ShareFacebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Email Print Villager News Miscellany by admin 19 June, 2023, 3:33 pm 0 Comments PBMay-June 2023May-June 20235It 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 TrumpieManhattan DA Alvin Bragg, sitting on his 34-point indictment, may soon have company in his pursuit of Trump, from 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 efort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and the classifed 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 fnd 11,780 votes”, the outgoing President manically implored during a call to Republican Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, 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’ ofce has found more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations dating to between 2011 and 2021, and that Trump infated 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 Ellemagazine ‘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 Trump of 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 Timesclaiming they “maliciously conspired” against him, breaching the confdentiality 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 staf conspired to harm his 2016 run for president by promoting a “contrived Trump-Russia link”.But, Villager can guarantee, 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 MiscellanyVillagerowner of the National Enquirer who bought the Stormy story, so he could dump it.Bidin’ for BidenAs we Bacchanalise 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 efectively 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 Hill that 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 6May-June 2023May-June 2023728, 1999, and Joseph Biden Sr died on September 2, 2002. In January 2023, Biden claimed that under former President Trump’s administration, “only 3.5 million people had been – even had their frst 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 his 2008 run for the presidency. After Biden’s frst 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 of 214 inaccurate claims in his frst 100 days. HigginsesFirst things frst, 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 Timeswhich he loathed. He died at 55 in January.SheightWhile 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 “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 the Iraq War from the beginning. He repeated the mad claim several times. In 2020, Biden claimed all of three times to have been arrested attempting to visit Nelson Mandela in Soweto in the late 1970s along with the then-ambassador to United Nations, Andrew Young. Mandela was actually held in a prison on Robben Island, and Biden was not arrested while attempting to visit him.Repeating the same joke of 2015 and 2019 on St Patrick’s Day 2022 in the White House, Mr Biden is heard saying: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid”. This carry on led to his spokesperson being force to deny, upon his arrival in Belfast that he was anti-British.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 “frst 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 of 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 the Purple Heart, and that his uncle told him “I don’t want the damn thing”. Frank Biden died on November Ireland’s fragile human-scale towns and cities. Now Dublin is braced for topping out of the 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 frst, 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 ofces, Ronan’s is 93% ofces, 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) skyscrapersRonan’s George’s Quay offce development, now rising 6May-June 2023May-June 20237giving 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 landlordsIt’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 fgure in previous decades was about 20 per cent. Begin againMarian 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 backsideIs 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 MeathOn 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-of 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 fraudsterOn 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 benefted 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 fshed 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 Timesrehabilitating Bertie Ahern? An Easter Monday interview by Justine McCarthy allowed him uncontrolled space to moan about the scrupulously grounded fndings 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 IrishIn that same eccentric and complacent forum in a Saturday Column recently came the most Irish Times David McWilliamsmoment ever, Provisional GreensVillager is as unimpressed by the Green Party as the next man, and not particularly fred 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 Villagewas 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 Indoheadlined ‘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 tooVillager 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 DeadDespite 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 8May-June 2023May-June 2023PBPique peaked in 1789France spends 14% of its GDP on 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 efect.Us and themAs predicted before by Village, it seems for the moment that Russia’s eforts in Ukraine, beheadings apart, have been almost exhausted. Bakhmut has been about the extent of it. And Ukraine is now set for a Spring ofensive, 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 wherethey stop him. Ireland is militarily neutral. Derelict opinionsThere is talk about redeveloping vacant and derelict properties, but a report from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland points out that this is not fnancially 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 fx it; if it is broken fx 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 onThe UK isn’t going to make a bonfre 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 frst place.The puss on that octopusA plan to build the world’s frst 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 confdential 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 Timeswhich, 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 frm 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 theSunday Times(Ireland) which is in fact News Corp, based in London. Ireland: relatively unwell Actual individual consumption, abbreviated as AIC, 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-proft institutions and the government for 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 infuenced by the extent to which non-proft institutions and general government act as service providers.According to Eurostat: “although GDP per 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 fgure 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 leaderVillager 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 Doherty ShareFacebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Email See more Previous article Kincora, an Orwellian child abuse nightmare at the BBC. By David Burke. Back All Entries Next article Looking good for FIE challenge to EU’s inflated fishing quotas.
