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    Equality of Outcome: an ethical imperative that crucially needs to be measured

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    Editorial. By Michael Smith The most widely supported form of equality is equality of opportunity. Even Margaret 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 – distributing ‘goods’/resources in inverse proportion to the bestowals of fortune and history on individuals. We are all equal from birth and ethically. Society’s goal is to recognise that, by distributing ‘goods’ to reinforce that equality. If the agenda is imperative it needs to be facilitated. The first thing is to have the information – the data – to show from what basis you need to begin redistribution. But the greatest 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 thoroughgoing egalitarians, it has long been the case that data from the ESRI show that the post-redistribution. Gini Co-efficient (a statistical measure of overall income distribution that is used as a measure of inequality) is improving in Ireland. Having disimproved in the early years of the boom, the Gini Co-efficient in Ireland narrowed during the economic crisis and overall from 1987 to 2019. On the back of this according, 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 regularly in this magazine and forensically by Unite the Union, in particular, this falling inequality has been presented as a “fact” but is not. • The ESRI methodology skews the result because in Ireland the Gini Co efficient shows income inequality falling while the other standard measure of income inequality (the share of income to the top 1%) shows it rising. • The Gini Co-efficient is peculiarly unreliable in Ireland, not being based on information on the 1.7 million households in the state but on a small sample of them – 4,183 to be exact (around 0.2 per cent of the total). The survey is voluntary. In 2019 the CSO invited over 9,000 households to take part in the survey but in the end only 40% agreed. The CSO employs around 100 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 50 percent of all interviews for the income survey are by proxy, which gives rise to issues “with the quality of data for proxy responses for certainvariables”, according to the CSO itself. Left think-tank TASC has said that such surveys “have well-known limitations. Being voluntary, non-response is a problem among the rich in particular, and high incomes tend to be underreported when they do respond”. Because of all this, in the case of the Gini Co-efficient, the raw data collected by the CSO are subject to a series of statistical weights, measures, and guesswork to compensate for gaps in the interviews. A more universal set of figures 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 going to the very top. However, this doesn’t form part of the final output. • Income inequality itself does not suffice 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, according to TASC. These are: income; wealth; public services; tax; capacities; family composition; and the costs of goods and services. If economic equality does not measure full economic capacity then what is measured is meaningless. • 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 good environment constitute equality of outcome/condition at least as much as money. They are ignored 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 growth” from 2007 to 2017 but are ignored by the ESRI and in the reportage, even though the source of the data is relied upon in other ways. We are told that, regardless of our own experience, things have never been better. Official and establishment complacency is lethal to our society and our democracy. Unaddressed inequality always ultimately generates demagoguery. Anyone who cares can see that the richest have never had it easier but that many people struggle to survive in an extraordinarily pressurised society. Everyone can see that people in their 20s and 30s will be the first generation to be worse off 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 rising inequality is properly monitored in the first place.

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    The strong centre

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    Paschal Donohoe is a decent man: modest, cultured, the cleverest man in the room, according to a senior Fianna Fáil figure who spoke to Fiach Kelly in the Irish Times recently: the man other politicians envy, and a safe pair of hands. At 43, he has graduated with first-class honours from Trinity college, lived abroad, pursued a career in the private sector and risen without obstacle from local politics in Dublin city council to the heights of government, and the Ministry of Finance. Unlike his even younger boss Leo Varadkar he doesn’t have the sheen of a cultivated image. he has never attracted any suspicion of impropriety, never been excoriated, even in the unpleasant role of frugal Minister for Public expenditure (which he sure-footedly merged with the Finance brief when he took it over). When Village interviewed him he was open, generous with his time, eloquent. He reads progressive Irish fiction, has some quirky tastes, knows what is going on in his constituency about whose substandard welfare he remains committed. He even says he reads Village. Village’s agenda is equality, sustainability, accountability and it is wide and all-embracing enough that any political force, as Mr Donohoe certainly is, can be assessed against its imperatives. He is certainly in relative terms a model of accountability and openness. But what of equality and sustainability? Paschal Donohoe serves the politics of Fine Gael faithfully. He implies that Fianna Fáil is economically fickle, not always pro-european or outward looking and, increasingly implausibly now, that its attitude to ethics is demonstrably inferior to that of Fine Gael. He believes in Europe, the Open Society of Declan Costello, in an embracing attitude to outsiders. He believes in a balance between the markets and the state and, creditably from the perspective of this magazine, thinks the momentum has moved too far to the markets and needs to move back to the state, globally at least. He takes a robust attitude, as did his hero Declan Costello, to the obligations of the state. It will intervene to incentivise or nudge those who do the right thing, it will not perpetrate evil itself. He was passionate in defending the coherence of this attitude, in his interview. Mr Donohoe believes in the rights of property but will interfere at the edges, as with site-value and sugary drinks taxes. The state needs to plan systematically for development of its own lands. On national planning he was reluctant to stay how he would stop unsustainable development – such as the sprawl of Dublin into counties Meath, Wicklow, Kildare and beyond, as opposed to merely incentivise and encourage sustainable development – for example of cities and towns outside Leinster. He does not seem engaged by the environmental and climate-change agendas, though he knows its rhetoric. He rarely acknowledges, in policy, that Ireland is the laggard in Europe on climate, plastic waste and many other environmental performances. He does not seem zealous to revive the across-the-board indicators of social and environmental success, not just economics, that even the Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil-Green governments toyed with a decade ago. Failing them, it is likely we will continue to be a model of unsustainable, joyless growth, a paradigm of how to nearly get it right. As to equality, Mr Donohoe is exercised by the plight of those who cannot put themselves in a position to benefit from the equality of opportunity that those with strength crave. He knows from his Dublin central constituency that intergenerational inequality is difficult to mitigate. But his credo is equality of opportunity and he and his party are never going to be forces for radical redistribution, for equality of outcome. He is a decent man of the “strong centre”. He and his party have done some service bringing back elusive economic success to this country bankrupted by the now shiny principal opposition party. It has been argued that Fine Gael, with its visceral fetish for the rights of property, so well-enjoyed by its protagonists and indeed its voters, is ill-equipped to deal with the crises of housing and homelessness that do much to undermine the fabric of society in 2018. It is ideologically too wedded to the private sector to provide homes on the scale required on public lands. Mr Donohoe, in fairness, claims that he has far-reaching proposals to do just that. We’ll see. Ireland is lucky to have such an open, decent, youthful and thoughtful politician in the Department of Finance as the risen fiscal pendulum suggests we can once again explore a national Vision. But it is impossible to be radical from the centre, however strong, and – for Village, Mr Donohoe would do well to address the social and environmental agendas as stringently and competently as he continues to promote and foster the purely economic agenda.

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    Ourland

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    The return of the Irish economy is not an accident. The fact there were no riots when in collapsed in 2008 in a sea of imploded vested interests was no happenstance. The fact this country has divided power since its instigation between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael wasn’t just luck. The repetition of the failures of the national spatial strategy in the National Planning Framework was predestined. The failure of any party to take on the rights of property and make them subject to the common good isn’t a random thing, it’s determined. This country isn’t Germany which went through industrialisation, Nazification and deNazification, and learnt that politics and the common good is a serious business. Nor are we like the US which takes itself so seriously that it can elect a politician on an America First platform, elect someone who’s utterly wrong about everything. Or the UK which tossed a reputation forged over a millennium for empirical pragmatism into the fires of Brexit because it had a serious gripe with Institutional Europe (and Johnny foreigner). Ireland lost half of its people in the famine five generations ago. There is a strong folk memory of apocalypse which imbues a national fear that workaday issues aren’t important, that politics doesn’t really matter, that anything good is transient, that there’s no point planting a tree, a flower. We also suffer from the residual malaise of the colonised. For 700 years decisions were taken not in the common good but in the interest of an alien political entity. Service for the government and its establishment was not service for the common good. This country is sceptical about the motivations of its politicians, and its politicians do not see their roles as ethical or principled. This can generate corruption. We also suffer from the overhang of over a millennium of pious religious adherence though arguably we are overcoming that fast, almost – though not quite – too fast. Ireland is not a serious country like Germany. Yes we’re big on the GDP that every country wants. Certainly, we can do capitalism if you ask us too, but it’s only because that’s a doctrine that depends on an independent competitive detachment. You don’t have to buy in to anything particular to practise capitalism. We’re good at giving international commerce and its IT companies and vulture funds what they want: from planning permissions to an utterly unethical system of corporate taxation. You never hear anyone in public life talk of morality or ethics, you rarely hear mention of the public interest or the common good. Or philosophy: we’re sort of middlebrow. It is taken for granted that the combined private interests of all somehow amounts to the public interest. It is assumed the needs of the present outweigh concerns for the future. We don’t have a language for ugliness even though we forge it everywhere. We don’t care about planning, we couldn’t give a fiddlers for the environment. We’re the worst climate-change offenders in Europe, one of the few EU countries to miss its 2020 emission reduction targets under the EU effort-sharing decision, the worst per person in Europe. We love to litter. We’ve filled the countryside with unsustainable houses, allowed Dublin to leapfrog into much of Leinster. We’re going continue doing it. It would be draconian to tell anyone they can’t actually build somewhere. Climate, the environment and planning are at the sharp edge of our psychological weaknesses. We understand when someone fleeces the public purse – sure we’d do it ourselves. Even the parties of the left can’t bring themselves to support a property tax. For that would impinge on “the family home”. Does Richard Boyd Barrett not realise that that phrase betrays a millennium of weakness? Strangely we never hear that other assets shouldn’t be taxed – that stocks and shares shouldn’t be taxed because they’re “the family portfolio” but mention the family home in Ireland and a ‘Land League’ and a host of people who don’t realise they’re not leftists will come running to your aid, in your home or in the courts, even if you’re looking to remain in a gilded mansion, even if you have three homes. Charlie Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Enda Kenny, have been replaced with shiny new faces – Leo, the Simons, Eoghan. These tyros may have had radical, progressive or interesting ideas before they got into politics but it’s not an accident that they get beaten out of them by the time they stand for election, for the party. They’ll toe the party line, not the thinktank line on everything from housing to the drugs crisis to healthcare. They bought into Fine Gael (it might as well have been Fianna Fáil) atavistically. Sit on a bus in England or the US and the quality of the conversation overheard (‘innit?’, ‘So I’m Like’) shocks and bores. Not here. You’ll never meet a complete moron in Ireland. The left may not yield a property-tax agenda but then again the right hasn’t managed to muster much of an anti-immigration or even privatisation agenda. Most Irish people have lots of common sense, a fairly global outlook, a sense of humour and a cultural hinterland of some sort. Ireland isn’t serious enough to keep its quality of life as high as that in countries where the common good is the transcendent driver. But then again it’s not serious enough to say no to gay marriage – sure everyone likes someone who’s gay. Or serious enough to elect a Fascist or a tub-thumper. Ireland is a peculiar place. It’s not the worst place. But its history holds it back, and will for generations to come.

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    Planning tribunal legal farce dissipates public funds and fails to address full truth

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    Twenty years ago Colm MacEochaidh and I offered a reward of £10,000 for information leading to the conviction of persons on indictment for rezoning corruption. I had spent a year campaigning against a controversial rezoning of attractive fields in Cherrywood, Co Dublin, pushed through in murky circumstances by Monarch Properties which was subsequently found to have acted corruptly. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. We needed to do something dramatic as a) tribunals had been discredited following the weak Beef Tribunal report and b) there was a perception – following an Irish Times investigation by Frank McDonald and Mark Brennock (George Redmond’s son-in-law), billed as ‘Fields of Gold” which had managed to name one, but only one, dead (and therefore defenceless), councillor as corrupt – that planning corruption was a ball of smoke. Our anonymous stratagem was fronted by Newry Solicitor, Kevin Neary. He eventually received 55 separate sources of information. We threatenedthat, unless immunity was granted from prosecution to whistle-blowers and ultimately a tribunal – which we said should be cost-effective and streamlined like the British Scott Inquiry – instigated, we would start naming the people about whom we were receiving serious and verifiable information. We also introduced our informants to journalists who, once they verified the information, printed it. Our best informant was James Gogarty. We visited him in his house in Sutton. He was pleasant but a little cranky, determined to nail his employer for, as he saw it, shafting him on his pension. Gogarty had been persuaded to go back to work for Joseph Murphy Structural Engineering – a building company, after his initial retirement. He was particularly venomous about Joe Murphy Junior who he saw as an upstart. He was bitter that the then Minister for Justice, Nora Owen, was not taking his claims seriously enough and he ventilated about Seamus Henchy, a Supreme Court judge.What he said to us about Owen, Murphy Jr and Henchy had to be taken witha pinch of salt. But what impressed us was the information he had about a bribe he had paid one-time Environment Minister, Ray Burke. For us it was morally certain that the information about Burke was true, since it was backed by documentation and had to be extracted from him, while he really only wanted to moan on about his pension. He was disillusioned with the failure of the Irish Times to take his story seriously and it took some persuasion to get him to talk to any other newspaper but in the end he spoke to the Sunday Times on the eccentric basis it was not Irish. In the end this did not work out and he only really became confident when we linked him to Frank Connolly, then of the Sunday Business Post. A lot of the information we received was rubbish – one man said he knew the burial place of racehorse Shergar but several of the allegations resulted in criminal prosecutions or appearances before the planning tribunal. The pressure built up through Neary’s appearances on the media, Connolly’s articles in the Business Post, some pieces by Matt Cooper in the Sunday Tribune and an article by John Ryan in Magill, ultimately made a tribunal unavoidable, and it was duly established in 1997. In the end it established corruption against Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn and resulted in the resignation of Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who made up a cock and bull story about a digout in order to avoid questions about unexplained sums of around €200,000 that passed through his accounts. We never paid the reward as no-one claimed it. The £10,000 went in legal fees. Ultimately, the tribunal found systemic and endemic planning corruption in County Dublin. So far so good. But it had relied too much on two whistle-blowers, Gogarty and Dunlop one of whom was sporadically unreliable and the other of whom was serially mendacious. The judges and lawyers who cost so much and took so long simply didn’t have the nous to investigate the allegations presented to them, forensically. Particularly when Judge Mahon took over from Judge Flood the tribunal found both too much and too little. It found mostly against those whose reputations were already destroyed. It did not make some of the findings that it could have made not just against Bertie Ahern but also against many other senior serving politicians. It also perhaps made too many findings based predominantly on the evidence of the serially dishonest Dunlop. It did not find a street-wise way of analysing evidence where there was not a whistle-blower and much of its proceedings were ill-focused. In the Cherrywood rezoning, for example, a number of councillors had changed their minds and voted for rezoning, after they’d been paid money by the corrupt developer or corrupt Frank Dunlop. They weren’t even asked to explain their changes of mind though, even before we knew that there was any corruption, campaigners had (in 1993) hammered the mysteriously-changed minds as suspicious. Where the tribunal had failed to ask the right questions in several cases the report simply omits the issue, including the failed line of questioning, completely. Someone should research how much money and time was wasted pursuing issues that were never resolved. The judges and their legal teams fell short and were laid bare by an admittedly over-zealous Supreme Court. That is not surprising when you consider the same minds allowed the tribunals to go over budget and over time. The mentality is captured by the attitude of the judges when John Gormley, as Environment Minister, arranged for Mahon to be aided by two other judges. When he asked the judges how much time the extra judicial repower would save, on the assumption they’d divide up the material to be investigated in three, he was told that if anything it would take longer than with one judge only, as they were going to sit together in every case. In the end court decisions have resulted in the unravelling of all adverse

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