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    UNrealistic

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    At the end of last September, under the shadow of the glimmering New York skyline overhead, the world celebrated the dawn of a new era. The UN Summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concluded with a massive party in Central Park, graced by the presence of superstars such as Ed Sheerin and Beyonce. The party was sponsored by Gucci, Citi, Unilever, Google and others. Many of their super-rich executives could well have been watching the party from their high-rise apartments in that most elegant part of the planet. Some people had paid upwards of $10,000 for VIP passes to the party. All proceeds went to charity, of course. There was no whiff of a world on the brink of collapse, threatened environmental destruction and violent extremism, the one that had been so eloquently articulated by Pope Francis in his landmark address to the UN General Assembly the previous day. The gap between the optimistic, almost euphoric atmosphere in some UN quarters and the pessimistic, almost despairing perspectives of others, including Pope Francis, was palpable at the Summit. On the one hand, famous business moguls, UN officials and many states, including Ireland, lined up to hail the goals as a new beginning. On the other hand, many wondered whether yet more goals would make any difference at all or even whether they would take us in the wrong direction altogether. Whatever your perspective, the SDGs are now a universally agreed UN document. For the most part, they set out important objectives for the world, 17 in all. They point to all the critical areas of human development that must be addressed if we are to tackle inequality, poverty and environmental destruction. They set 167 indicators of progress which are to be monitored and followed up annually. Importantly, for the first time ever, they promise to “leave no-one behind” and put a deadline of 2030 on achieving that goal. While as individual objectives the SDGs are desirable, as a global policy framework they are deeply flawed in at least four ways. Firstly, the sheer number of goals agreed and the lack of real interconnection between them has turned them into a shopping list. Everything becomes equally important. Yet the truth is that global imperatives exist. There are critical enablers which everyone needs to address alongside second-level priorities, which can be reached only on condition the first are being achieved. So the SDGs create a kind of policy fog in which it is hard to see the wood from the trees. Secondly, despite years of debate, the goals fail to resolve the decades old conundrum of sustainable development. This is the fact that ‘economic’, ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ dimensions do not really sit side by side or form interlocking circles. The ‘economic’ and the ‘social’, in reality, are dependent on the ‘environmental’. We need to move away from the inadequate cliche of interlocking circles to a ‘doughnut’ model as put forward by Oxfam. There is no overarching agreement in the SDGs that we need to move towards a world which lives within planetary boundaries. This is a real opportunity lost. Thirdly, however worthy the SDGs are, they are weak voluntary initiatives rather than an international treaty. Of course, voluntary initiatives have an important role in setting norms, but they only thrive when the environment is conducive to their realisation and are matched by strong implementation measures. The goals are debilitated by dysfunctional power structures, which render them a side-show, if not quite irrelevant to the main drivers of power. Unfortunately, important policies are being actively promoted by the same states that signed up to the SDGs and whose actions elsewhere directly contradict many of the goals. One alarming example is the emerging rules on global trade and investment, epitomised by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is being negotiated between the EU and USA. Controversial proposals within TTIP include Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanisms. These will effectively facilitate MultiNational Corporations to circumvent domestic court systems and sue sovereign states through a confidential arbitration mechanism in challenging governments for introducing regulations that in multinational businesses’ view harms their interests or profit margins. This raises concerns about the state’s right to regulate on a wide range of public policies, including extreme poverty and environmental standards. SDGs do not even enter into these negotiations. Another example is continued state subsidies and investments in fossil fuels. If remaining below the agreed 2°C-increase target for global temperatures is to be possible, a basic pre-requisite for the SDGs, 80% of known remaining fossil fuels need to remain under ground. Yet in 2014 the global economy missed the decarbonisation target needed to limit global warming to 2°C for the sixth year running. Fourthly, the respective roles of the state and the private sector in SDG development and implementation is deeply concerning. The visibility of the private sector and the pledges made in New York reflect the way that major corporations have managed to skew the agenda. One official pledge made by MasterCard at the SDG Private Sector Forum to bring 500 million people in the developing world into the credit market, thus enabling them to achieve Goal 8, is indicative of this. A pick-and-mix approach to the SDGs is already evident, facilitating corporations to use them to their marketing advantage while not addressing basic human rights and issues such as lack of accountability. The UN appears to have already relinquished control of its own message about the SDGs to the corporate sector through its ‘Global Goals’ campaign. This was launched during the Summit. In signing a licensing agreement for the Goals with key sponsors such as Gucci, Citi and others, it effectively delivered the SDGs, a key global public good, into private ownership. A clause in the campaign agreement means that those who use the goals’ branding must do so in ways which do not damage the partner brands. Technically speaking, therefore, if an NGO such as Trócaire or Christian Aid, draws attention to the systemic problems of corporate power whilst using the goals’ branding, they are in breach of the licence. Though it

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    If we can borrow it, we will spend it

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    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.

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    Red Hand

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    NIance For a long time the two issues that appeared to enjoy cross-party support in Northern Ireland (apart from horror of bauble-free direct rule) were one-off housing and visceral anti-abortionism. Now Sinn Fein appears to take a more nuanced approach to abortion. As do the courts. The Belfast High Court has ruled that abortion legislation in Northern Ireland is in breach of human rights law. Until now termination of pregnancy has only been allowed if a woman’s life was at risk or (unlike in the South) there is a permanent or serious risk to her mental or physical health. In a tragic case of foetal anencephaly, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) had brought the case to extend abortion to cases of serious foetal malformation, rape or incest. The British 1967 Abortion Act does not apply to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland’s Attorney General John Larkin said in a brief statement that he was “profoundly disappointed” by the decision and was “considering the grounds for appeal”. In his ruling, Judge Horner said women who were the victims of sexual crime and cases of fatal foetal abnormality were entitled to exemptions in the law. He said that the issue was unlikely to be addressed by the Northern Ireland Executive in the foreseeable future, and that Northern Ireland citizens were entitled to “have their [European Convention on Human] rights protected by the courts”. In early 2015, Sinn Féin effectively vetoed efforts in the Northern Ireland Assembly to prevent the Marie Stopes clinic in Belfast from performing abortions. The party whip, Caitríona Ruane (MLA for South Down), claimed the move by the DUP’s Paul Givan and the SDLP’s Alban Maginness was “an attempt to restrict the right of a woman to obtain a termination in life-threatening circumstances”. Storey-telling The deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin to save the North’s Executive has allowed the Westminster Parliament to vote through cuts for the North, including to Social Welfare. It is, however, promised that £345 million will be put aside for the next four years to top up payments for claimants who lose out in the changes. However, Green Party Assembly member Steven Agnew has derided Social Development Minister Mervyn Storey who, in a written answer, told Agnew that the Social Security Agency paid out approximately £80m per year in its Discretionary Fund over the last four years and that this fund would be redeployed for Social Welfare. In effect, protection seems to be robbing one set of claimants to pay another. Agnew said top-up money appeared to be “the renaming of an already existing budget”. robins on his way One of the biggest beasts of Northern politics, Peter Robinson, has slipped quietly into the good night of political death. Robinson was one of the toughest political scrappers going: however, the constant rumour of scandal and declining health combined to sap his vigour. Although it is rumoured Gerry Adams contributed to expediting his goodbye at end of his final question time as First Minister, the Sinn Féin Front Bench joined the DUP in giving him a standing ovation. That’s a sign of how the two parties are interdependent. Were the Northern Executive a family, their relationship is so dysfunctional social services would be sent in. However, both know they face disaster if the Executive falls. If people reflect too hard on the political extremities they might finish up voting in some moderates. They are not made whole Colm Eastwood’s defeat of uncharismatic Alasdair McDonnell in the SDLP leadership election was a sign of that party’s desperation. The Assembly election is due in May: parties very seldom dump a leader – no matter how poorly performing – so soon before an election. McDonnell’s defeat was particularly humiliating because many of the party’s ‘ABA’ (Anybody But Alasdair) tendency had walked away. The SDLP is haemorrhageing members as well as votes and Eastwood will lead the party away from its middle-class, middle-aged roots to a greener and more leftist future. When Margaret Ritchie was elected leader five years ago, 409 delegates voted. When 32-year-old Eastwood overthrew MacDonnell, only 305 did. Eastwood succeeds McDonnell, Margaret Ritchie, Mark Durkan, John Hume and Gerry Fitt, in that order. Quinn again There was little coverage in the South of the conviction of Quinn Building Products for the death of 24-year-old Fermanagh GAA star Brian Óg Maguire from head injuries in its Derrylin factory. The company, bought last year from IBRC and US bondholders by a holding company which is reinstating the exciting old Quinn regime, pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the safety of an employee and maintain work equipment. Omagh Crown Court found the company’s procedures were inadequate, and “the equipment used was defective”. The judge pointed out that the company had been convicted for the death of another worker in 1997, when it was called Sean Quinn Quarries. road to nowhere you’d know The Executive has announced it is to contribute £75m (€106.5m) to build a nine-mile stretch of dual carriageway from Ballymagorry, north of Strabane, Co Tyrone, to Newbuildings, south of Derry City. The proposed road is part of the proposed A5, from the Monaghan-Tyrone Border to Newbuildings, the North’s largest ever road project. Two years ago a judicial review overturned the decision to grant this planning permission for failure to carry out an appropriate assessment of the Rivers Foyle and Finn Special Areas of Conservation under the EU Habitats directive.. The Executive’s determination to go ahead with the dual carriageway is mysterious. No part of the existing A5 is among the North’s 50 busiest stretches of road. Options of developing the existing road were dismissed, while expanding public transport was not even considered. Case meant to be The GAA’s proposed 38,000-seater Casement Park stadium in West Belfast is enmired in a bitter planning battle. Residents feel they are being railroaded by the Corporate GAA. Anger at the proposal – and Sinn Féin’s support for it – was key to sweeping People Before Profit’s Gerry Carroll onto Belfast City

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    Wicklow again

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    Apolitical blast from the past has returned to haunt the much troubled Wicklow County Council and its former county manager, Eddie Sheehy. Former councillor and once prominent Green Party member, Deirdre de Búrca, recently learned that the Council has abandoned a Supreme Court appeal taken by Sheehy after she secured a High Court judgment in her favour in a long running zoning row. The story dates back to 2004 when de Búrca complained that Fianna Fáil councillor and solicitor, Fachtna Whittle, had breached ethics legislation when he proposed and voted for the rezoning of land near Brittas without disclosing that it was owned by a man represented by his legal practice. The ethics committee of the Council, including Sheehy and then cathaoirleach, John Byrne, considered that while Whittle had been “unwise to propose the motion he did” he had no “beneficial or pecuniary interest” in the zoning and therefore the complaint by de Búrca was “unjustified”. The then Green Party councillor challenged the decision to the High Court which decided in her favour with Judge John Hedigan ruling in 2009 that Sheehy and the Council had not dealt with the zoning and potential conflict-of-interest issues at the core of de Búrca’s complaint. He quashed their report and directed the Council to review the matter. This was not good enough for Sheehy who lodged an appeal, which has been trundling through the justice system ever since, with the Supreme Court. Following his retirement earlier this year, his successors, including acting county manager, Bryan Doyle, have decided to drop the appeal. To add insult to injury solicitors for the Council sought to impose a ‘gagging order’ on de Búrca as part of what has been described by the Wicklow Times as a “settlement” of the action which the former councillor refused to accept. This involves the Council absorbing the estimated hundreds of thousands of euro in costs accrued in the action, one of a number of legal actions Sheehy left behind when he departed earlier this year. Meanwhile, the Minister for the Environment, Alan Kelly, continues to deflect Dáil questions on the outcome of a number of inquiries into various matters involving planners, councillors and developers in the garden county during Sheehy’s tenure. These include the circumstances surrounding contracts agreed between the Council and the developers of the 1400 Charlesland residential scheme near Greystones, Sean Mulryan and Sean Dunne and their partnership company Zapi Ltd. As previously reported in Village a secret contract, providing the then high-flyers with road and other access to the previously landlocked Charlesland site for little or nothing, is under examination by department officials. The Council has insisted that the contract merely involved an ‘exchange of easements’ of six acres of its land. However, according to the agent who helped to acquire the lands, the road access deal was worth tens of millions to the developers with little or no payment in return to the Council. Before the Charlesland 200 acres site had road access it was worth €22m. Once it had planning permission with road access its value jumped tenfold – to €220m. Auctioneer Gabriel Dooley has claimed that he was present when Fianna Fáil councillor, Pat Vance, discussed maps of the planned development with Mulryan and Dunne in Dobbins restaurant in Dublin in early 2003 and offered advice on how to circumvent various planning obstacles including the objections of local members to any material contravention of the local area plan to facilitate the ambitious Charlesland scheme. Vance signed the ‘exchange of easement’ contracts along with Sheehy, the director of services, Tom Murphy and representatives for Mulryan and Dunne. Bray-based Councillor Vance has also been the subject of an ethics complaint by Dooley over failing to disclose property he acquired in the early 2000s om the town in his annual declaration of interests to the Council. A property in question at Saran Wood was sold earlier this year following publication in Villageabout the ongoing and bitter exchanges between Dooley and Vance, among others. Dooley has not been informed of the outcome of any investigation or if one has taken place. Mulryan, meanwhile, is involved with international investors and NAMA in a major residential development in Dublin’s docklands and will surely be hoping that the long-awaited departmental inquiry into the Charlesland controversy will not cause any difficulties. He may be interested to know that one of the senior official asked to deal with the various complaints from Wicklow has also recently retired which, no doubt, has delayed the investigation even further. Frank Connolly

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    The limits of Aestheticism

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    Robert O’Byrne is an aesthete – possibly Ireland’s only one, a writer specialising in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them ‘Luggala Days: the Story of a Guinness House’; a biography of Sir Hugh Lane; ‘A History of the Irish Georgian Society’; a ‘Dictionary of Living Irish Artists’ and ‘the Last Knight: A tribute to Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin’. In addition to really loving things that relate to the Guinness and FitzGerald Families and the Irish Georgian Society (IGS) which they have led, he writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine and also contributes to the quarterly Irish Arts Review. He publishes a blog called “The Irish Aesthete. This is not an oxymoron”. Tragically for O’Byrne, of course, it is. But this is the least of the issues currently challenging his sensibility. The ascent to pure aestheticism inevitably took some time. After an international childhood and schooling in Gonzaga, during its own aesthetic epoch, he served in a Jesuit novitiate in the early 1980s. In 1986 O’Byrne became the first director of a pilot project in music promotion, Music Network, which some years ago scooped a U2 funding jackpot. In the 1990s he worked as a staff journalist for the Irish Times, often writing about fashion: “Robert O’Byrne’s three-part series on major trends for the season ahead: think long, think luxuriant, think languorous”. He scraped an extended niche for himself arbitrating style more generally: “the most shocking feature of the cluster of Carrickmines houses sold in Dublin last month for some £1 million each was not the price paid nor the speed with which the properties were reserved, but the unrelieved banality of their design”. At the height of the debate on one-off housing debate in the early 2000s he wrote – reflecting his peculiar if consistent focus – ignoring considerations of good planning or sustainability that: “the debate needs to be not about whether development should take place, but about the design and character of that development”. And sometimes he took his taste out of the stuffy walls of journalism onto the streets. In September 1998 he could be found launching ‘Dublin Style: An Insider’s Guide to Shopping’. In the mid to late 1990s he impurely served as the Times’ gossip columnist, hosting a horrible page at the back of the Weekend supplement that mirthlessly celebrated the country’s nouveaux glitterati. He also covered antique and art sales for the Irish Times, with some style. The Irish Times still indeed allows him the occasional essay such as a recent erudite sashaying review of a book on the history of Irish wallpaper, for which all proceeds go to the IGS, though neither O’Byrne nor the Irish Times felt the need to declare his connection to the IGS. O’Byrne’s prose is often original and the judgement sharp, in his columns and on his blog. The blog has a cohort of fans, often genuinely double-barrelled, who outdo one another in obsequiousness. Not unrepresentatively, during 2015 the Irish Aesthete will be visiting one Irish town every month – to berate its architectural neglect. O’Byrne has lots of considered opinions. In a recent collection of essays concerning the FitzGeralds of Carton House, he was hammered by Dr Terry Dooley of Maynooth for criticising its late housing-estate strewn incarnation as one of those “ill considered conversions into spa hotels and golf resorts”. However, his usual percipience can let him down as when he equivocated in the controversy over the recent removal of sculptural busts from the entrance hall at Bellamont Forest House in Cavan, despite the evidence proving them to be integral to the design of this internationally important house by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce. Crucially, O’Byrne himself moved to the rarefied setting of Palladian Ardbraccan House near Navan where he lodges in one of the wings. As befits an aesthete whose oeuvre so often touched on its members, and its causes, O’Byrne is Vice President of the Irish Georgian Society (IGS), a membership organisation whose purpose is to promote awareness and the protection of Ireland’s architectural heritage and decorative arts. A fully illustrated book by Robert O’Byrne on the society’s first 50 years was published in 2008 and he has comprehensively ingratiated himself. If anything all had been looking well for his further elevation. O’Byrne was until recently the IGS’s representative on the board of the Alfred Beit Foundation which owns the Palladian Russborough House in Co Wicklow. Sir Alfred Lane Beit, honorary Irish citizen, was a British Conservative Party politician, art collector and philanthropist – nephew of Alfred Beit, a South African mining millionaire from whom he inherited a vast fortune including a large number of Old Master paintings. In 1952, he and his wife, Clementine Mitford, moved the art collection to Ireland. It comprises many of the paintings assembled by the Beit family from the late nineteenth century. While he eventually presented the major works to the National Gallery of Ireland, the remaining collection, along with Russborough itself, was bequeathed to the Alfred Beit Foundation (ABF) which was established in 1976 with a board of trustees. The sale of 350 acres of land at Russborough in 1978 afforded an endowment of almost £400,000 or around €4m in current values. It is not known what has become of this original endowment, but the ABF is known to have been struggling for some time, despite receiving regular handouts from the Apollo Foundation, a London-based trust associated with the Beits, and substantial grants from the Heritage Council and Fáilte Ireland. The ABF has been operating at an annual loss of €300,000 (2013). Certainly this is a problem but there is no sense the costs are being reviewed or that dynamic fund-raising is in place. A substantial salary is paid to a chief executive who oversees an uninspiring, if rising, 24,000 annual visitors to the house. In 2006 a collection of 62 early Italian bronzes was sold for €3.8m and fourteen oriental ceramics were sold

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    Trying to run before it can walk

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    BID (Business Improvements District, now known as DublinTown) is a not-for-profit quango, funded by hundreds of retailers in an area, 2,500 of which are compelled by the City Council – acting under the Local Government BIDs Act 2006 – to pay an extra rate to it. Businesses must vote in favour of becoming a Business Improvement District in order for it to be established. BID’s role was originally to ensure that an area would be clean, green and accessible. Its chief executive is Richard Guiney formerly prominent in the Dublin City Business Association and its chairman is Ray Hernan, CEO of Arnotts. Itsboard comprises city business people and councillors including myself and Ciarán Cuffe, as well as Rose Kenny, Dublin City Council Area Manager. The problem is that its principal functions are already dealt with by the City Council. Additional tasks undertaken by BID, a US-inspired initiative much promoted by the City Business Association, include intense cleaning such as graffiti removal, managing the Christmas lights, tackling the anti-social behaviour that obsesses its members, organising festivals, collecting waste, ‘lobbying’ and ‘branding’. Ultimately it seems that BID is more concerned with employing marketing companies to gure out what consumers are buying than it is about husbanding ratepayers’ and taxpayers’ money to make the city a cleaner, safer place with. BID is attempting to run before it has shown it can walk. The problem for its beleaguered compulsory members is that its functions are ill-defined and many claim that despite its expansionary intent it is not delivering on its original functions. Business owners in Capel St recently took the BID to court and won their case, and some are now seeking to exit the BID and be free of the extra rate levy. BID has brought us branded quarters like Dame District, Talbot Area District and the Creative Quarter. It even has ambassadors directing the public to top Dublin attractions. It is improper, against a background of suspicion of local authorities and the indictment of the Temple Bar Cultural Trust for the City Council to collect over €2m as an extra rate levy forBID/Dublintown, but to have no audit control on how or where this money is spent, if only because DCC is the overriding rating authority. I have a motion before DCC calling on councillors to instruct the CEO to forensically audit this company. At its most recent EGM a strong group of members including some on the Board challenged the CEO and the chairman about a process that would give the BID company the legal right to borrow moneyand begin to acquire property, including for a €1.5m headquarters in the former TSB on Lower Abbey St. Serious questions were raised by members of the organisation about whether such functions wereultra vires the objects of the company and the terms of the 2006 Act. The meeting collapsed in acrimony over the issue of allegedly dubious proxies. Tempers were further frayed by the secrecy of BID/DublinTown’s salvo with Dublin City Council into the Christmas Market business at St Stephen’s Green in 2014, franchised to an outfit called Milestone Inventive whose shareholders include Enterprise Ireland. Due to its faux-ski-resort tackiness, over reliance on fast food and beer and close proximity to what is already a very busy commercial area, this so-called Christmas market caused great annoyance to many local rate-paying businesses, including many BID members, to the Restaurants Association of Ireland and car-drivers. Dublin City’s CEO, Owen Keegan professed himself “underwhelmed” by it, and it duly made noises about improving for next year. BID/DublinTown company is primarily interested in Dublin’s big-beast retailers: BT, Arnotts, Clearys, O’Carrolls Gift Shop, the Ilac Centre etc. It appears more concerned with employing marketing companies to gure out what consumers are buying than it is about making the environment of the city a cleaner, safer place. While some of this might be admirable in its place, it is undemocratic and perhaps even illegal to do so with rate-payers’ money that has been compulsorily extracted from hard-pressed businesses. It also gets the City Council o the hook for some of its own delinquent services. Unsurprisingly, the CEO of Dublin City Council is not impressed by BID marketing initiatives or its property adventures, but claims to be legally powerless since itis accountable only to its own shareholders. The BID/DublinTown brand with its limited remit is inconsistent with Dublin City’s own brand of promoting Dublin. The arrogance and indifference of BID’s current leadership has ensured the discontent of many BID members and will ensure their downfall or discontinuance. It is marshalling its diminishing credibility to ‘love bomb’ Sinn Féin, frantic to burnish its business credentials, the biggest group on the Council – one time bolsterers of now disgraced Temple Bar Cultural Trust. As a Board member of BID I have little confidence in the company. A Business Improvement District’s mandate is for a maximum of 5 years. A Business Improvement District wishing to continue beyond 5 years must reaffirm its mandate through another ballot, based on a further proposal. I support the bid for freedom. • Mannix Flynn  

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    Ireland should renege on €30bn NAMA bonds

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    Let’s leave our useless banks with worthless IOUs, writes Mick O’Broin. Even before it emerged that the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) was definitively bailing out developers, its dealings with banks were problematic. NAMA is, as Enda Kenny said from the opposition benches, “another blank cheque to bailout the banks”. And, like the bank bailouts in general, there has been a variety of voices pointing out the illegitimate nature of the public debt generated by NAMA.

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