6  February 2016
News Miscellany
Villager
NEWS
Electi On
Right, Villager thinks there’ll be a hung Dáil.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will struggle to work
out whether they should coalesce, risking their
exposure as ideological charlatans and the
long-term growth of Sinn Féin. Another elec-
tion within a year. The prognosis is tentative
since around here there is no worse crime than
a discredited prediction.
Quite a bit at stake
In which spirit… so Bernie Sanders and Donald
Trump come out punching from New Hampshire
and it’s cockle-warming to see the Bush and
Clinton dynasties with their inequality-indul
-
gent ideas formed a generation ago, in serious
trouble, even if it does signal the return of the
Angry White Man, and his supporters.
Sanders’ agenda, of course, has obvious
appeal in the right-on Village while Trump is
dangerous in an old-fashioned FASCIST way.
Assuming for the sake of mischief a Sanders-
Trump election-off, for Villager the victor can
regrettably (and terminally) only be Trump.
Sanders is too ugly and Trump too rich for any
other upshot. So what happens then?
The only force in global volatility that is more
unhinged than Trump is Islamic State whose
principal religio-geo-strategic goal is dooms-
day precipitated by a battle in Syrian city of
Dabiq, near Aleppo. It is here, the Prophet
reportedly said, that the armies of Rome (ie the
West) will set up their camp. The armies of
Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s
Waterloo.
After its battle in Dabiq the caliphate,
already in 2016 nicely ensconced under Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, will expand and sack Istan-
bul. An anti-Messiah will come and kill a vast
number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just
5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem.
Then Jesus (Jesus!) - the second-most-
revered prophet in Islam - will return to Earth,
whack the anti-Messiah, and lead the Muslims
to victory.
After a series of domestic putsches and for-
eign-policy cataclysms Villager foresees an
insurgent Trump, toupée to the sun on a white
charger leading the Crusaders into battle at
Dabiq. He will lose but be revealed as the Anti-
Messiah before final wipe-out at Jerusalem. It
is not clear whether the Donald will consider
the big new status recompense for the
loserism.
Jesus and Mohammed will together sort out
the souls and the Bushes’ and Clintons’ Wall
Street millions will be useless to them.
Hello you
Former Anglo CEO, David Drumm, is to wing his
way back from breaking rocks in a Federal peni-
tentiary, with Fintan O’Toole’s misplaced
endorsement for a man incarcerated in the
lucre-lionising country to which he has fled,
blowing up a tail wind. Drumm has announced
that he hopes to wear a tag rather than go to
prison here. Villager has an idea. How about we
wear the tag and he gives us back the money?
Valentine wishes
The words ''My heart is, and always will be,
yours'' from 'Sense And Sensibility' have been
voted the most romantic line from romantic lit-
erature, film and TV drama.
They are uttered by Edward Ferrars to Elinor
Dashwood in director Ang Lee's 1995 screen
version of Jane Austen's classic novel with
Emma Thompson's Oscar-winning screenplay,.
It was the top choice of 2,000 inane British
women who were polled for the cliché-blind TV
channel ‘Drama’. Villager resolves to try it out
on Mrs Villager.
The scene in the 1997 epic 'Titanic' where a
frozen, fearful and (Villager was happy to note)
doomed Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio,
tells his effervescent Rose played by Kate Win-
slet, ''promise me you'll survive'' (inevitably)
came third.
Bliss and the insolvent
luxury car company
‘Former Model’ Glenda Gilson opened up to
'VIP' in a February cover photoshoot about her
life a year since marrying ‘Rob McNaughton’.
The cover (Villager claims never to get beyond
it) gushes: “After 18 months of wedded bliss
the gorgeous star of Xposé reveals that staying
in is her new going out”. Admittedly the former
vainquese of bearded developer Johnny Ronan
has a lot to stay in from.
Gilson mystifyingly fails to mention that
during her blissful year she was barred from
acting as a company director for five years.
Glenda and her brother Damien were in charge
of Gilson Motor Company Ltd until 2011 when it
was wound up by the High Court for failing to
pay €141,937 to the Revenue.
Judge Paul Gilligan said Glenda was
“deceived” by her sibling in the “improper way
he ran the affairs of the business” which
traded in high value vehicles and operated a
car parking and valeting service at Sir John
Rogerson’s Quay. Some of the money is owed
to Ronan, who has – in other news - expressed
the view that NAMA operates on the spiffing
principle of Arbeit Macht Frei.
You get the Tsar you deserve
Ronan and his former business partner in
Treasury Holdings, Richard Barrett, are back in
business and back in the media, as if they had
never cavorted malignly around boomtown
threatening all-comers (Barrett once said he
“had his foot on the throat” of poor Chicago-
nurtured Garrett Kelleher) and in the end cost
us all a packet.
Barrett was even allowed to drawlingly pon-
tificate on the Marian Finucane radio
programme, about his vision for social housing
something he has in the past been very reluc-
tant to provide in Treasury schemes.
Apocalypse
Sense and Sensibility pucker up
  February 2016 7
He told Marian, always agog at a bit of devel-
oper vim, “There is an enormous humanitarian
crisis of epic proportions which is causing a
great deal of human suffering. It is proportion
-
ally much larger than the Syrian refugee crisis”
with up to 300,000 people on the housing list.
Barrett also tells a provocative anecdote of a
local authority renting “a house at €8000 a
month on one of Dublin’s two best roads to
house a homeless mother with four children,
costing the state a fortune”.
But, intriguingly, he has the answer: “I have
formed a series of investment companies, (in
Housing, Social Housing, Health Care, Renew-
able Energy) [all, for some reason, called
Bartra]. We will build these facilities renting
them to the Irish Government”. He sees it as a
sort of “social payback because I don’t need
the money”. He wants a Tsar to oversee the
crisis. Villager doesn’t want to be presumptu-
ous and Richard will be busy, what with China
and all that dodginess and machismo to venti-
late, but he is himself a pre-eminent candidate,
if too shy to say so. Otherwise, Johnny? Michael
O’Leary? Ben Dunne? All Tsars in Villager’s
mind, already.
Treasured memories
While we're here let's not forget that Treasury
Holdings went bankrupt owing €2.7bn, €1.7bn
to Nama alone.
This suggests they cost the country around
€700m. It also seems almost small-minded to
dwell on the fact that in March 2012 three sub-
sidiaries of Treasury Holdings transferred their
interest in a company called CREO to another
Treasury subsidiary called Daylasin in return
for €18.6 million in unsecured loans notes (in
effect IOUs). Nama believed the shares were
worth €28.3m. Treasury then transferred its
100% interest in Daylasin to Barrett and Ronan
for €100,000. Barrett also took over two other
companies for something close to one-fifth of
their real value. Any nastiness on the criminal
front was averted by a civil settlement.
In the end we'd be better with less pontifica-
tion, less dicing with fraud, and our money
repaid.
Finagling Finucane
Former Justice Minister and eminent senior
counsel, McDowell announced on a recent
Marian Finucane programme that he regrets
international inequality. The thing is that when
he had power he consciously and successfully
promoted inequality. In 2004 he told ‘The
Economist Survey’ of Ireland that “Fifteen
years ago, political conversation was about
economic failure and poverty. Since then,
absolute poverty has fallen sharply. Inequality
is as an inevitable part of the society of incen-
tives that Ireland has, thankfully, become”.
Villager believe if you disgrace yourself on
as central a political issue as inequality there
is no come back. Being discredited, either you
cast yourself into the political wilderness or
you apologise.
McDowell also defended, without demur
from the typically regressive Finucane panel,
his 2006 vision of abolishing stamp duty which
would have further inflated property market.
Finucane continues to pack her radio show
with PR and lawyer guests. No-one really
knows why.
Michael, Michael and Michael
Mind you, Villager is biased. McDowell is rep-
resenting Michael McLoone – former Donegal
County Manager and focus of the ongoing
Department of the Environment ‘review’ on
Donegal Planning - in a defamation action
against Village. Proceedings were intiated over
a year ago but seemed to be moribund. Until in
January McLoone’s lawyers decided to try to
undermine one of Village’s principal defences,
that it was reporting court proceedings, in par-
ticular the affidavit that former Donegal senior
planner, Gerard Convie, had opened in court
which made serious allegations about
McLoone and others. McLoone has recently
obtained, by order, the digital audio recording
of the court proceedings in the case Convie
successfully took against the Department of
the Environment after it dismissed his com-
plaint about the propriety of Donegal planning
as ungrounded in evidence. The recording
shows that no affidavit was opened.
But that is because McLoone’s lawyers
asked for a recording of proceedings for the
wrong day.
Sugar, Taoiseach?
It is scandalous that the banking inquiry didn't
even ask the banks precisely how their liquid-
ity people allowed catastrophic liquidity
problems to build up.
Meanwhile whistleblower, now-Greece-
based Jonathan Sugarman, who does know,
has been out and about bumping into Enda
Kenny.
Sugarman introduced himself as the missing
link in the banking inquiry and the Taoiseach
listened attentively, in a Dublin café. Before,
according to the whistleblower, going pale. Sug-
arman, whose career was devastated by his
bravery in disclosing breaches of banking regu-
lations by Unicredit Bank was mysteriously
excluded from giving evidence to the inquiry.
Not that Enda cared.
Arise and follow… Seán
Charlie Haughey's son, unexciting Sean, has
a range of shares in banks, oil companies and
pharmaceutical companies but has insisted
that his extensive portfolio will not pose a con-
flict of interest if he is elected again as a Fianna
Fáil TD. The former minister of state owns
shares in 42 different companies including
Amazon, Apple, Burberry and McDonald’s.
Charlie, of course, received the equivalent
of €45m in gifts between 1979 and 1996 from
some of Ireland’s richest men. On one occasion
Haughey sent the chairman of the revenue com-
missioners to meet supermarket mogul Ben
Dunne as a result of which capital gains tax for
the tycoon’s family was reduced by £22m in
return for payments of £282,500 from Dunne
to Haughey. The Moriarty Tribunal also found
that Haughey stole a "sizeable proportion"
from the Brian Lenihan medical fund – Lenihan
was Haughey’s loyal deputy who was dying
from Liver cancer.
It is surprising Charlie's family was not pur-
sued for any of the €45m proceeds of the sale
of Kinsealy, his Georgian estate, since some of
it was paid for with tainted funds. And now it
seems, Junior, has converted some of his share
to stocks.
Topping up the pension
Dick Roche, former Fianna Fáil Minister for the
Environment and European Affairs and annual
€50k-government-pensioner, has declared cli-
ents worth €500,000 in his filing for the EU
Transparency Register. These include a con-
tract with Chinese mobile-phone company
Huawei worth €100-200,000, and contracts
with Deloitte and a company producing dis
-
credited biofuels.
Since his ignominious demise in 2011 Roche
has headed the Skill Set agency. Thankfully it
detains him in Brussels much of the time.
Mind you, very day Alan Kelly continues in
office as Environment Minister, Dick Roche
looks better.
Not missed, but better then Kelly

Loading

© 2015 Village Magazine

Back to Top