Villager - Village Magazine

July-August 2024 5

social avatars like Breakfastroll Man, Kells

Angel and Bouncy Castle man. McWilliams

predicted the Great Irish Recession but did

it for so many years it doesn’t count. He was

also famously the force behind the bank

guarantee (though not the bit of it which

was bad), and betrayed Brian Lenihan Ju

nior’s garlic-inﬂected visits to him to seek

his advice. He invented the Global Irish Fo

rum which achieved very little with a great

deal of indulgent noise for the dark years

from 2009 up to 2015 before quietly being

put down. He and his wife Sian did also cre

ate the Dalkey Book Festival but, while high-

quality, it’s a little smug for these columns.

Kilkenomics too was a good idea.

The current target for this column, which

hates columnists anyway, is his horrible

rugby-Dad Saturday Column in the Irish

Times, at the complacent capitalistic epi

centre of that oleaginous production.

McWilliams regularly preaches the Swiss

model of local democracy but, when it

comes to Ireland’s unbalanced planning

and development, blames Irish citizens for

holding centralised power to account, ﬁx

ing them with responsibility for the hous-

ing crisis. For example,‘An entitled minority

are giving two ﬁngers to the rest in Ireland’s

housing crisis”’ (Irish Times, Opinion,

March 30th).

Mandal: A

Robin Mandal a former President of the Ar-

chitects Institute and a nice, sound man,

who once mistakenly put a legal threat

through the door of the Village oce, cor

rectly tears him to shreds: “He overesti-

mates the impact of ‘objections’. They have

no impact whatsoever on the timelines for

making planning decisions, either in the lo

cal planning authority or An Bord Pleanála.

A person making an objection is not putting

‘a cap on the building of homes’.

Mandal goes on: “Taking his ﬁgures, of

Wronger than Conor

Village policy is that the wrongest man in

Ireland is Conor Skehan but David McWil

liams is usually very wrong indeed also.

They both fall into the category of compla

cent capitalists and both fetishise the mar-

ket. That is a mistake since the market can

only be a means to a human end not a goal

in itself.

McWilliams rehashes his own old pieces,

sometimes partially verbatim. Who’ll ever

forget his pieces on moving Dublin Port

and how NIMBYs are mainly responsible

for the housing crisis. And if ever one did

forget them one would have only to wait

until McWilliams recycles them. A talented

prognosticator, he pretends he invented

the term Celtic Tiger and in 2005 the Irish

Times helpfully reported “that McWilliams

coined the term ‘Celtic Tiger’”. In fact it was

a banking lad called Kevin Gardiner. This

magazine works on the recycled basis that

after not inventing that term McWilliams

privately vowed that no Celtic-Tiger-derived

phenomenon in Irish society would go un

named by him. So in his book the ‘Pope’s

Children’ (also 2005) he introduced us to

News Miscellany

Villager

228 [big,fasttracked housing ‘SHD’] permis-

sions, he notes that 16 have stalled because

of a legal objection. This is 7 per cent, a tiny

number. The numbers that he state that

these 16 case aect are 4,151. In the Dublin

area alone, our ﬁgures show that of 45,000

SHD permitted units, 30,000 were unused

– seven times more than those ‘held up by

objectors’. Our ﬁgures also show that of

the 80,000 permitted in the Dublin Area,

50,000 were unused.

Our data for all planning permissions over

a 10-year period show 265,000 planning de

cisions of which 18,000 (again, 7 per cent)

were appealed - either by the developer or

an “objector” – and 500 (0.2 of 1 per cent)

were subject to a “’legal objection’”. Scald

ing, really.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

Anyway McWilliams latest idea is that Ire-

land has “a bigger welfare state than almost

anywhere else in the world”. The Nevin In

stitute’s Ciarán Nugent, featuring elsewhere

in the magazine, debunked this fundamen

tal, and loathsome, mistake with some

ease.

Out of 30 European countries, Ireland

spends least of any as a share of GDP. Even

accounting for issues with Irish GDP we’d

probably rank around 5th least (% of GNI)

and NOWHERE NEAR any other Northern and

Western European Nations”. Wrong again,

David McWilliams: and these are not trivial

matters.

McWilliams often likes to vaunt unrav

elling of a lot of market income inequality

here in the tax and social welfare systems.

7.7% of Irish workers now pay more than

half all Irish income tax and USC. However,

the context is that the top 20% in Ireland

have more income relative to the bottom

20% (12.3 times) than any other EU country

AFTER income taxes (net market income).

6 July-August 2024

The upshot: deadliest in EU for drugs

Inequality and poor

social services have

their consequences,

everywhere in Ireland.

Every 14 months

more Americans die

from taking the drug,

fentanyl, than were

killed in all of the coun

try’s wars combined

since 1945. Europe has

escaped its grip, so far. Drugs of all sorts are

estimated to kill less than 7000 people annu

ally in the EU.

Universal healthcare means that most Eu

ropean patients can treat the source of their

pain, without having to resort to addictive

medical opioids for a quick ﬁx. There are

fears of an explosion of this as the availabil

ity of heroin dries up globally, as expected,

over the next year due to the Taliban clamp

ing down on opium cultivation in Afghani-

stan. Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has

expressed concern about the imminent rise

of a synthetic drug culture here,

Meanwhile, the EU’s European Monitoring

Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction shows

where drug overdoses are highest. Its 2024

report ﬁnds that Ireland faces the deadliest

drug problem, with fatalities around three-

times higher than the region’s average.

Here’s a chart from The Economist which

highlights yet another Achilles Heel of the

Irish Nirvana.

Read a book not Harvey Norman ads

Villager despairs at the direction of Irish

newspapers. While the Indo group and the

Examiner hold up and the Mail often excels

itself, the Irish Times is no longer a chal

lenge, left of centre, a paper of record or a

good read. Its failure to take on the proto-

fascists, pretence that the government is

delivering on climate and the intense re

laxation of its lightweight political journal-

ism, mean it is not monitoring for its readers

the Zeitgeist or the threats of our time. The

Business Post used to take an investigative

stance on business but is now deferential as

well as predictably greed-friendly, the Sun

day Times is a shadow wrapped in a Harvey

Norman wrapper with Hugh O’Connell. Read

a book not a newspaper, Ideally one with

challenging or radical ideas but if not even

a political book is better than a newspaper.

Fadas very fadó

Is it an insult that The Times and Sunday

Times (Ireland) don’t use fadas?

No style

The Telegraph’s style guide commits it to re-

ferring to Trump as Trump since he is a con-

victed felon. Even Starmer gets a Sir Keir.

And its Boris remains Boris.

47: Trump

The Economist magazine gives Trump a two-

in-three chance of winning in November.

Biden’s path to victory is dauntingly nar

row. He must win Wisconsin, Michigan and

Pennsylvania (plus Omaha’s single elector

al-college vote) to get to 270. If he loses any

of those, he will have to win one of Arizona,

Georgia, Nevada or North Carolina where he

is currently several points down in the polls.

74% men

Only 26 per cent of those elected in the

June local election were women, exactly the

same as in 2019. Ireland is in 22nd place in

the EU 27 for female representation in local

politics.

Munsters in Ireland South

A lot of the new blood standing for election

in 2024 looked like it had escaped from the

Munsters. Villager doesn’t like celebrities,

doesn’t watch them and certainly doesn’t

vote for them . As Newstalk’s sage and inde

fatigable Gavan Reilly, whose personal cov-

erage of the elections was better than that

of both the Irish Times and RTE.IE, noted:

it’s at the stage where “if they don’t know

YOU, they’re not prepared to listen to YOUR

IDEAS”.

Gloss falls o

Village has tried with little success to cham-

pion An Rabharta Glas, an oshoot of, and

antidote to, the now freefalling Greens

that is stronger on implementation (which

wouldn’t be dicult) and more radical (or

driven by the science if you prefer). This

outing it lost its one local Councillor Lorna

Bogue who also failed to get elected to the

European Parliament. Her platform was

“workers and carers”. Fine but not what

you’d expect. For Villager there should be

much more about quality of life, fairer dis

tribution of wealth and, yes, the ineptitude

of the Greens. The party needs to focus and

open up to its opportunities. It deﬁnitely

needs a name change now too. The Greens

are going to be almost wiped aside. The

green agenda is too important to fade with

its ineective champions.

Bogue, who resigned from the Greens in

2020 over their handling of the Mother and

Baby Homes Bill, does not like them . Even

as she was being eliminated from the Euro

pean Parliament election she objected to

Eamon Ryan’s suggestion on RTÉ that her

transfers could save his colleague Grace

O’Sullivan’s seat in Ireland South. “My vote

is against the Greens’ eco-austerity, not for

it”, she harrumphed.

Bogue goes rogue

Elsewhere the feisty Bogue suggested on

Twitter that “Results from Ireland South re

ﬂect a failure of government & opposition

parties to address basic issues of housing

and health. The result is 25,000 votes for

a nazi. The Left must develop a popular

politics that counters the hate-based big

otry of the far-right before the next GE”. This

prompted the following riposte from Tracey

O’Mahoney founder of the makey uppy Irish

Council of Human Rights who self-deﬁnes

as “registered on the Roll of Practising Bar

risters” (she works “in house” somewhere):

“Lorna, this highly defamatory tweet has

been viewed 15,000 times in one hour. In

case you are too stupid to realise, the bur

den of proof moves to the defendant in defa-

July-August 2024 7

mation cases. I would suggest you issue an

unreserved open apology immediately or

suer very severe ﬁnancial consequences”.

Bogue held her ground.

Disobligheing

The Twitter handle of Derek Blighe, Ireland’s

least impressive politician, who got 3.64%

of the ﬁrst-preference vote in Ireland South,

describes him as “President of Ireland ﬁrst”.

No. He’s President of Ireland First. He’s cer

tainly not anything ﬁrst. He’s a bandwagon

of yesterday’s most disgusting second-hand

ideas, that democracy had jettisoned before

the rise of this other self-deﬁning, racist

half-wit and his xenophobic mates.

Casey closed

Villager is touting a

new political aphorism

called #CaseysLaw,

which states that can

didates on the Far

Right in Ireland tend to

the condition of being

found out.

Far Wrong

The reason the Far Right in Ireland are wrong

about asylum seekers here is that there are

about 20,000 asylum seekers in Ireland,

and about 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

But from 2002 to 2022 our population in

creased by 1.2 million. Anyone who thinks

asylum seekers, people seeking refuge from

war or persecution, are a signiﬁcant phe

nomenon, even if they were all spurious,

needs to address the reality that they con

stitute less than half a percent of the popu-

lation. If you’re up for a row with a policy

of providing refuge for half a percent of your

population you are likely to have a psycho

logical not a political problem.

Arguments that cannot be proven

As government

repeatedly re

moves asylum

seekers and tents

from Grand Ca

nal, the basis for

the draconian ac

tion in some no-

tion of ‘a criminal

oence in prin

ciple’, as the gov-

ernment press

oce claimed, remains unknown to law.

The Canal byelaws expressly disapply them

selves to persons using canal property for

less than a week in one place. That didn’t

stop barristers Jim O’Callaghan and Barry

Ward citing the ﬁrst two subsections of a

section of the byelaws which prohibit pitch

ing tents, without citing the third which ex-

cepts the prohibition where the tent is there

for less than a week. The Irish Times printed

the mistaken view of the law, and its jour

nalists had no interest in changing it when

this was pointed out. In case the point is

missed: this is abuse of the absolutely most

vulnerable — asylum seekers arriving from

war zones including Gaza, often with no

English and crucially, no access to lawyers.

If we had a decent press this would have

been headlines all month.

Premeire league

Experts at Gambling ‘N Go analysed the

nationalities of every footballer who has

played in the Premier League since its foun

dation in 1992.

Ireland ranks third globally, having pro

duced 200 Premier League players since

1992. France takes the top spot, with 234

Premier League players

England and Wales have produced a

combined 1,815 players since the founda

tion of the Premier League. Villager would

welcome analysis of how many of them cap

tained their teams and how many of — par-

ticularly the best players on — the England

team, which selects from a population of 58

million, have Irish backgrounds: certainly

there’s Keegan, Rooney, Gerrard and Gre

alish; and currently there are Rice, Philips,

Maguire, Gallagher, Kane, and Bellingham

– the latter two representing England’s mis

erable goal haul in its ﬁrst two matches. Ire-

land hasn’t moved from inferiority complex

to superiority complex over the last thirty

years without picking up some supporting

justiﬁcation.

Mary Losing

‘Growing unease in Sinn Féin over Mary Lou

McDonald’s leadership after poor election

results’ ran the headlines. We can all do it:

‘Growing unease in [whatever organisation

you don’t like] over [whoever you don’t like]

after [whatever you can make the case is a

failure]. It’s the prerogative of biased jour

nalism. At least when it happens in Village

it’s not precious, smug or covert.

Electable Moran

Apart from the three lads jailed from his

class in UCD Law — Thomas Byrne solicitor,

Ireland’s biggest ever thief; Gerard O’Brien,

former judge jailed for raping pupils when

he was a school teacher; and Cocaine Jim

who robbed the bank where he worked,

the editor’s favourite classmate was John

Moran, now Limerick’s ﬁrst directly elected

mayor. Moran – fully formed in the guise we

see before us today— stood for election as

class representative in 1983 and was duly

elected. The editor was well down the ﬁeld.

The importance of being Harris

Simon Harris’s only mode is earnest. Ear-

nestness on speed.

It’s Policies, Stupid

If politicians including Harris were any good

they’d induce the sense of woozy pride

recognition of Palestine, banning smoking

in public buildings and introducing plastic

bags engendered in the public.

Gouging

Village has increased its cover price from

€4.95 to €5.95 (£5.00 in NI) due to in

creased printing costs, rising ambition,

and hubris, as well as our vastly improved

website for which we are committed never

to charge. However, the magazine is printed

on better paper and the editor is claiming it

will come out every two months, on time.

Something to do with the ﬁrst Friday of every

second month, he said just before the latest

magazine hit shelves on 22 June. Apologies

from all. More on this later.

Enjoy the sun

Villager wishes all

his readers joy in

the sunshine. Steer

clear of Flygskam,

striking pilots,

Ryanair and

turbulence.