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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
8 October-November 2024
its Haitian immigrants eat them. He chose
the issue because it’s Vance‘s State. Hu-
miliation of Vance too, explains, why Laura
Loomer was pictured with Trump at two 9/11
memorial events. Loomer — a looper — is
a former congressional candidate, who re-
cently said on social media that if Kamala
Harris wins the election, “the White House
will smell like curry & White House speech-
es will be facilitated via a call centre”. Like
Harris’s mother, the parents of Vance’s now-
suff ering wife Usha are Indian.
Humble Vance
Venture capitalist JD Vance is especially dif-
fi cult to humiliate which makes Trump all
the more determined. Reciprocslly, Vance
then took it out on pin-cushion Tim Walz, so
humble he was a football coach, in their big
debate on 1 October.
Humble President
The most humble US President in living
memory was Jimmy Carter, who just hit
his century. He was also one of the few US
Presidents who understood ethics, though
he did dice with racism in his early political
career. Villager’s favourite story of the guile-
less Carter was when he was in the navy and
was interviewed in 1952 by Admiral Hyman
Rickover, for a commission in the US nuclear
submarine fl eet, when Carter was a junior
offi cer. Rickover staccatoed him with sweat-
inducing questions for two hours and then
asked him where he had graduated in his
class and if he always did his best. A per-
spiring Carter though about this unanswer-
able question and decided to concede, “No,
not always”. In a repost for the ages the
Admiral cold-bloodedly asked “why not?”.
And Carter has spent fi fty years unable to
Chump
It’s true and it’s important: Trump is weird.
Americans are weird too
But so are a majority of Americans. Only half
of them don’t believe in evolution. 54% of
Americans (possibly the same half) support
mass deportation of undocumented immi-
grants. If Donald Trump prevails in Novem-
ber, there’ll be a horrendous job for law en-
forcement. The Offi ce of Homeland Security
Statistics estimates 11 million unauthorised
immigrants were living in the US in 2022.
Trump thinks it’s between 16 and 21 million.
Forty-four percent of unauthorised immi-
grants in 2022 were from Mexico, import-
ing a whole new meaning for the concept of
Mexican wave.
Trump loves to humiliate
Trump is determined to humiliate those
closest to him. You could see it when he
blanked his daughter Tiff any, on the stage
of the GOP’s Convention in front of an audi-
ence of millions. You could see it with his
support for the lynching of Mike Pence, with
his humiliation of his female groupies and
even his lovers, and you can see it with his
toying with JD Vance, his pick for Vice Presi-
dent. The instinct to humiliate is why he’s
made such an issue of the dogs in Spring-
fi eld, Ohio. You will recall he has falsely said
News Miscellany
Villager
answer the question. He even named his
autobiography ‘Why not the best?’. Villager
has always struggled with that particular
question — to the point of avoiding thinking
about it
Irish humiliations
Workaday humiliation comes from phoning
what used to be called utility companies.
Villager has spent half the time since he
last went into print raging on the phone to
Eircom hoping someone will take his call
looking for it to better automate reception
of his emails, and to Vodafone, oh yes, for
hanging up (not just once, Ethan, TEN times)
just when he gets into his stride. Eircom’s
predecessor, An Post, of course used to
make people wait three years for a phone.
Eircom just makes you wait three years be-
fore you can talk to a human whose not just
interested in your account number and date
of birth. Villager is never sure whether the
mad emailed messages he gets from the old
dinosaur (noreply@eircom.scam) are Spam
but recently he’s been notifi ed that “We are
writing to let you know that the monthly
charge for webmail is increasing by €3 to
€12.99 per month. This change is eff ective
from the 1st of November 2024. No further
action is required”. Yet further action would
be required, Villager feels, if it didn’t involve
being recorded for training and quality pur-
poses. Or anything to do with security. Vil-
lager on the phone seeking technical sup-
port — particularly at the point where he is
ravaged for his date of birth and password
— is almost the best defi nition of pure mas-
culine hatred in this hateful world.
Why don’t they work as well as Villager’s
Mac?
VillageOctNov24.indb 8 03/10/2024 14:27
October-November 2024 9
Sharing the apple pie
Ireland is the first adventure of the British
Empire and one of the few European colo-
nies. For centuries we were run for others.
Not so long after independence we devel-
oped a model that depended on under-
taxing the richest corporations in the world
in return for jobs, income taxes and later
what turned, for the moment anyway, into
a healthy corporation-tax take. The whole
contrivance was to the detriment of wealthy
Western countries that bought the products
of the wealthiest corporations which did
not pay their corporation tax in them. Argu
-
ably it was also to the detriment of the USA
since the elusive corporations often didn’t
pay corporation tax, anywhere. On the other
hand it did help with commercial colonisa
-
tion: no small part of the American mix. In-
sidious perpetration by insurgent Ireland of
this scam — recognised with justifiable con-
tempt by the EU and its Court of Justice, no-
tably in its recent judgment on Apple — has
been a sort of revenge, but it has also done
a great deal to heighten global inequality
from which we were for so long a victim and
which is now, for Western countries, an al
-
most existential crisis.
BecOz you get it
The Irish Times, formerly quite parochial,
now seems to be written by Australians for
Australians.
It’s because none of them
have anything to say
And why are Irish Times correspondents
more interested in scrutinising Charlie
Haughey and Garret FitzGerald than Micheál
Martin and Simon Harris? Is it just because
they’re more interesting? And why are all of
its political correspondents obsessed with
the date of an election rather than with the
policies of the parties that will fight it? Is it
all just to annoy Villager?
All the skills but nothing to
say
Simon Harris, though, there’s someone
who’d find it difficult to annoy anyone. Un-
less your concern was Vision. Or you were
cynical about sustained sincerity. Or bitter
about lost youth.
Nothing to say that’s not
Normal
The Irish Times keeps preaching Sally Rooney,
whose novel ‘Intermezzo’ has just been pub-
lished to international acclaim (The Guard-
ian: “Is there a better writer at work right
now?”/”sentences precision-engineered for
weight distribution like wide-span bridges”),
is “Joycean”. Well Joyce pioneered an original
and multidimensional style, published noth-
ing but masterpieces and was erudite. Rooney
won the European debate championships,
has published nothing but bestsellers and is
still only 33 but her prose, though realist, is
pedestrian by comparison.
Ormond spit
Ormond Alison O’Connor is the middlebrow
Brendan O’Connor radio show’s most fre-
quent panellist, according to an article in
this magazine last year, by Mark Cullinane.
O’Connor told O’Connor in August that,
when in Dublin City Centre, she is scared to
be outside the “Grafton St and George’s St
area”. She wouldn’t spit on Village which
toils away to no avail on filthy Ormond Quay,
and depends on more adventurous voices.
Ormond spat
Work will start early next year on the rebuild-
ing of the Ormond Hotel, which featured in
the Sirens scene in Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s
a debate as to whether Monteco, its Ma-
laysian developer, can extract the rest of
the largely demolished hotel from the sev-
enteenth-century building next door that
houses the Village office — without damag-
ing the building and its cowering cantanker-
ous lefties. Last time Monteco tried this
they seriously damaged the restaurant be-
low the office with stray demolition tactics,
putting the poor restaurateurs — who lost
their legal action against Monteco — out of
business. That was before they got near the
more fragile Village office.
Ormond squat
Well Ormond Quay isn’t just one of the old-
est parts of the City, it’s exciting! Villager
returned to the office the other night to find
half the city’s Garda on the quay while the
editor lucubrated a thesis on Dereliction
law. It turned out a Jordanian asylum seeker
had received eighteen stitches to the head
after an altercation at a Georgian house on
Lower Ormond Quay. Housing activists be
-
gan squatting in the vacant building during
the summer and “invited” homeless asylum
seekers to stay there, according to one ac
-
tivist involved. The building is next to the
sadly vacant building where the romantic
‘Bachelors Walk’ television comedy was
set which itself adjoins the elegant former
‘Number 10’ house where until a few years
ago lucky bridal parties could enjoy their
day in “a beautiful Georgian Town House
in the centre of Dublin city, overlooking the
River Liffey” where “an inconspicuous front
door opens into an impressive entrance hall
which, in turn, brings you towards a dramat
-
ic staircase mounting to the Grand Salon
and Library”. The building was bought by
Davy Property in 2014. Writing in the Irish
Times, Jack Fagan reported Davy’s plan plan
was to lease it to a leading company with a
track record for “pulling in the crowds and
sending them home happy”. Having paid
€2.8m for the property Davy then closed it
down. Perhaps it, or the idea, was just too
cheap.
Timed out
Meanwhile, Jack Fagan has died. A mild,
if somewhat crotchety, presence atop the
Irish Times’ ugly property reporting during
VillageOctNov24.indb 9 03/10/2024 14:27
10 October-November 2024
the boom, at one time there was a set-off
between him and the intrepid Frank Mc-
Donald, environment editor, with the one
giving the vested-interest perspective and
the other the public-interest perspective.
These days the property interest tends to
be the one that prevails as the Times could
do with some strategic commentary on na
-
tional failings in planning and the environ-
ment.
Nims deserve a by
Construction work has not yet started on
over 50,000 apartments that have planning
permission in Dublin, according to new fig-
ures published by the four local authorities
in the city. They suggest site and construc-
tion costs are now higher than what buyers
are willing to pay for apartments.
A study published by the SCSI last July
which found that the cost of building a
typical apartment in Dublin was €2,363 per
square metre, about 13% higher than the av
-
erage across 10 ¬European cities surveyed.
There is planning permission in place for
82,700 new homes, almost 84pc of them
apartments. Work has started on 26,492,
but 56,208 units have yet to start develop
-
ment, over two-thirds of the total.
Court proceedings are holding up 7,455 of
these, about an eighth. So the problem is
cost and the unbalanced messaging David
McWilliams, not Nimbys.
Agriculture always gets a by
Agriculture uses over 70 per cent of Irish
land, contributes 1.11 per cent to GDP and
creates 37 per cent of the country’s emis-
sions, according to DeSmog.
Bye Bye civic Europe
Today’s European Union resembles a Bar-
bieland: a place prone to regard itself as
more perfect than it really is – and harbour-
ing some notable blind spots notably grow-
ing xenophobia. A report by the European
Council on Foreign Relations identifies
three key “blind spots” that risk eroding
goodwill towards the EU: the “whiteness”
of the EU’s politics, low engagement by
young people and limited pro-Europeanism
in central and eastern Europe could mould
a European sentiment at odds with the ear
-
lier core values. It recognises that “Mario
Draghi has dominated the conversation in
Brussels by focusing minds on the need to
revive the bloc’s economy, which is losing
its competitive edge”. But notes that there
is less focus on civic mindedness. Seems
fair.
By from 2019
Villager doesn’t like Sir Keir Starmer. He’s
not sure how he finished up christened
after the first parliamentary leader of the
Labour Party and being such a phony. Any
-
way at the recent Labour Conference he was
interrupted by a lad complaining heroically
about the massacre of innocents in Gaza.
Starmer, a human-rights lawyer, had re
-
hearsed his line: “this guy’s obviously got
a pass for the 2019 Conference [guffaw]
— we’ve changed the Pahhty”. Well if he,
and it, have changed so he, and it, regard
genocide as a laugh and global justice as
old-fashioned, there’s no point to him, or it.
Bipartisan
Villager listens a lot to the Rest is Politics
podcast, owned by Gary Lineker, with Rory
Stewart (a comfortable ex-Tory centrist) and
Alistair Campbell (a comfortable ex-Labour
centrist). Basically the idea is they both ap
-
pear to know everything about the whole of
world affairs while pretending they haven’t
just looked it up on ChatGBT; and for Camp
-
bell to avoid talking about war crimes and
to boost Keir Starmer. Like Campbell, Stew-
art travels intercontinentally weekly but un-
like him he says wonderful a lot. The high
point of the effort was when Campbell told
Stewart, who used to sign off each episode
with “lots of love”, that he didn’t love him.
They do like each other though.
Appropriately Partisan
Fintan O’Toole whose lifelong capacity for
partisan anger is only somewhat in retreat,
believes the most important alleviator of
poverty would be targeted child benefit;
and Villager is inclined to defer. Unfortu
-
nately Simon Harris casually announced
that it’s not happening. He “certainly
doesn’t rule out the idea of having two rates
of child benefit” and claims that “there’s a
roadmap to how you get there”. But he ab
-
solutely ruled out doing it in the budget: “I
don’t believe even administratively that it
would be possible to do it in this budget”.
And they didn’t.
Too partisan
Twitter’s no fun anymore. And it’s more fun
to say that here than on Twitter.
Xitter attracts the sort of people who
have read one book and misunderstood it
but inherited a lot of confidence from a def
-
erential Mammy (or Mom).
Probably less partisan
Do you thank AI, after you’ve extracted im-
ages, say, from it (the newly toyed-up editor
wants to know)?
Too Friendly to government
The B minus recently bestowed by Friends
of the Earth is too high a grade for Ireland’s
climate performance. Far too much of the
“independent” assessment of the Greens,
including in the media, comes from people
with (usually obvious) links to the party.
History won’t judge them or the Greens
well. It’s all a little bit Fianna Fáil.
Wasting waste
Village is trying to commission a piece
showing that little of the waste that goes for
recycling is actually recycled, but the scan-
dal remains as yet untold.
Recycling fell by four per cent in 2023,
well behind 2025 EU targets. The EPA re-
ports indicate that 84% of glass and 73% of
paper/cardboard are recycled but only 28%
of plastic packaging waste was recycled in
2021, against a 2025 target of 50%. Most
plastic is incinerated, and only one third is
recycled. Villager surmises a lot of it now
secretly finishes up in Africa and the Far
East.
VillageOctNov24.indb 10 03/10/2024 14:27
October-November 2024 11
Waster Brains
With one part in two hundred of the average
human brain, by weight, now microplastics,
preservation of the species suggests it’s us
or them.
Waster
Chris Comerford largely escaped obituaries
when he died last month though he stilled
the news cycle for a few days in the 1990s.
After Irish Sugar was privatised as ‘Green
-
core’ in 1991, he claimed to own part of a
company that had been a part subsidiary of
Greencore and which Greencore had bought
out a decade earlier using money lent by an
-
other Greencore subsidiary. He was forced
to resign. A solicitor appointed by Minister
for Industry and Commerce, Des O’Malley,
found he did indeed have a beneficial stake
in the bought-out subsidiary. High Court In
-
spectors, the first ever appointed, found the
opposite.
Greencore took legal action against Com
-
erford and others alleging breach of breach
of trust and breach of contract but settled it
in the end. A DPP file was never acted on.
Clearly privatisation was the future.
The, once famous, Irish Sugar business
is no more — the Sugar Club is its last gasp
— and Greencore these days is merely the
world’s biggest, and most unexciting, sand
-
wich-maker with most of its operations in
Britain. Its CEO used to be Patrick Coveney
who wasn’t very good with pandemics, and
now is Dalton Philips who was quite bad at
queues when he was in the Dublin Airport
Authority.
Woods for the trees on
religious financial liability
More implausible official bleating, this time
from Helen McEntee, about taking more
money from the slippery religious for their
abuses of children.
A scoping inquiry in September noted
that there were around 2,400 allegations
of abuse involving more than 800 alleged
abusers in over 300 schools. A Commission
of Investigation will now take place while
the Garda are appealing for victims to come
€352 million, given the findings of fault.
However, according to an April 2017 report
from the Comptroller and Auditor General,
the voluntary sum was reduced to €193 mil
-
lion, after the Christian Brothers reduced
their voluntary commitment to surrender
playing fields by €127 million. The value of
the indemnity and voluntary deals was a
combined €321 million.
Up to 2022 some €237 million of the
€480.6 million originally provided for under
the 2002 and 2015 Agreements has been
contributed.In January 2023, a mislead
-
ing report in the Irish Times was headlined,
“contributions from congregations amount
to just €480m”. But of course that was
merely what had been promised in 2002 and
2015 combined — and then according to the
Comptroller and Auditor General reduced —
not what had been contributed which was
just €237 million.
Oasis or desert?
Have the Gallagher brothers, who have now
disavowed dynamism, ever had an original
thought? it’s always been difficult to like
Oasis unless you like their greed and dis
-
honesty as well as their derivative music. Vil-
lager frankly prefers Pulp. How come Israel
feels justified retaliating to the inept missile
assaults by Hizbollah and Iran that typically
cause little injury, with conflagration?
Conflagration nation
Is Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim to keep the
conflict going on as many fronts as possible
with maximum carnage, and maximum geo-
political fallout, to deflect from his previous
domestic travails and to hold on until No-
vember, and the warm embrace of a forgiving
Trump Presidency?
More of the same
As Village was going to press the Irish Inde-
pendent was reporting that Fine Gael elec-
tion candidates are being told by HQ to wise
up and get their poster orders in quickly and
the Irish Times was as usual claiming that
legislation was now being rushed and that
Parliamentarians (still?) believe there will be
a November election. Elections in the US and
Ireland could herald revolutions, or more of
the same, before Village’s elusive next pub
-
lication date.
forward. It will no doubt spawn a redress
scheme of several billion Euro, probably paid
for by you and me.
An indemnity deal signed on 5 June 2002
between then Minister for Education, Mi-
chael Woods, and 18 religious orders de-
cided that the contributions of the religious
institutions to the bill for religious abuse
would be capped at €128 million Euro, in-
cluding originally 64 properties. An indem-
nity was given by the State against further li-
ability, forcing the remainder of the bill onto
the Irish State.
Woods seemed animated by the fact that
the congregations estimated their legal li-
ability at under €60 million if forced into
court, as they believed nine out of ten cases
would fail— mainly because of the statute of
limitations. Woods was determined to be-
lieve them though 20 years later it is clear
that many religious orders including Spiri-
tans, Jesuits and Carmelites are now report-
edly paying pupils for abuse in their schools
because they cannot sustain technical de-
fences, morally, and want to continue to act
in positions of authority.
Crucially too, the cost of the estimated
redress portion of the liability rose five-
fold to €1.25 billion as a result of the num-
bers and severity of claims. The State has
long estimated the total cost of the inquiry
bill, a survivor redress scheme and related
survivor supports at €1.5 billion. This has
proved accurate and includes payments of
nearly 15,000 claims, at an average award of
€62,250; and €193 million in legal costs. The
State thinks the religious should in principle
pay 50%, but the religious demur.
The agreement was infamously signed just
before the 2002 general election, and conse
-
quently was not laid before the cabinet for its
approval. It then remained unpublished for
several months. Woods said that his strong
Catholic faith made him the most suitable
person to negotiate the deal. When asked to
give a statement about the exclusion of then
Attorney-General, Michael McDowell, and
his officials from two meetings, Woods said:
“The legal people simply couldn’t have at
-
tended – it was a no-go area for them – they
had fallen out with the religious”. Weird.
In 2015, there was a second, this time vol-
untary, deal which agreed to an additional
VillageOctNov24.indb 11 03/10/2024 14:27
