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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— June – July 2013
Shathead
Villager likes Shatter. Well likes is a little strong.
Likes more than any other Fine Gael member of
government, apart from Frances Fitzgerald, per-
haps. Or respects. Anyone that annoys the Garda,
the legal profession and judges, inspires a debate
on their respective contributions to the common
good and then wins it, deserves a little indulgence.
It is entirely predictable that he will be replaced
just as he implements the Troika-mandated
Competition Authority recommendations on the
legal profession. That said, of course he should
have resigned over leaking details of Wallace’s
trivial traffic incident – even McDowell at least
complained he was saving the state when he
tried it on with Frank Connolly. There was no
possible justification or proportion to Shatter’s
action, which was committed in front of the
Garda and which the Garda decided to overlook.
We do not live in a police state and information
received by Ministers, particularly the Minister
for Justice, must be treated with scrupulous dis-
cretion. Tellingly, Shatter hasn’t helped his own
case by revealing any corroboration: Villager
presumes someone knows if the Minister likes
a drink (though he seems like a man who would,
perhaps, drink on his own, if at all), and indeed
if he suffers terribly from the asthma, for which
no proof has been offered. Meanwhile, Villager
is concerned at rumours that Shatter has a class
of superinjunction out against coverage of the
prices charged by his former law firm. Certainly
there’s been a precipitous decline in media men-
tion of this once controversial issue.
Bitter PIL
Unfortunately for him, Shatter was the latest
member of the cabinet to come under the spot-
light of non-party activist network ‘Independent
Resistance’, when ten members of the group
held a silent vigil outside the minister’s home
in the leafy suburb of Ballinteer, Co Dublin on
Sunday June. Independent Resistance is a
broad network of anti-austerity and community-
rights-based groups, joined together by collective
endorsement of a six-point economic strategy
for prosperity and sovereignty put forward by
Professor Terrence McDonagh of NUI Galway.
Members see the network as an alternative to
the anti-austerity campaigns covertly driven by
‘Marxism-based’ political parties in Ireland.
Organisers (including a number of academ-
ics) claimed they were holding the vigil as a
response to the Personal Insolvency Legislation
(PIL) and Shatter’s plans to make home evictions
more expedient through empowering County
Registrars as special judges to preside over debt
cases in the courts. This is already practised infor-
mally throughout the country with Dundalk being
an example where the County Registrar, who is
also the Sheriff, sits in her own court, handing
out repossession notices, enforcing them and
in doing so enriching the Sheriff ’s office that
receives a percentage of the value of the repos-
sessed home or articles. One placard at the vigil
read “You leave our homes alone and we’ll leave
your home alone”.
Independent Resistance also held silent
vigils outside the home of Minister for Social
Protection, Joan Burton, last month. A number
of the network’s founding members held an eight-
week rolling vigil outside of the house of then
Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern’s, in . In
Ahern’s case he resigned and stated that the pro-
testers were “the last straw” describing them in
local media as “worse than the Provos”.
Dishonest and corrupt people
are dishonest and corrupt
The editor was going to synopsise the findings
of the report Village has commissioned on pri-
vate prosecutions against dishonest bankers
and tribunal villains. But the legal advice was to
keep it quiet for the moment. And all of us here
in the sweat-pit that is Village always follow the
legal advice: senior counsel chose the headline
for this paragraph, for example. Anyway, it’s all
happening…
Crash to crèche
inspectors to monitor , crèches and
pre-schools? Sounds like the beef industry. Or
the industrial schools. Or planning or building-
regulation compliance? Or the banks?
Gonzaga
What secondary school do parents whose tod-
dlers send them to a crèche called Little Harvard
go to?
The big issues: corporation tax
Irish journalism famously confuses on the
big issues (does NAMA make a profit, can we
renege on our debts to bondholders, is Enda
Villager
villager
“Dead”; not “
Live
”. Bill
O’Herlihy represents the
tobacco industry
Kenny an eejit, what colour is Shatter’s hair etc).
Corporation tax is no different. So, after a fort-
night’s scintillating media debate, we know that
we charge .% Corporation tax, although
there seems to be a problem and our grown-up
friends abroad think we’ve a special deal with
Apple, though that’s sort-of not true. In fact, just
like in France where the official rate is % but
the actual rate .%, you need to look behind
the headline. In Michael Noonan said our
effective rate was %. But we do better for our
IT companies. In fact there’s a special tax rate on
income arising from intellectual property (IP)
which can be as low as .%. Up to % of the
cost of acquiring IP can be set off. You don’t need
to create the IP in Ireland you just need to oper-
ate in Ireland and buy the IP here, wherever it
has been created (Palo Alto, normally). So you
just bump up the cost of acquiring the IP and
bingo, you pass for a tax genius, and fleece the
ordinary man across invisible borders. Who cares
if it’s a ‘special deal’: it’s globalism, and Ireland
majors in it.
Hari Nama
Similarly, news that NAMA claims to have made
a profit of €m boggled the brains of the
nation for a few days recently. What it means is
that some of the loans that NAMA bought at dis-
counted prices (remember haircuts) were sold
at a profit over the last year. Of course NAMA
has carefully chosen to sell the best of its port-
folio – % of its asset sales since inception have
been in Britain. Clever, but meaningless for the
prospect of the agency getting this country back
the €bn it has invested. A shocking augury
is that the likes of Harry Crosbie have indicated
that NAMA, before it pulled the plug on him, was
expecting him to repay only the discounted price
NAMA paid for his loans, not the price the likes
of Crosbie originally paid. €.bn down and
€.bn to repay, to real profitability.
The best lack all conviction
Ireland is the only country in the European Union
that does not have a scheme for the expungement
of certain convictions after a set period of time.
Eight million people in the UK have a conviction
(just under % of the total population). The
UK Ministry of Justice has found that % of
men aged have at least one conviction; %
of women aged have at least one conviction.
It is likely that a comparable proportion of Irish
people are affected. The Irish Penal Reform
Trust says that at least half the calls it receives
relate to spent convictions and/or Garda vetting,
mostly from people who received a conviction
for a minor offence such as drunk and disorderly,
sometimes committed or decades ago, and
who continue to experience barriers to work,
training, and emigration.
Machynlleth
George Monbiot is a man for all seasons. His lat-
est book, ‘Rewilding’, outlining a radical new
agenda for land-management has created a con-
cept that will last a millennium. Monbiot moved
to Wales some years ago and, though a farmer on
a recent BBC Newsnight programme about the
idea claimed Public School-educated Monbiot
hadn’t been able to hack it there, he remains in
Machynlleth. In , Monbiot wrote a column
about urban planning for the Guardian, in which
he made the inspired case that new estates should
be built around a common green on which chil-
dren could safely play:
“Most importantly, the houses face inwards,
and no cars are allowed inside the square: the
roads serve only the backs of the buildings. The
square is overlooked by everyone, which means
that children can run in and out of their houses
unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn
their own rules, without fear of traffic accidents
or molesters. There’s a council estate a bit like
this across the road from my house. Whenever I
pass through it on a dry day in the holidays, I see
dozens of children playing there”.
Tragically, that is the place from which, on
October , April Jones was abducted and
murdered by former slaughterhouse worker,
Mark Bridger, recently sentenced to life impris-
onment. He claims he cannot remember where
he buried her.
Tryanair
Ryanair wants to buy out Aer Lingus. But com-
petition authorities may actually want it to sell
off the stake it currently retains. The EU’s Court
of Justice held in that it could not force a
divestment since Ryanair did not have control of
Aer Lingus but in late May Britain’s Competition
Commission found Ryanair’s .% stake con-
stituted a ‘relevant merger event’, ie an event that
would lead to common control or ownership.
Worse, it found that it had lessened competi-
tion in British markets. The British decision is
only provisional but a final decision, due in July,
could force a sell off on routes to Britain. Worse
still, a revised EU Merger Regulation may actu-
ally make it now possible for the Commission
to order divestment of a stake that is less than
controlling.
Hokey dokey
Amiable veteran sports broadcaster Bill O’Herlihy
merely moonlights as chair of RTÉ’s soccer
panel, and indeed Chairman of the Irish Film
Board. He is in fact, as he has declared himself,
primarily a PR dude. His company, O’Herlihy
Communications, recently ‘withdrew’ a claim
that it advises the Government, after being
accused of a potential conflict of interest by Ash,
an anti-smoking group. O’Herlihy attended the
meeting Taoiseach Enda Kenny held with a del-
egation of senior tobacco industry figures in May.
He advises the Irish Tobacco Manufacturers’
Advisory Committee. It’s called leveraging public
goodwill to do evil. O’Herlihy Communications’
website had claimed that staff “have worked in
government at the highest levels” and that “we
have been official advisers to the current and past
government”. The latter assertion was removed
after a query from the Irish Times. O’Herlihy
was media adviser to Fine Gael under Garret
FitzGerald in the s. He has used that back-
ground to advance his company.
For example, he mounted a vicious and frac-
tious campaign in an area near where he lived
in Cabinteely in favour of Monarch Properties’
scheme for Cherrywood in the early s. He
gave controversial evidence to the Planning
Tribunal – claiming that the project manager of
the development, Richard Lynn, had told him
that it was not possible to get a planning appli-
cation or a material contravention (Section )
through Dublin County Council unless it was
bought. According to Mr O’Herlihy, who had
been retained by Monarch Properties as their
public relations expert for Cherrywood, Mr Lynn
confirmed to him that money – £, – had
been paid. Marshalling all the ethics of the avun-
cular grandee he is, O’Herlihy continued to work
for his corrupt employers, touting the project
which he knew had little chance of being built
the way his propaganda claimed it would be
(full-grown trees, no roads, ‘Moroccan Village’
architecture). In the end the Tribunal found that
many of Monarch’s cash donations to council-
lors were corrupt, though of course no-one has
been prosecuted.
In May Ash Ireland wrote to the Taoiseach
suggesting O’Herlihy’s claim to be an adviser
to the Government and to the tobacco industry
constituted a breach of EU guidelines and was “a
totally unacceptable and disquieting conflict of
interest which warrants investigation and clari-
fication”. A spokesman for Mr O’Herlihy said the
statement online was not correct and the word-
ing would be changed. “It sounds like someone
got carried away while designing the website”,
he said. For the Irish Times to quote this spuri-
ous and Orwellian attempt by a cynical PR firm
to distance itself from its own central operations,
tells a tale of deferential ‘mediacrity’. Letters seen
by the Irish Times showed that O’Herlihy made
pre-budget pleas to Minister for Finance Michael
Noonan and Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton
last November not to increase the price of ciga-
rettes. “Excise increases merely generate greater
sales for illegal cigarettes,” he argued in the let-
ter, adding: “Ireland, with the most expensive
cigarettes in the EU, is fertile ground for crimi-
nals who trade in smuggled cigarettes”. Noonan
stated he attended the May th meeting with the
Doe-eyes
— June – July 2013
industry because of concerns about smuggling
and the loss of revenue to the State. Minister John
Perry chaired a ‘roundtable’ (how nice!) meet-
ing with the industry on the same issue last year.
Britain decided not to remove branding because
of such fears. Meanwhile, the boss of Ireland’s
biggest tobacco company, JTI, which sells Benson
& Hedges and Silk Cut among other brands, has
said it will sue if necessary over the government’s
plan to depress brand-slave smokers by requir-
ing that cigarette packaging is entirely plain.
Holy Joery
Irish rebel leader James Connolly, an athe-
ist, turned to God in the final hours before his
death and renewed his Catholic faith according
to an unpublished book which has just come to
light. Journalist Tim Kendall, a friend of Queen
Mary, tells how his grandfather George Kendall,
chaplain to the th division of the British Army
which was sent to Dublin to help put down the
Rising, witnessed Connolly’s renewal of his
Catholicism. The revelation is contained in a
manuscript found in an old filing box of docu-
ments in England. An admiring Kendall was at
Connolly’s side in the hours before the Citizen’s
army leader was executed for his part in leading
the rising. For an atheist the holy-joery was
some hypocrisy. Connolly is of course one of the
founders of the Labour Party. So it sounds like an
early example of a Labour leader wrestling with
his conscience and winning.
Be nimble
Connolly was also a leading light in the ITGWU
which evolved into SIPTU in . Soon after
defeat of the Croke Park II earlier this year,
SIPTU’s current head, Jack O’Connor, who had
supported the agreement, told Vincent Browne
that his position depended on his assessment
that SIPTU members would get a worse deal
from government if Croke Park II broke down.
Well, Villager finds O’Connor an honourable and
thoughtful fellow but nothing now on the table
seems to constitute a setback for the interests of
union members and we must conclude that his
assessment was wrong and the tenability of his
overall position dubious. Meanwhile, the unions
that recommended a No vote now find their mem-
bers changing their minds.
Gentleman in Red
So Rosanna Davidson’s soon-to-be father-in-law
Richard Quirke, promoter of the Borris casino
and owner of amusement arcades including
Dr Quirkey’s on O’Connell St, settled with the
Revenue after it found “the application of incor-
rect VAT to income earned”. Interestingly the
O’Connell St vipers’ den never got planning per-
mission to extend into the old Carlton Cinema.
Quirke has benefited from a lax regime there for
years. Being an ex Garda – albeit one who left
under a cloud, does him no harm.
Lost without one
Nathan Deal, governor of Georgia, recently over-
turned a court ruling that it was improper to allow
distribution of Gideon bibles to properties in the
famously lovely Georgia state parks. Ed Buckner,
a former head of Atheists America, had found no
less than nine bibles in a cabin he was staying in.
Fair-minded Mr Deal noted “any group is free to
distribute literature” so Atheists America took
this as a deal, and asked to distribute books by
Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to the
parks’ lovely cottages. But while the godless ones
waited for guidance on how to start distributing,
Deal told the local newspaper he “cannot guar-
antee their safety”. Of course the bible is quite
popular in Georgia (there isn’t really an Irish
equivalent: perhaps Fintan O’Toole’s ‘Ireland in
Objects’). The most famous Georgian, pea-
nut-farming former President, Jimmy Carter,
revealed: “for the last or more years my wife
and I have read the Bible as the last thing every
night. One night she reads aloud and then the
next night I read aloud. Then we have discussions
about what we read to each other”.
A future half empty
Google Glasses look like funky spectacles but
projects an array of relevant images and choices
for its wearers. One of these is to take photo-
graphs just with a word of command. Villager
feels that such technology may work in theory
but it will not work in a world run in the inter-
est of humans. In the course of the day we all see
things not fit to show to our lovers or to appear
in the National Enquirer. One insidious look
down from your mate in the gents and your gen-
italia will set the web alight for eternity. It just
won’t work. Julian Assange, in reviewing for the
New York Times a recent book in which Google’s
maestros share their vision of the world cautions
above all to “know your enemy”: “if you want a
vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed
Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces
— forever”. A debate also rages over whether to
allow face-identifiaction-technology on to the
Glasses. Villager looks forward to Google Glass
going the way of Google Plus, Google Wave and
Google Buzz.
Pro-eyed
Where do they get the models for those pro-life
campaigns, vigils etc? The child-like eyes focused
at the horizon, the perfect skin, the youthful ide-
alism. Upon reflection, they’re identikit Youth
Defence members – remember the now-elusive
Nic Mhathúna sisters, and the look they’re going
for is… foetal.
Buy, buy
The . acres veterinary-college site in the cen-
tre of Ballsbridge originally bought by developer
Ray Grehan for more than €m is now being
marketed by Jones Lang LaSalle with a guide price
of “over €m” – .% of the tumefac-
tion. Though of course Dunner paid even more
per acre for Hume House, nearby, it’s still rented
out so Villager reckons Grehan, newly-minted
free of his €m debts after a London bank-
ruptcy and – ludicrously – now ‘Africa-based’,
holds the record for worst buy.
Hackaleese
And you thought his attendance record in the
Seanad, before he abdicated, was the worst
thing about him. The UN Committee on Torture
has responded to the investigation by Martin
McAleese into the Magdalene Laundries. The
McAleese report, warmly received by religious
institutions and even the Irish Times’ Patsy
McGarry who can normally be relied on for
an anti-Catholic perspective, stated that no
evidence exists that abuse took place in the laun-
dries, despite the existence of hundreds of pages
of testimony describing incidents of physical and
mental cruelty considered by McAleese and his
team. Felice Gaer, vice-chair of the UN Committee
on Torture in a letter to the UN representative in
Ireland wrote: “the report lacks many elements
of a prompt, independent and thorough investi-
gation…specifically the committee has recieved
information from several sources highlighting
that the McAleese Report despite its length and
detail did not conduct a fully independent inves-
tigation into allegations of arbitrary detention,
forced labour or ill treatment”. It was Ms Gaer’s
Committee Against Torture and its report
into the laundries that forced the government to
launch an inquiry in the first place.
Gaer also wonders “whether the Quirke inves-
tigation process [on redress for survivors] will
have independent statutory powers, be trans-
parent and subject to an appeals process, and
independently monitored” and Ireland “intends
to set up an inquiry body that is independent with
definite terms of reference and statutory powers
to compel evidence and retain evidence from rel-
evant religious bodies”. Well, does it?
BMWhopper
All motor manufacturers manipulate their fuel-
villager
-€171m; now down to “over €15m”
consumption figures. An Taisce is calling on
the EU to resist the delaying tactics of these car
manufacturers and adopt the new global testing
standard which will become available in
and give consumers fuel-test results that they can
trust. BMW is responsible for the most inaccurate
and misleading fuel consumption data. They are
followed closely by Audi and Mercedes. A new
report, released by the International Council on
Clean Transportation, shows that the average
BMW uses % more fuel than the Bavarian car-
maker claims. Audi is next worst, at %, while
Mercedes/Daimler is not much better, using %
more fuel than ‘official test results’. Examples of
dodgy practices that make a mockery of the ‘offi-
cial’ EU efficiency test include:
l taping over the crevices between the car’s
doors (to reduce air drag);
l
over-inflating the tyres (to minimise rolling
resistance);
l
disconnecting the battery (because recharg-
ing it uses fuel);
l using Formula grade lubricant (to optimise
the engine);
l removing or disconnecting items such as the
radio aerial, the passenger side mirror, air
conditioning, etc.
Toyota’s manipulation is far less with a gap of
% between claimed efficiency and real-world
performance – hardly impressive.
Power (hosing) comes to Fermanagh
When it was first announced that this year’s G
summit would be held in Co Fermanagh, British
Prime Minister David Cameron grandiloquently
stated the potential for a “brilliant advertisement”
for the North. It is a “great place for business, a
great place for investment”, he orated from a
platform at a forklift truck manufacturer in Co
Armagh last November.
At the very least, it can appear to be a great
place for business. In the lead up to the summit,
a widespread policy of covering up dereliction
has been “accelerated”, according to Minister for
the Environment, Alex Attwood. This includes
painting, power-hosing, and the widely reported
flowerifying of once-prosperous business spaces
with window paintings. In the one-street town of
Belcoo, a former well known butcher’s shop had
coloured stickers applied to the windows sug-
gesting a packed meat counter and that business
is booming.
Overall, £m has been spent by Attwood’s
Department in the North.
It might be more difficult to paste over the
economic hardship of the scenic locale consid-
ering the five-star Lough Erne luxury hotel and
golf resort, which will host the summit, has been
in receivership since and is on the market
for €m.
In the Sunday Times’ attic
Does anyone know who John Burns is? Well, he’s
the guy who shapes around in the background of
the Sunday Times but never appears in the out-
side media or goes for the job of editor when it
becomes available there. Villager thinks he might
be deputy editor (Associate ed, Ed). Anyway he’s
had this ‘news’ ‘miscellany’ column to fill for the
last little while for the Murdoch-owned title. It’s
called Atticus (Atticus the Platonist, Atticus Finch,
Atticus Ross?) in an effort to make it sound even
more pompous than ‘Villager’. Anyway Villager
takes solace that at least he doesn’t have to resort
to stories about malapropisms and tea, Atticus’
staple. The thing is that he seems to have it in
for little Village, using his over-remunerated,
over-proofread Atticus vehicle as hammer. In
July last year Burns noted that we slagged off
Elaine Byrne’s serial misuse of words in a piece
that was missing a comma in the right place. Wow,
Mr Atticus. That was on a page of the Sunday
Times which misspelt tea “cosey” (more tea, by
the way). Then earlier this year, he noted that
Village’s Contributing Editor, John Gormley, had
tweeted that the Examiner group was about to
go under. Burns derided Village’s (actually now
quite respectable) finances and Gormley for get-
ting it so wrong. But two weeks later Gormley was
proved prescient and Burns exposed as just unin-
formed. Now Burns is back. He noted that Villager,
in our last edition, confounded The Great Leaders
of North Korea. Round to Burns. Kim Jong-un
has indeed replaced Kim Jong-il. But, not con-
tent with his victory, the elusive Burns said that,
because it runs a Village Idiot page, this magazine
is somehow “smug”. Smug, Mr Atticus?
The editor, incidentally puts it all down to
some legalistic correspondence he had to send
to Burns during his litigation-fetish period.
Grand Social Rage
Vincent Salafia (the man whose litigation let the
motorway through Tara off the hook) is back.
Long-time litigator, camper, JD, law lecturer in
Queen’s. Now promoter. He’s fronting an event
called Rage Against the Regime, which will be
launched at the Grand Social venue in Dublin’s
City Centre on June, and will run from .pm
until .am. It is a new monthly political event,
incorporating debate, live music, comedy, art,
film, spoken word, and dance. The event, which
takes place in three different rooms simulta-
neously, will be broadcast live on the Internet,
and anyone can participate via social network-
ing. Sounds good but do try to avoid Vincent
himself.
Meaningful surnames
Congratulations to Mount Anville’s Samantha
Power on her appointment as US ambassador to
the UN. And indeed to Tom Hayes, the new junior
minister in agriculture. Grist to Villager’s ongoing
campaign to have it recognised that meaningful
surnames reflect a truth. Like Burns.
G7 plus slug
Sam-Power
