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PB May-June 2023 May-June 2023 5
It seems so long ago that this column would
start with nice animal drawings of the US
President. Now all Villager’s Presidential
ideas are typed.
Bumpy for Trumpie
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, sitting on his
34-point indictment, may soon have company
in his pursuit of Trump, by prosecutors
elsewhere. Special counsel Jack Smith is
considering whether to bring federal charges
over Trump’s involvement in the January 6
Capitol insurrection, the wider Republican
eort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election
win and the classified materials discovered
in boxes at Mar-a-Lago. Fani Willis, the DA
in Fulton county, Georgia, is separately
investigating attempts by Trump and his
allies to overturn Biden’s win in that state. “I
just want to find 11,780 votes”, the outgoing
President manically implored during a
call to Republican Secretary of State Brad
Raensperger, referring to the number of
ballots needed to give him victory in the swing
state. New York Attorney General Letitia James
is suing Trump and the Trump Organization for
fraud in civil proceedings. James’ oce has
found more than 200 examples of misleading
asset valuations dating to between 2011 and
2021, and that Trump inflated his net worth by
billions of dollars, helping him to obtain lower
interest rates on loans and better insurance
coverage.
Other civil cases include two by E Jean Carroll,
a former Elle magazine ‘advice columnist’
accusing Trump of defaming her by denying
he raped her in a dressing room of New York’s
swanky Bergdorf Goodman department store
in late 1995 or early 1996. Catherine McKoy
and three others accuse Trumpof promoting
a scam marketing scheme on ‘The Celebrity
Apprentice’. The lawsuit alleges Trump
pocketed $8.8 million from the scheme —
but that they lost thousands of dollars.Eddy
Grant, the performer behind the 80s disco-
reggae mega-hit “Electric Avenue” is suing
for copyright infringement, claiming Trump
made illicit use of the song during his 2020
campaign. Trump himself is suing his un-mad
niece Mary and the New York Times claiming
they “maliciously conspired” against him,
breaching the confidentiality of the family’s
2001 settlement of the estate of Mary Trump’s
father, Fred Trump Sr. Trump lost a case in
a federal court in southern Florida in March
2022, alleging that Hillary Clinton and her
campaign sta conspired to harm his 2016
run for president by promoting a “contrived
Trump-Russia link”.
But, Villager can assure, none of it will be
enough to undo the clown President’s allure
for 40% of the American public. For his
appeal to them is how much he riles people
like you and Villager. To be undone the man
has to appear to the Redneck to have stopped
annoying us. It’s not going to happen short
perhaps of him leading his next administration
into an unsuccessful WW III.
And now the nominative determinism bit:
Apart from Bragg’s right to boast about his
indictments, we have Mr Jim Trusty, Trump
lawyer and his associate, Mr Todd Blanche,
who whitened, on his own, when he heard
Trump’s explanations, and David Pecker,
News Miscellany
Villager
owner of the National Enquirer who bought the
Stormy story, so he could dump it.
Bidin’ for Biden
As we await his doddering but at least sane
presence in our midst it’s no harm to look at
Trump’s successor’s…shocking incompetence
down the years:
In 1987, while campaigning for the 1988
Democrat presidential nomination Biden
claimed he attended law school on a full
academic scholarship, and that he graduated
in the top half of his class. On September
21, 1987, Biden admitted those claims are
inaccurate.
In his 1988 presidential bid, Biden
plagiarised portions of speeches made by
former President John F Kennedy, Senator
Robert F Kennedy and British Labour Party
leader Neil Kinnock. It eectively led to him
dropping out of the race.
In 1988, Biden maintained his ancestors
worked 12 hours a day underground, mining
coal. This claim was shown to be false.
In 2007, Biden claimed he was “shot at” in
Iraq. A Biden aide later told The Hillthat he
was not shot at in Iraq.
In 2008, Biden claimed he was a coal miner.
In 2019, Biden said “poor kids are just as
bright and just as talented as white kids” at
a town hall in Des Moines hosted by the Asian
and Latino Coalition. After a pause, he added:
Letitia James: suing Trump for New York
6 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 7
In January 2023, Biden claimed that under
former President Trump’s administration,
“only 3.5 million people had been – even had
their first vaccination”. A CNN fact check called
the claim “misleading at best”, and found that
the actual number was 19 million people.
On March 13, 2023, Biden claimed his
support of gay marriage began with an
“epiphany” during his senior year in high
school. Despite this claim, Biden opposed gay
marriage until his2008 run for the presidency.
After Biden’s first 100 days as president,
CNN wrote an article stating that compared
with Trump, things were “quieter”, and gave
a “rough count” of 29 inaccurate claims. The
article compared this to Donald Trump’s count
of214 inaccurate claimsin his first 100 days.
Higginses
First things first, after the American bit,
sad as they may be. It is Villager’s duty to
eulogise Kevin Higgins, regular contributor
around these parts and even in this column:
the lovely, wry, irrepressible and meticulous
poet, vitriolic enemy of political and artistic
hypocrisy, and socialist, died in Galway
University Hospital where, typically, he had
set himself up as artist in residence. His
last article in this magazine was a paean to
Michael D Higgins, and this least pompous
of men duly got the Presidential presence at
his obsequies and a generous obituary in the
Irish Times which he loathed. He died at 55 in
January.
Sheight
While keenly promoting higher densities as
part of a move to better quality and sustainable
development, this magazine has been banging
on for years about the dangers of high-rise for
Ireland’s fragile human-scale towns and cities.
Now Dublin is braced for topping out of the
“wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids”. It didn’t
make it better.
In 2019 Biden claimed “I have never
discussed with my son or my brother or
anyone else anything having to do with their
businesses, period”. A 2023 CNN report
reviewed the data from Hunter Biden’s
laptop and determined that Joe Biden did
have such discussions.
Biden claimed during the Democrat
candidate debates on January 14, 2020 that he
opposed theIraq Warfrom the beginning. He
repeated the mad claim several times.
In 2020, Biden claimed all of three times to
have been arrested attempting to visitNelson
Mandela in Soweto in the late 1970s along
with the then-ambassador to United
Nations,Andrew Young. Mandela was actually
held ina prisononRobben Island, and Biden
was not arrested while attempting to visit him.
Repeating the same joke of 2015 and 2019
on St Patrick’s Day2022 in the White House,
Mr Biden is heard saying: “I may be Irish, but
I’m not stupid” .
Biden used William Butler Yeats’ tedious
“changed utterly” quote some 21 times in
speeches as vice-president, according to the
White House archives. He, like Clinton, can’t
stop using the hope and history quote from
Heaney, maintaining its unfortunate status as
a tired cliché.
In Bidenesque slips, he has tended to call
the Easter rebellion the “first Rising”, and give
The Poem’s title as ‘Easter Sunday 1916’ – it
took place on a Monday, of course.
He made a couple of such slips elsewhere in
Europe, misattributing the phrase “they also
serve who only stand and wait” to “a famous
Irish poet” – it was English poet John Milton.
In Brussels, he described the Yeats quote as
“a stanza from a poem of an Irish poet who
we’ve just lost”. Given that Yeats died in 1939,
it’s possible that he confused him with the
more recently departed Other Laureate. In any
event he likes to josh that he quotes them not
because they’re Irish but because they’re the
best poets.
In defending the 2021 withdrawal from
Afghanistan, Biden claimed that Al Qaeda has
been eliminated from Afghanistan. This claim
was shown to be false.
In March 2022 Biden’s unscripted remark
that Putin “cannot remain in power” caught
advisors o guard.
In 2022, Biden claimed his son,Beau Biden,
died in Iraq. Beau Biden died from a brain
tumour in 2015.
In 2022, Biden claimed that as vice-
president, his father, Joseph Biden Sr. asked
that he award Frank Biden thePurple Heart,
and that his uncle told him “I don’t want the
damn thing”. Frank Biden died on November
28, 1999, and Joseph Biden Sr died on
September 2, 2002.
worst of them. Two twenty-two storey towers,
82m and 88 m high respectively rising on Tara
St, following the demise of Apollo House and
Hawkins House, two modernist monsters. The
first, by Marlet Property Group, will cosily be
known as College Square but Ronan Group’s
phallus, to be called “Aqua Vetro”, on the
corner of George’s, Dublin’s ugliest, Quay,
and Tara St, inevitably wins on priapism and
will be higher. Of course it will be a “gateway”
between the historic city and Docklands, or
in other words it abruptly terminates, and
dumps on, the historic city. According to its
marketing: “Others look up to you, impressed
by your principles. The high standards you
set for yourself can only be echoed by the
architecture you occupy”. Marlet’s largely
commercial scheme has just 58 apartments
while, after getting the original four storeys
of hotel changed to oces, Ronan’s is 93%
oces, the rest retail with a restaurant. No
residential. Which we actually need.
Newly erected tower cranes with jibs showing intended
height of Ronan (left) and Marlet (right) skyscrapers
Ronan’s George’s Quay office
development, now rising
6 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 7
giving the entire game away on the writer, his
publisher and their Project. It was headlined:
“There is a mismatch between what Irish
people believe is happening and what is
actually going on”.
Useless landlords
It’s weird how we never hear from landlords
who are selling up because property prices
are at a massive insane crescendo. Just the
allegedly beleaguered ones. Villager sees
no good from landlordism and agrees with
the usually politically
hackneyed Sally
Rooney, in an informed
piece in the Irish
Times, that landlords
have no role to play in
alleviating the lack of
accommodation and
that “in the longer term, the State needs to
start moving our rental stock out of the hands
of private investors, and into the hands of
State housing bodies”. A survey by the Real
Estate Alliance indicated that 35 per cent
of properties for sale in 2021 belonged to
landlords; the average figure in previous
decades was about 20 per cent.
Begin again
Marian Finnegan, the head of Sherry
FitzGerald shared her thoughts on the recent
lifting of the eviction ban with the Irish Times’
uneven political podcast: “The ban served no
purpose, all it did was kick the can down the
road”, she said. You could the same of going
to the doctor.
Fáilte’s backside
Is there any more horrible building complex in
Ireland than Dublin Airport? All the structures
look like they’re the back of the building. It’s
like it was designed to set low expectations for
the visitor.
herald a merger of two parties whose policies
are indistinguishable.
English man in Meath
On January 12 Leo Varadkar said he would
seek legal advice on whether former minister
Damien English, in many ways a decent and
approachable fellow, breached planning laws
by failing to declare his ownership of one
house he owned in Castlemartin, Co Meath, in
a planning application to the County Council
for a one-o rural home nearby that led him
to fall on his sword and go as Minister of State
for Enterprise. The rural development section
of the Meath County Development Plan 2007-
2013 outlines the criteria for non-farmers who
wish to secure planning permission.
It says people considered local to an area
include those who can claim to be local “and
who do not possess a dwelling or who have
not possessed a dwelling in the past, in which
they have resided or who possess a dwelling
in which they do not currently reside”. Villager
can assure him that he not only breached
planning laws he is, having got a very valuable
permission for a new house on the basis of a
material false representation, vulnerable to
prosecution for fraud. He is a “person who
dishonestly, with the intention of making a
gain for himself or herself or another, or of
causing loss to another, by any deception
induces another to do or refrain from doing an
act”. It seems important and fair to demand
publication of this advice, Villager would
think.
Liar but not fraudster
On the other hand Niall Collins, also a victim
of the marauding and fearsome Ditch website,
may have lied like a conman but he does
not seem to have benefited from it since the
lie, that he was living with his parents and
therefore had a need for a new house, does
not seem to have been material. At the time
the Limerick Development Plan 1999-2005,
which Villager fished out of extreme obscurity,
does not seem to have considered that “need”
was any sort of requirement for building in the
countryside.
Bah ern!
Why is the Irish Times rehabilitating Bertie
Ahern? An Easter Monday interview by Justine
McCarthy allowed him uncontrolled space
to moan about the scrupulously grounded
findings of the Planning Tribual which he could
have challenged a decade ago. The facts don’t
wither though all around them may.
Best explainers to the Irish
In that same eccentric and complacent forum
in a Saturday Column recently came the most
Irish Times David McWilliams moment ever,
Provisional Greens
Villager is as unimpressed by the Green Party
as the next man, and not particularly fired up
by the dissident acts of some who don’t spend
enough time attacking their party’s scandalous
failure to deliver its meat on climate change
and biodiversity loss. As Village was going to
print, Patrick Costello was going away without
writing the promised article on his party piece,
CETA.
Nevertheless both he and Neasa Hourigan,
who did turn up to interview in the last edition
of Village, are thoughtful contributors to the
discourse. Hourigan was subject to an assault
in the Indo headlined ‘Neasa Hourigan the
Green Party TD who wanted to keep ban on
evictions raised concerns about proposals
for more than 5000 new homes in her
constituency’. But surely it’s a tribute to any
person of environmental sensibility that they
would object to anything that is unsustainable
in their constituency: and everybody knows
that history will not look kindly on the sort of
developments rising in Dublin’s North Inner
City. The sort of people who don’t care about
quality of development along with vested
interests have started pursuing the idea
that it’s unGreen to object to developments.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, for example, has
stated that “the people who are loudest about
the housing crisis are the ones who are most
likely to object to your home”. He says he has
not objected to any planning applications
in his own constituency in seven years as he
could not do so “in good conscience” during
a housing emergency. Conveniently too, he no
longer lives there.
Green too
Villager likes the cut of Holly Cairns and
couldn’t disagree with anything she’s ever
said, all of which is properly leftist and never
lacks for radical environmentalism. He’s
nervous that she’s over script-dependent
and is fearful how she would fare if Varadkar
unleashed his inner nastiness on her.
Red and Dead
Despite Anne Harris’s enterprising attempt
to make the case that Labour is setting a new
and exciting political agenda for the country,
it is notable that it is not registering in the
polls. Strangely Ivana Bacik rarely seems to
understand the advantage to the listener or
viewer of her answering the question put,
which is a pity because the party and she in
particular has always had an impressive head
for policy. Labour needs to do everything it
can to dump the aura of insincerity which has
festered since its last uncelebrated outing in
government. It is that that prevents the Social
Democrats making the obvious moves to
arse of airport
8 May-June 2023 May-June 2023 PB
Pique peaked in 1789
France spends 14% of itsGDPon public pensions,
nearly double the OECD average. Villager,
normally not one to indulge non-left ideologues,
sympathises with Macron trying to even things
out a little for the current generation by reducing
the retirement age from 62 to 64 when it’s at,
and staying at, 66 for a state pension in Ireland.
France seems like a country that peaked in 1789
and doesn’t know how to channel revolutionary
ardour to egalitarian eect.
Us and them
As predicted before by Village, it seems for
the moment that Russia’s eorts in Ukraine
have been almost exhausted. Bakhmut has
been about the extent of it. And Ukraine is
now set for a Spring oensive, though leaked
documents suggest the US is nervy. Of course
Putin has several aces, the most dangerous
of which are almost unspeakable so nothing
can be relied upon. Meanwhile, Leo Varadkar
says “Putin will stop where we stop him”. No.
Assuming he is stopped it will be where they
stop him. Ireland is militarily neutral.
Derelict opinions
There is talk about redeveloping vacant and
derelict properties, but a report from the Society
of Chartered Surveyors Ireland points out that
this is not financially viable in many cases. But
that’s because surveyors don’t have a clue
how to salvage the best of historic buildings.
Professionals love the maximalist approach
but good conservation can be cheap: if it’s
not broken don’t fix it; if it is broken fix it don’t
replace it. Let’s get a report from a body that
understands minimalism. Let’s hear from those
who think rather then survey.
Regulati on and on
The UK isn’t going to make a bonfire of all
those boring EU Regulations in the end.
Civil servants were going to make the call on
which rules were worth saving and even the
maddest Brexiter had to concede that was
less democratic than allowing the EU draw
them up in the first place.
The puss on that octopus
A plan to build the world’s first octopus
farm has sparked concern among scientists
over the welfare of the awkwardly intelligent
creatures. The intensive farm on Spain’s
Canary Islands would raise about a million
octopuses annually for food, according to
confidential documents seen by the BBC.
Some scientists call the proposed icy-water
slaughtering method “cruel” but Nueva
Pescanova, a Spanish-based multinational
with multiple arms, spinelessly said it
wouldn’t waste the ink defending itself.
Just another case for KRW
Village’s editor’s defamation action against
Leo Varadkar and the Sunday Times which, in
August 2022, published allegations among
other things falsely implying that he was
a Putinite trundles along. Michael Smith
is represented by KRW Law in Belfast. That
firm once represented Gemma O’Doherty in
long lapsed defamation proceedings taken
against Village. But it also represents the
woman who was pressurised to meet Kerry
Judge James O’Connor, Garda whistleblower
Eve Doherty and former ISME chief Frank
Mulcahy, all of whose stories of woe have
featured in this magazine. And the ‘Hooded
Men’, Relatives for Justice and victims of the
Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings.
Unusually Varadkar is being represented
in his personal capacity by the Chief State
Solicitor replacing the redoubtable Kevin
O’Higgins, scion of the great Fine Gael family,
who normally does these things for the Party
and its leader. Part of the delay has been
serving the Sunday Times (Ireland) which is
in fact News Corp, based in London.
Ireland: relatively unwell
Actual individual consumption, abbreviated
asAIC, refers to all goods and services actually
consumed by households. According to EU
statistics register, Eurostat, it encompasses
consumer goods and services purchased
directly by households, as well as services
provided by non-profit institutions and
thegovernmentfor individual consumption
(e.g., health and education services). In
international comparisons, the term is
usually preferred over the narrower concept
of household consumption, because
the latter is influenced by the extent to
which non-profit institutions and general
government act as service providers.
According to Eurostat: “althoughGDPper
capita is an important and widely used
indicator of countries’ level of economic
welfare, consumption per capita may be
more useful for comparing the relative
welfare of consumers across various
countries.
AIC per capita is usually highly correlated
with GDP per capita, because AIC is, in
practice, by far the biggest expenditure
component of GDP”. Not in Ireland. Eurostat
explains: “The high level of GDP per capita
in Ireland can be partly explained by the
presence of large multinational companies
holding intellectual property. The associated
contract manufacturing with these assets
contributes to GDP, while a large part of
the income earned from this production is
returned to the companies’ ultimate owners
abroad”.
In 2016 Eurostat estimated that the
material wellbeing of people living in
Ireland was 97% of the EU average. By
2022 this figure had fallen sharply to just
88% of the EU average. Over the last three
years, a clear increase in AIC per capita
relative to the EU average was registered in
most Eastern European member states and
Denmark. In contrast, the most noticeable
decreases were recorded in Ireland (88% in
2021 vs 94% in 2019), Spain (85% vs 91%)
and Malta (83% vs 86%).
GDP per capita ranged from 55% of EU
average in Bulgaria to 277% in Luxembourg.
And 220% in Ireland. Not that you’d notice.
Followed by the leader
Villager misses Broadsheet.ie and its
exquisite Barcelona-based former host, John
Ryan. But he takes a minor comfort that the
satiric and penetrating dormant website’s
twitter account follows only two accounts
of which one is Village (hello @cillcarban,
Florida-based contemporary painter,
strangely, the other).
Eve Dohery
