Villager - Village Magazine

4 December-January 2014

Villager

Meaningful surnames

Chris Green is the Greens’ press

oﬃcer. Brian Warﬁeld is vocalist and

lead songwriter of the bellicose and

irrendentist Wolfe Tones. Alex Proud owns

a club in London’s Camden that refused

to take a booking from homophobes

who sought their own seating area away

from the club’s mainly gay clientele.

Ireland not France

Village marched a little on 10 December.

He was struck by how disparate the crowd

was – not one that will be corralled into any

particular new movement, he concluded.

Passing McDonalds on O’Connell St he

noticed not that the windows had been

smashed by the mob – clearly they hadn’t,

but that a queue tailed on to the street.

Defaming the old boys

“I came from a poor Irish, not particularly

well educated background… I am in fact

‘a pleb’”, Bob

Geldof said in

evidence in

the Old Bailey

libel trial on

behalf of his

friend, former

Tory chief

whip Andrew

Mitchell.

Not

particularly

well

educated…

a pleb? A strange claim from an alumnus

of Blackrock College. We’re not talking

Eamon Dunphy here. What do the lads

in the Union, lobbying furiously for

maintenance of the exclusive entrance

policies that made them what they

are feel about the deprecation?

Mates of Yates

Cancer survivor, Chris Donoghue –

presenter, along with former Fine Gael

ﬁnance spokesperson Ivan Yates – of

Newstalk’s breakfast show, is heading

for UTV as news anchor in the new year.

In June he was the ﬁrst to tweet that Fine

Gaeler Leo Varadkar had been appointed

minister for health – he’s his beau.

Nice hair too

Fionnán Sheahan for editor of the Sindo.

He has a nice head on him which is always

important for that clever balance of

tabloid and thoughtful. Barry Egan and

the late Aengus Fanning also notable

exponents of the unusual head. And

Fionnán so good with Vincent Browne.

How about just thanks?

The RTÉ news equivalent of hasta la vista

is “thanks, indeed” and its principal

exponent, Brian Dobson. While we’re on

newscasters, who does Sharon Ní Bheoláin

pout at so intensely, while her counterpart

presenter – usually Dobbo – is talking?

Villager hopes it is him. Thanks indeed.

Bad hair

Villager wanted to run a regular piece

on men’s hair, ‘hairpiece’. Starting with

a special on dyeing applied, they think

undetectably by vain middle-aged

alphas. But the editor wouldn’t let him.

Right Tone

All proﬁts from the Wolfe Tones’ ‘Joe

McDonnell’, popularised by Ireland’s

biggest eejit, the bard John Delaney,

go to the Simon Community. Fintan

O’Toole famously assailed the band for

expressing hatred of all things English

and whipping up violent nationalism.

Perhaps making his point their rendition

of ‘A Nation Once Again’ by Thomas Davis

was voted the number one song of all

time in a BBC World Service poll in 2002.

We can assume they won’t be fronting

any heart-tugging ads for Simon this

Christmas, or even doing backing tracks

Someone please just cut it

The president of University College Cork,

Dr Michael Murphy, who is paid €232,000

a year, has described how the heads of

Irish universities “are as challenged

at paying their bills as anyone else”.

“Many people won’t understand this

because of the scale diﬀerence. But

the stress on people is the same”. If he

doesn’t know that the scale diﬀerence

works only one way, what is he doing in

a profession where you’re supposed to

think? Come to think of it, what is the point

of University Presidents? Ed Walsh. Ed.

Greatest or only?

The greatest good it looks like the

markets will ever do is cause Russia

prots

from

current

single go to

the Simon

Community

December-January 2014 5

to jettison Vladimir Putin.

Fishing in January

Village is now publishing monthly

– except in January and August,

making ten times annually. So there

will be no edition next month.

Goodish, and very bad

The House of Representatives in the US has

just agreed a $1.1 trillion (€887 billion)

spending Bill that would avert a second

government shutdown in just over a year.

It also reverses a key provision of the

2010 Dodd-Frank Act to allow big banks

to trade high-risk ﬁnancial instruments

such as swaps and derivatives under the

cover of the Federal Deposit Insurance

Corporation – ie the taxpayer – with

funds guaranteed by the public. The Act

required banks to shift their riskiest

operations into new entities so that

federal protection for deposits would not

embrace these stock market gambles.

Wrong again, and taking

too much time

Village has taken the Irish Examiner to

the Press Ombudsman over its misreport

of the Mark Dearey case against Village

which Dearey dropped in April after

the parties agreed non-ﬁnancial terms

including a reiteration of an apology

Village had already given for a mistake, but

no concession of the alleged defamation

for which Dearey had taken the case.

Reporter Ray Managh, fresh from making

seven inept mistakes in a previous

report in the Irish Times at an earlier

stage of the case, blew it again. In July

Managh professed himself “stunned”

by the allegations in Village’s complaint

and asked the Ombudsman to halt the

investigation pending his production of

a copy of the transcript of the case – and

went to the Circuit Court to obtain it.

Although the Ombudsman is not treating

Managh as a party to its investigation, it

granted the postponement he sought. On

4 December Tim Vaughan, the Examiner’s

editor, wrote to the Ombudsman

pronouncing that “I am not in a position

to furnish you with my response to the

complaint but hope to be able to do so

very shortly. I regret this delay, which

unfortunately is unavoidable”. Nobody

can tell Village what has happened to

Ray Managh and his court application.

Anti-social

In serious countries like Austria and

the Netherlands, between a third and

a quarter of all dwellings are publicly

funded. Ireland’s recently published

housing strategy, Social Housing

Strategy 2020: Support, Reform, Supply

is not supportive or reforming (or even

supplicatory) enough. Apart from the

provision of 35,000 new and refurbished

social housing units to deal with the list

of 90,000 people, at a cost of €3.8bn,

anyone needing a home will have to rely

on the private rental sector, though a new

housing assistance payment will be made

available to 75,000 renting households

of which 50,000 are currently in receipt

of rent supplement. Local authority rents

are, on average, €53 a week, or 15 per

cent of income, whereas a new report

from the National Association of Building

Cooperatives (Nabco) shows tenants in

private rental accommodation spend one-

third of their income on rent. And the

trickledown will not eﬀect the necessary

radical changes to Ireland’s homelessness.

Emergency accommodation and social

and psychological support are required,

tailored to the wide-varying needs of

social casualties whose provenances,

predicaments, and psychologies vary

enormously. The agencies that have

failed to get that message across for a

generation should get on-message and stop

besieging us with money-seeking, emotive

but ad hoc ads featuring elderly, slow-

talking personages from the bleak past.

Done again

Ben Dunne, who likes to bray down

the wireless about his health clubs and

pontiﬁcate dogmatically on the issues

of the day on ‘Liveline’, despite oﬃcial

ﬁndings that he was corrupt, has been

caught in another video with a stranger.

It is quite explicit with an unsavoury

admixture of ﬂashing haunches and

adenoidal writhing. Villager recalls that

the Moriarty report found that Michael

Lowry, then Minister for Communications,

sought to inﬂuence a rent review of a

building part-owned by Mr Dunne in a way

that was “profoundly corrupt to a degree

that was nothing short of breathtaking”.

Dunne too was found to be “corrupt”.

The man who was called ‘Big Fella’ by

his mentor, Charles Haughey, made

headlines worldwide in 1992 when a

cocaine-fuelled binge with two hookers

in his hotel suite ended in a stand-oﬀ

with US police on a hotel balcony.

Two years ago the Sunday Independent

reported that Dunne, who was kidnapped

by the IRA for seven days in 1981,

was a changed man following a recent

health scare, that he had lost two stone

on a clean-living, healthy lifestyle. He

had also decided to bring out a ‘tell-all’

book. Bin the book and zip it, Big Man –

upstairs and down, Villager cautions.

Stupider travel

During 2013 transport emissions

increased 2.1% over 2012 levels, and

now make up 20% of the national total.

Emissions from electricity generation

fell. However, transport emissions,

combined with increases from agriculture

and heating, have put Ireland on a clear

path to breach the EU 2020 targets. The

National Roads Authority is, as usual,

beavering away oblivious to government

policy, as ostensibly enshrined in the

hiply named ‘Smarter Travel’. The NRA

is plotting infrastructural delights

such as the over-scaled Gort to Tuam

motorway and boosting the M7 between

Naas and Newbridge, by adding extra

pleb?

love-rats website, Victoria Milan, found that Sharon

Ní Bheoláin is most Irishmen’s fantasy

6 December-January 2014

NEWS VILLAGER

lanes. Meanwhile on the ground An Bord

Pleanála is chipping in with a po-faced

policy incoherence, swelling the size

of the Liﬀey Valley Shopping Centre in

south Dublin; and of the greed-and-lucre

touting Kildare Village, and permitting

continued use of 10,200 long term surface

car parking spaces by Dublin Airport and

provision of more than 700 new car spaces

for a wholly car-dependent premises for

the Kerry Group outside Naas. In 2009

‘Smarter Travel’ pronounced: “there will

be a considerable shift to public transport

and other sustainable forms of travel”, that

“the present levels of traﬃc congestion

and travel times will be signiﬁcantly

reduced”, “work-related commuting

by car will be reduced from a current

modal share of 65% to 45%”, and “the

total kilometres travelled by the car ﬂeet

in 2020 will not increase signiﬁcantly

from current total car kilometers”.

Old Enemy takes one for Ireland

The Environmental Protection Agency

(EPA) has enthusiastically welcomed

the marginal drop of 0.7% in overall

Irish greenhouse gas emissions

for 2013 (over 2012). Cynics are

attributing the drop to emissions newly

‘exported’ to the UK via the new East-

West electricity interconnector.

Meanwhile, the Climate Bill promised

in December by Enda Kenny for

year’s end has been delayed again.

Intelligent life on Mars?

Villager has long been convinced there

is no intelligent life anywhere.

Making Ireland look good

Italian politics has reverted to the status

quo ante: a game of which major party

can implode ﬁrst. Matteo Renzi, the

prime minister and leader of the centre-

left Democratic party (PD), and ludicrous

philandering septuagenarian Silvio

Berlusconi, who heads the terminally

inert centre-right Forza Italia, both face

swelling revolts by dissident factions. But

the headquarterless and web-based Five

Star Movement (M5S) which got a quarter

of the national vote in 2013 faces the

biggest problems. Since Grillo refuses to

ally with any of the mainstream parties,

the movement was forced to join an uneasy

coalition between the far left and far right.

15 of the 54 senators and ﬁve of the 109

deputies elected for the movement last year

have either left the M5S or been thrown

out. They really could have done with some

of Michael Fitzmaurice’s mentoring.

Aerogini

Villager is in a permanent state of

exhaustion at this magazine’s fetish for

the Gini Coeﬀﬁcient, a stringent gauge of

equality in society. The Gini Coeﬃcient is

valued at between 0 and 1; with 0 being

perfect equality and 1 being perfect

inequality. Beth Berman, a sociologist at

SUNY Albany, passing a bored moment

on a ﬂight, decided to calculate the

Gini index for US passenger planes.

She found that “in today’s standard

U.S. domestic conﬁguration, the 12% of

people in ﬁrst class use about 25% of the

passenger space, the 51 people in Economy

Plus use another 30%, leaving the sardines

– the other 157 people – with 45%.

That gives us a Gini index of about 16.

Transatlantic ﬂights, however, are

increasingly taking this in-the-air

distinction to new heights. Take, for

example, the Boeing 777. It boasts seats

that turn into beds on which one can lie

fully horizontal. Unsurprisingly, though,

these air-beds take up even more space

than a ﬁrst class seat. So if we look again

at how the space is distributed, we now

have 21% of the people using about 40%

of the plane, 27% using another 20%,

and the ﬁnal 52% using the last 40%. The

Gini index has now increased, to .25.

America’s Gini index, by way of

comparison is 0.41, and Ireland’s around

0.31. So, compared with both Ireland

and the US, US passenger planes are a

socialist utopia. Ryanair which hems

everyone into a miserable minimal

yellowpak aﬀair that passes for a seat

is likely to be more egalitarian still. Of

course there are luggage-limit exceeding

loads of caveats here. One reason that

airlines are becoming more unequal, as

one commenter on a blog published by

the Economist counterintuitively notes, is

precisely because they are becoming more

egalitarian. In the past only the rich could

aﬀord to ﬂy, so the amenities on planes

were more evenly distributed. Somehow it

reminds Villager of the argument Ryanair

makes that its relatively low-emission

ﬂeet means that it is essentially doing the

environment a favour, when air travel is in

fact the least carbon-friendly travel mode.

Villager will not go to airports when he

seeks either equality or environmentalism.

How the cuts fell

Gross current expenditure in Ireland

actually rose by €1.1 billion (2%) between

2007 and 2014 – although this increase

was entirely due to non-discretionary

spending increases in Social Protection.

Capital expenditure bore the brunt of

cuts, falling by €4.5 billion, or 57%, in

that period. Excluding Social Protection,

current expenditure fell by €3.1 billion

(9%). According to publicpolicy.ie here are

a number of caveats that should be kept

in mind when interpreting the reduction

in capital expenditure since 2007. The

ﬁrst is that with the completion of the

motorway programme, capital spending

was likely to be scaled back anyway.

Secondly, Public/Private Partnerships

are kept ‘oﬀ-books’, and so are omitted

in the analysis. Also ‘oﬀ-books’ is

investment in water infrastructure for

2014, which is now under the muniﬁcent

tutelage of Irish Water. Thirdly,

capital spending in 2007 was aimed at

building capacity for an economy that

would have been signiﬁcantly larger

than it is today. Nevertheless, the

reduction in the largest areas of capital

expenditure has been quite striking,

as can been seen in the table below. •

Major areas of capital sending, 2007 & 2014

2007 2014 Change 1m Change %

Roads 2,173 600 1,573 -72%

Housing 1,258 273 985 -78%

School building 646 470 176 -27%

Public transport 641 296 345 -54%

Health facilities 493 324 169 -34%

Source: Revised Estimates 2008 and 2014

December-January 2014 7

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planning

whistleblower

p19

Pr iv ileged

6 0 y e a r s o f

Law Society

self-regulation

11-page investigation

by Dr Maeve Hosier and Michael Smith