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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 October 2016
News Miscellany
NEWS
Years after they banned trucks from the river-
side, Villager’s principal experience of Ormond
Quay in front of the Village office is still really
just somewhere to get run over. The gentlemen
from Eircom have kindly removed the two drug
dealers’ telephone boxes outside the door, so
urine from the city’s drunkards can now flow
undiverted into the gutters but it is still difficult
to be enthusiastic.
It is very difficult to love the River Liffey. It’s
not somewhere from which you hear the peals
of joyous children at swim or at play.
This magazine has in the past promoted the
idea of a jungle from O’Connell St to Heuston
but the city fathers will never do anything until
it has been tried and tested in Leicester and
Wolverhampton and a decade or two passed.
So it is no surprise that plans for pedestriani-
saton, less still greening, of the quays have
been botched for want of civic imagination and
civic bottle.
Nevertheless it is encouraging that Dublin
City Council, is keeping its nerve on a quayside
cycle route, for the moment.
In the teeth of residents’ pleas, it intends, we
hear, to permanently ban private cars and lor-
ries from Ellis and Arran quays, on the north
side of the river, and to divert vehicular traffic
for 1.5km through the residential streets of
Stoneybatter, Dublin’s Greenwich Village, and
Smithfield, Dublin’s Times Square.
While diverting traffic into residential areas
is, as Councillor Mannix Flynn says, unethical,
there is no option and the hope must be that all,
especially the discommoded residents, will
make life so difficult for blasted cars that they
simply stay at home, or in the ground.
The case that Brexit was about the underclass,
globalisation, and rising inequality has been
inconveniently assailed by poll data presented
by Professor Danny Dorling, Professor of Geog
-
raphy at Oxford University in a report for BBC’s
'Newsnight'. "The vote to leave Europe was
largely a middle class, English vote", he has
concluded.
As part of his ongoing quest to link surnames
to appropriate occupations or behaviour, Vil-
lager notes:
May
Theresa May is most interesting for whether she
may Not.
Gunning
Fatima Gunning, an anti-abortion zealot,
recently posed in a Repeal jumper with a banner
designed to discredit her opponents, appealing
implausibly for “abortion for terminally ill
babies”.
October 2016 5
Jennifer Aniston's inter-
ests are well mediated by
her pal Chelsea Handler
who, among other things,
recently ripped into pretty
Angelina Jolie on her Netflix
comedy show, berating her husband for
getting involved with her in the first place.
The outspoken TV host called Jolie a “f***ing
lunatic” who had driven badly-behaved Brad Pitt
to booze and pot as an escape. She went on:
“Maybe because he could have been spending
the last 12 years at Lake Como hanging out with
George Clooney and Matt Damon, instead of
being stuck in a house with 85 kids speaking 15
different languages”.
Someone noticed Village
Donald Trump quoted and linked to a profile of
Denis O’Brien written by the editor and pub-
lished in Village in the candidate’s press release
indicting the media mogul’s links to the Clintons.
The passage stated that O’Brien “is a mate of
former President, Bill Clinton. Indeed he flew him
to the recent Dublin Castle beano in his jet, and
later paid the tab for a late-nighter in the Unicorn
restaurant, with Clinton, the strangely ever-pre-
sent Séamus Heaney, and 22 others”.
Irish Times
A piece by investigative Titan, Peter Murtagh, in
the Irish Times documenting Trump's press
release recorded the other six organs cited but
strangely omitted Village, which is usually hys
-
terical about the Irish Times and once said its
nice editor, Kevin O'Sullivan,
should resign when his fail-
ure to publish part of the Dáil
transcript of Catherine Mur-
phy’s allegations about Denis
O’Brien’s banking arrangments
was found, as it surely later was,
by the High Court to be legally with-
out any grounds.
And we can add Trump to the list of people who
may have commissioned the mysterious Red
Flag dossier on O’Brien!
The media, led by RTÉ continually report that
Denis O’Brien still “challenges” the findings of
the Moriarty Tribunal that he channelled
£867,000 to Michael Lowry after Lowry had
granted the third mobile-phone licence to
O’Brien’s Esat in 1995. Since there is no sign of
a legal challenge to the Tribunal’s findings –
indeed a challenge would be out of time - the
word can only be being used in a sense so weak
that it is scarcely worth bothering with.
The IMF is urging governments to tackle record
global debt of $152tr, 225% of global GDP and
rising, with the private sector responsible for
two-thirds of the total. The debt level is more
than twice the size of the global economy and
unprecedented as a proportion of GDP, the Fund
says. So if the world wanted a mortgage, it
wouldn’t get one.
The EU is sponsoring free Interrail passes for all
18-year-olds. Why not one for everyone in the
UK?
Villager’s favourite soccer and Olympics admin-
istrator, John Delaney, issued a release saying
he “had no knowledge or awareness of PRO 10
or its position as the Olympic Council of Ireland’s
ticket reseller”. It is strange that he would have
no knowledge of it as PRO 10 has donated over
€50k in sponsorship to the OCI of which Delaney
is eminent Vice-President.
A policy introduced in 2012 by former minister
for social protection Joan Burton, of compelling
lone parents to look for work could make families
poorer, according to a Government-commis-
sioned report from the UNESCO Child and Family
Research Centre at NUI Galway. It was part of the
move since the late 1980s from passive to active
labour market policies within the Irish welfare
state.
‘Lone Parents and Activation, What Works and
Why’ includes a review of international experi-
ence of activating lone parents. Joan Burton’s
instincts were too harsh.
Since 2012, thousands of lone parents have
been moved off the One Parent Family Payment
– on which they do not have to seek work – when
their youngest child reaches seven. Those whose
youngest is between seven and 14 move onto
Jobseeker’s Transitional payment and engage in
training, while those whose youngest is 14 or
over must move onto Jobseeker’s Allowance and
seek work.
The research suggests that a package of sup
-
ports is the most effective way to assist lone
parents into sustainable employment and
ensure income levels are sufficient to lift them
and their children out of poverty.
This includes employment supports, financial
supports, education and training, and support
towards the cost of childcare.
Fifty construction cranes were visible over the
centre of Dublin on 1 October from the seventh
floor of the Irish Times building on Tara Street
over which apparently they were dropping crates
of used fivers addressed to the Property Supple-
ment. Bertie Ahern used to gauge the city’s
success from the cranes on the skyline. As min-
ister for finance in the early 1990s, he used to
count them from the top floor of the Central Bank
in Dame Street (one…two), when he was not
counting his dig-out cash.
The Irish Times’ Tara Brady is normally much
more demure than her partner in film review and
elsewhere, contumelious Donald Clarke.
6 October 2016
However, she has just knifed John Michael
McDonagh, the writer-director behind 'The [bril-
liant] Guard' and 'Calvary', for his latest movie,
'War on Everyone'. She let loose: describing it as
“wavering between a hard-boiled detective
milieu and a half-baked 1980s CHIPs spoof… a
jamboree of bad ideas and trunk shots”. Noting
that McDonagh has previously faced criticism for
his depiction of women as enfeebled victims,
Brady notes that "the two female love interests
are thoroughly objectified. Later, both homosex-
uality and transsexualism are used as
punchlines".
The Mahon Tribunal recommended the creation
of an ‘Independent Planning Regulator’ to… reg
-
ulate planning, independently. The government
has just published a Planning and Development
Bill: “to establish an office, to be known as the
Office of the Planning Regulator”.
So far, so good.
Villager deployed the convenient ‘search’
device to see how many times he could find the
word “regulate” in the Bill but alas this will be
the sort of Regulator who does not regulate. The
Minister will do all that tedious stuff. Actually the
Minister will not do all that tedious stuff. No one
will. The Regulator will “evaluate and carry out
assessments relating to planning matters and
provide observations and recommendations in
relation to those matters, conduct reviews and
examinations and training programmes and
research”.
With all that on its plate regulation would have
been a step too far. For the regulator.
The recent joint proposal from the French and
German governments calling for the establish-
ment of a permanent EU military Headquarters
as well as a common EU defence budget is a sig
-
nificant step in increasing the militarisation of
the EU. The Italian government has called for a
"powerful and usable EU force" while Commis
-
sion President Juncker has stated that “Europe
needs to toughen up. Nowhere is this truer than
in our defence policy”. These calls come at a time
of increased EU/NATO cooperation and
announcements of big increases in EU military
spending and supports for the arms industry by
the Commission and Council Presidents. This is
on top of the €200bn a year already spent in EU
states in researching and developing weapons
and military technology. Paul Murphy of the AAA
extracted a strangulated admission from An Tao-
iseach in the Dáil that the new headquarters was
not a worry for the government.
A simple strike by Polish women is the measured
response to efforts by Poland’s Parliament, the
Sejm, to legislate for a new, absolute ban on
abortion. The Parliament is 73% male, despite
some useful gender quotas, still less than Ire-
land’s 77.8%, mind you.
Anyone literary who uses the word 'wonderfully'
should be barred from public discourse, Villager
has concluded. John Banville, who claims to be
a wordsmith but who wrestles on occasion with
smugness, is to be found on the cover of 'Space
to Think; Ten years of the Dublin Review', desig
-
nating the, certainly worthy, collection:
“wonderfully rich, intelligent and informative”.
A complaint has been lodged with the Charities
Commission by Brian Montaut of the ‘Architects’
Alliance of Ireland’ against the Royal Institute of
the Architects of Ireland (RIAI). He claims that the
RIAI’s founding purpose, as a private organisa-
tion for the protection and promotion of its club
members, precludes it from claiming it acts as a
charity when it promotes good or great
architecture.
Media coverage of the killing of Michael McCoy,
has emphasised the number of objections and
judicial reviews he launched in protection of the
Dublin Mountains, where he lived, though by all
accounts his submissions were measured and
mostly successful. Seán O’Rourke said he had
died in a “land dispute”. But Michael McCoy died
for the environment not for land, and should be
celebrated as a martyr for, perhaps, the cause of
our time.
NEWS
October 2016 7
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