new technology to expand are in non— broadcast media outlets, from newspapers to independent pod-and video-casts. “There are a few case studies in the Irish Times where I was absolutely blown away by some of the stuff they were able to do. They also very cleverly decided to upskill all their press photographers who were interested in doing it into shooting video with their DSLR cameras. So you have a new aesthetic. You definitely have better, although not necessarily radically more expensive, cameras and you also have some of the journalists who responded and went out shooting stuff with their phones”. “You don’t need a broadcast-quality camera to produce content that going to be delivered (back) onto mobile phones. I’m more and more coming to the opinion that there is a mobile ecosystem where we create on the mobile phone, edit on mobile phone, and deliver to mobile phones”. New technologies, and the ability to produce programming and news quickly and cheaply, also have implications for how RTÉ covers different communities, Mulcahy believes. “In the UK, there’s been a concerted effort by the BBC over the last 12 to 18 months to try and encourage hyperlocal sites. There is a UK government initiative where you can get a modest fund to basically try and get it off the ground. So there’s more that the government here could do to encourage that level of local community content”. “This is a device that most people have in their pocket. Maybe not everyone has a top-of- the-line Android or whatever, but lots of people have smartphones that can do pretty decent video, reasonably decent video”. “There is potential to give community-group newsletters, the ones that get stuffed on A4 sheets through letterboxes, a mobile angle. We could really energise community activism at grass roots level by showing them what you can do with video on mobile”. Looking to the future, as technologies (and screens) merge, Mulcahy can see a point where RTÉ produces video and audio not just for broadcast, but for the web, and for web first. As technologies mature, there is no strict reason why, for example, a new report compiled during the mid-afternoon should have to wait until the Nine news to be seen, when it can be immediately streamed to desktop computers or phones. Gerard Cunningham
-
The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2015 had passed through the Seanad and was before the Dáil. However, unfortunately the Bill will not be passed through the Dáil before the 2016 General Election. It is now vital to ensure that it is restored to the Dáil at the same stage it had reached very early in the term of the incoming government. The Bill represented groundbreaking reform of sexual-offences law. The Bill contains welcome changes to criminal-evidence rules in sex-offence cases, for example by setting out precise criteria restricting disclosure of victims’ counselling records to the defence, a practice which currently causes great distress for victims. Other important changes protect child witnesses from being cross-examined in person by defendants in sex offence trials; and prevent judges and barristers from wearing wigs and gowns when a child witness is giving evidence in such trials. The sections that have received most attention are those dealing with prostitution law. These sections would criminalise the purchaser of sexual services (the client), while decriminalising the seller (the person engaged in prostitution). This change is based on a law introduced in Sweden in 1999. It would radically reform our deeply awed prostitution law, under which both prostitutes and clients are criminalised. By criminalising buyers of sex, it will pave the way for an approach to regulating prostitution that recognises the lived reality of those in prostitution, and that genuinely seeks to tackle sexual exploitation of women. Current Irish law focuses on prohibiting the visible manifestation of prostitution through criminalising offences of ‘loitering’ and ‘soliciting’. While these offences are gender-neutral, most prosecutions in practice are brought against women, who will typically be convicted of ‘soliciting’ and ordered to pay a ne (which many will go back to prostitution to pay). This model clearly has not succeeded in reducing the numbers of those engaged in prostitution; or in addressing the real exploitation experienced by many of these women. The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality recently conducted a review of prostitution law in recognition of the problems with our current law. We received 800 written submissions, 80% of which favoured the Swedish approach. These submissions were drawn from a broad cross-section of civil society, including trade unions, frontline medical workers, service providers and those working with migrant women. We heard evidence from Sweden that their law has been effective in reducing prostitution levels, and has had a positive normative effect on social attitudes to sexuality. The Committee also held a series of public hearings, with input from those both for and against the Swedish approach, and from those directly engaged in prostitution. We heard that women enter prostitution in Ireland at a young age, many under 18. Many people are trafficked into prostitution and the vast majority are subject to control by a third party, or pimped. The report of the Committee, published in 2013, concluded that prostitution is widely available across Ireland. It is highly organised, highly profitable, highly exploitative and largely controlled by organised crime interests. That is the actual reality of prostitution. Current Irish law has failed to tackle this. We unanimously recommended a radical change with the adoption of the Swedish approach to criminalise only the client, the purchaser of sex. This Swedish law is based on a view of prostitution as inherently exploitative, amounting to gender-based exploitation. Laws based on this approach have already been introduced in other countries, including Canada, Norway, Iceland and most recently Northern Ireland. The changes we recommended were supported by a wide range of organisations, including the Immigrant Council of Ireland, the National Women’s Council and the Turn Off the Red Light campaign. Ultimately, they were adopted by the Government and included in the 2015 Bill. The Bill was debated at length in the Seanad over December and January. The campaign for this Bill must now continue into the next Dáil. Its offer of important changes to sex-offences law generally, its provisions to decriminalise those engaged in selling sex and to criminalise those purchasing sex, and its promise to tackle sexual exploitation, particularly of children and those engaged in prostitution must be defended and realised without delay. Ivana Bacik
-
Two recent events highlight the true nature of the ongoing Irish economic recovery. Firstly, ahead of the infamous Ireland-Argentina Rugby World Cup match, the press office of the main governing party, Fine Gael, produced a rather brash infographic. Charting projected growth rates in real GDP for 2015 across all Rugby World Cup countries, the graph put Ireland at the top of the league with 6.2 percent forecast growth. “FACT: If the Rugby World Cup was based on economic growth, Ireland would win hands down”, shouted the headline. Having put forward a valiant performance, the Irish team went on to lose the game to Argentina, ending its incipient ascendancy. Secondly, within weeks of publication, Budget 2016 – billed by the Government as a programme for the ‘New Ireland’ – has been discounted by a range of analysts, including those with close proximity to the State, as representing the return of a fiscal policy of …electioneering. Worse, judging by the public opinion polls, even the average punter out there has been left with a pesky aftertaste from the political wedding cake produced by Merrion Street on October 13th. Tasteful or not, the public gloating about headline growth figures and the fiscal chest-thumping that accompanied Budget 2016 did not stretch far from reality. Official growth is roaring, public finances are in rude health, and the Government is back in the business of handing out candies to kids on every street corner. The air is filled with the sunshine of recovery and talk about the Celtic Tiger Redux is back on the menu for South Dublin along with the fennelised lamb. Ireland by the numbers On budget day the government projected full-year 2015 inflation-adjusted growth of 6.2 percent followed by 4.3 percent in 2016. Extraordinarily optimistic, “one minister acknowledged that the growth figure for this year is likely to end up nearer to 10% than the 6.2% estimated just 6 weeks ago”, according to a story on the front page of the Sunday Business Post in late November. Much less optimistic, the IMF has the figures at 4.9 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Still, this ranks Ireland at the top of the advanced economies’ growth league, with second place Iceland at 4.8 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. The only other advanced economy expected to post above 4 percent growth in 2015 is Luxembourg. Which is dramatically telling: of all euro-area member states, the two most exposed to tax optimisation schemes are growing the fastest. Though only one has a Government gushing publicly about that fact. No medals for guessing which one. The problem is: the headline official GDP growth for Ireland means preciously little as far as the real economy is concerned. The reason for this is the composition of that growth by source and, specifically, the role of the Multinational Corporations trading from Ireland. We all know this, but keep harping on about the said ‘metric’ as if it mattered. Based on the figures for the first half of 2015 (the latest available through the official national accounts), the Irish economy grew by €6.4 bn or 6.9 percent in real GDP compared to the first half of 2014. Gross National Product, or GDP accounting for the officially declared net profits of multinational companies, expanded by a more modest 6.6 percent over the same period. Other distortions arising from this structural anomaly at the heart of the Irish economic miracle are the effects of foreign investment funds and companies on the capital side of the National Accounts. Back in 2014 the European Union reclassified R&D spending as investment, superficially inflating both GDP and GNP growth figures. Since then, our investment has been booming, outpacing both job creation and domestic public and private sector demand. In more recent quarters, capital investment has been outperforming exports growth too. Which compels a question: what are these investments about if not a tail sign of corporate inversions past and a forewarning of the changes in the pattern of economic output in anticipation of our heralded ‘Knowledge Development Box’? Beyond this, the legacy of the financial crisis has compounded the artificiality of growth statistics. Irish ‘bad bank’, Nama, and its vulture-fund clients are aggressively disposing of real estate loans and other assets bought at regrettable cost to the taxpayer. Any profits booked by these entities are counted as new investment here. Once again, GDP and GNP go up even if there is virtually nothing happening to buildings and sites which are being flipped by these investors. And while we are on the subject of the old ways, last month Ireland was announced as the domicile of choice for an upcoming merger between Pfizer and Allergan – two giants of the global pharma world. Despite numerous claims that Ireland no longer tolerates so- called ‘tax-driven corporate inversions’ (a practice whereby US multinationals domicile themselves in Ireland for tax purposes), it appears that we are back in the old game. Just as we are apparently back revenue shifting (another corporate tax practice that sets Ireland as a centre for the booking of global sales revenues despite no underlying activity taking place here), as exemplified by the Spanish Grifols announcement earlier in October. Just when we thought we were out they pull us back in! All of these growth sources also benefit from the weaker euro relative to the dollar and sterling, courtesy of ECB printing presses. Looking at the national accounts for January-June 2015, Gross Fixed Capital Formation accounted for €3.8 bn or almost 60 percent of total GDP growth over the last 12 months, and nearly three quarters of total GNP growth. In simple terms, the real economy in Ireland has been growing at closer to 3.5 or 4 percent annually in 2015 – still significant, but less impressive than the 6-percent-plus figures suggest. exchequer kindness Still, the above growth has worked well for the Irish Government. In the nine months up to September 2015, Irish Exchequer total tax receipts rose a strong €2.75 bn, or 9.5 percent year-on- year.
