Seán Fitzpatrick Trial Collapses - Irish Media Lets the Nation Down

To an institution, the Irish media made the wrong call yesterday. Everybody – Morning Ireland, all the papers, Newstalk and the rest – saw the Manchester bombing as the most important story of the day. It wasn’t. Not in Ireland.

The collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial was the more important story from an Irish perspective, and the across-the-board failure to cover that properly is another erosion of the public’s faith in the institutions of the state – an erosion that can lead to the washing away of the state entirely if it’s not addressed.

Seán Fitzpatrick was the face of the Irish Economic Crash. He was chairman of Anglo-Irish Bank, the bank that lead the field in terms of funny business, and which had over-extended itself to such a degree that the Government felt it had no option but to guarantee all debts of all Irish banks in 2008.

For the past ten years, the feeling has existed that the crash was due to reckless banking practices and it seemed right and just that certain reckless bankers should pay for that. But the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial suggests that’s really not going to happen.

The reasons why the trial collapsed or whether or not the law that deals with white collar crime is fit for purpose are questions for another day. What I’m concerned with this is the media’s inability to realise the importance of this story concerning Seán Fitzpatrick and the collapse of his trial.

In trying to come to terms with how someone so very unsuited to the job is currently President of the United States of America in Monday’s New York Times, David Brooks had some fascinating things to say about the phenomenon of alienation. It was, after all, the alienated who voted for Trump – those traditional Democratic voters in Wisconsin whom Hillary Clinton could not be bothered canvassing, for instance.

Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.

Does that sound at all familiar?

Fianna Fáil suffered the most catastrophic election result in its history in 2011 as a result of the electorate’s anger at the crash and, despite a recovery in 2016, the party is still struggling to regain lost ground. The electorate, meanwhile, disenfranchised with the last government because of a Labour betrayal and a tone-deaf Fine Gael slogan, remains in hostile mood as it still struggles to understand if democracy works in this country.

That’s what makes the Seán Fitzpatrick trial so important. The nation was going to come to terms with what happened through that trial. The nation would have become more educated in how banks and the state interact, the system would be able to strengthen its regulatory powers, all sorts of good and healing things would happen.

Not only will those things not now happen, the establishment of the state – and remember always that the media is the Fourth Estate of the Establishment – doesn’t even seem to register the nature of the crisis.

People are quivering with anger over the collapse of the Seán Fitzpatrick trial. They turned on Morning Ireland yesterday morning to hear about it and all they heard about was Manchester. The papers were all Manchester, and that’s how it continued throughout the day.

Micheál Martin told the Dáil yesterday that the collapse of the trial was a damning indictment of the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement, and the Taoiseach agreed with him. But what does that mean, really? What is the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement? Where is it? Who’s in charge of it? To whom does it answer?

We don’t know. The Office seems just another quango, that just exists for the sake of existing, without ever doing anything. The nearest we came to finding out what exactly the ODCE does was from RTÉ’s Orla O’Donnell’s frankly terrifying account of why the trial collapsed which gained no media traction, not even in the “National Broadcaster” itself.

If your correspondent were in charge, Ms O’Donnell’s story would the front page story on my newspaper, the first story on my radio show. Instead; silence and the shrugging of shoulders.

The media are enjoying the soap opera of the Fine Gael leadership race or else hand-wringing about when we’ll have a Labour Party progressives can believe in. In the meantime, the poor sods who get up and go to work and pay tax and send the kids to school and hope they’ll have some future look at all this and wonder: what’s going on, and why doesn’t someone do something about it?

In their alienation, the citizens of the US took a chance on Trump. In whom will the Irish place their trust when the time comes?

Piketty is Wrong About German War Debt

Colette Browne quotes economist Thomas Piketty in her column in today's Irish Independent as saying that Germany had sixty per cent of its war debt written off after the Second World War. This is not true.

It's not true for this reason: there wasn't a Germany after the Second World War to pay any debts. Germany was gone, and there were two states, East and West Germany, in its place.

Britain, France and the USA were in charge of West Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in charge of East Germany. The NATO powers quickly began to cut West Germany a break, as they had made a deal with the devil in the form of Josef Stalin to win the war in the first place, and now needed a strong Germany to protect Western Europe from the Soviets.

No such luck for the East Germans, which the Soviets already had in their mitts. Anne Applebaum has written an excellent book about rise of the Iron Curtain in the first ten years after the end of the war. From that we learn that the Soviets carried off everything in the occupied territories that wasn't nailed down, and would have continued to do so if Stalin hadn't kicked the bucket in 1953. East Germany remained a slave state, of course, but the Soviets went easy on populating the concentration camps left behind by the Nazis with people who didn't toe the state line.

Germany paid for her sins after the war, and now Germany is the main reason why there hasn't been a European war since – the longest period of European history without a war since Alaric and the Visgoths sacked Rome fifteen hundred years ago.

Beware, beware the celebrity economist. There's always a bottle of snake-oil that needs selling.

Can the Seanad Save Free Speech?

RTÉ and the Irish Times are both before the Courts this morning to see if they are allowed to broadcast and/or print speeches made in the houses of the Oireachtas. It’s an awful situation for a democracy to find itself in, but crisis can often lead to opportunity. And the very peculiar current crisis does present the Seanad with the opportunity to be what its advocates claim it is – relevant to the proper governance of the State.

You remember the Seanad – it’s the theoretical upper house of the bicameral Oireachtas, a growling, snarling watchdog that keeps the Government of the day on their toes. Or so, at least, its proponents would have you believe during the referendum on the continued existence of the Seanad, which the sovereign people choose to retain in a referendum held on the 4th of October, 2013.

Since then, the Seanad has done nothing – zip, zero, the null set, nada, nothing – to show itself worthy of the nation’s faith. Senators who were passionate and vocal contributors to the save-the-Seanad debate haven’t been heard from since, and the chamber looks like what it’s been long-perceived to be, a sanatorium for recovering politicians who didn’t quite make it to the lower chamber.

However. God never closes one door but He opens another, as the old people used to say, and circumstances have given the Seanad the chance to be heard.

If the current court order to redact details of the injunction issued on an RTÉ report into the relationship with businessman Denis O’Brien is upheld, the Seanad won’t have to do anything. There will be a fully-fledged constitutional crisis then, and God only knows how it’ll resolve.

If, however, the courts do not uphold the decision to injunct RTÉ and redact the details of the judgement, then An Taoiseach can roll into the Dáil – one week from now, because the Oireachtas is enjoying a well-deserved break currently – and proclaim what he has always known in his heart, that Ireland is the best little country in the world in which to do free speech. Any further questions will be brushed away, and dissent will be mashed into the carpet by the Government’s massive and well-whipped majority.

Which is why the Seanad must do what the Dáil cannot, and take a stand for freedom of speech. The Government want this thing to go away very, very dearly as, once it starts to unravel properly, goodness only knows where the breadcrumb trail might lead.

Ironically, in the light of previous relationships, the Labour Party may be more eager to see the issue go away than Fine Gael. The marriage referendum and Bench-marking II will go down well with the two wings that make that Labour Party and, after four hard years and the predicted giveaway budget will make the hat-trick. Labour don’t want to see their gifts to the Labour core support blown away in a political storm.

Which is why the nation must look to the Seanad to safeguard its rights. There is nothing that can be done in the Dáil, because of the Government’s steamroller majority. But the Government’s majority in the Seanad is nominal, if it exists at all. That gives the Senators some elbow room.

The powers of the Seanad are quite limited, but there is one shot in its locker. Article 27.1 of the Constitution states that “A majority of the members of Seanad Éireann and not less than one-third of the members of Dáil Éireann may by a joint petition addressed to the President by them under this Article request the President to decline to sign and promulgate as a law any Bill to which this article applies on the ground that the Bill contains a proposal of such national importance that the will of the people thereon ought to be ascertained.”

There is a bill due next week proposing that nobody may own more than twenty per cent of the media. Which sounds great, except that the law is not retrospective. If anybody already owns more than twenty per cent of the media, he or she can keep it.

That’s not good enough. Between the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal, the Siteserv controversy and the current attempt to muzzle the democratically elected representatives of the people, it’s time to have a look at the precise relationship between the Government and #REDACTED.

Can the upper house stand for the public good when the lower house either can’t or won’t? Will a majority of members of the Seanad vote to send this press ownership Bill to the President, and let the cards fall as they will after that?

Such a move still needs the backing of one third of Dáil deputies, which is fifty-five of them. The Government has 101 votes, which leaves sixty-four left over. They can surely scrounge fifty-five votes from those sixty-four if the upper house raises the flag of Liberty.

Eighteen months ago the Seanad told that sovereign people that it was relevant in the democratic processes of the state. Now it has a chance to prove it. History awaits.

Won't Anybody Think of Kieran Donaghy?

The last fancy eats he'll see for a while.

The Gaelic Players’ Association, or GPA, like to make a big song and dance about the suffering of the inter-county player, and the great efforts that the GPA make to help those forced to wear that crown of thorns, that overladen creel, that 21st Century hairshirt that is the county jersey.

As far as the GPA are concerned, the county player, like lovely Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, is worth it.

“County players are separately [separate, that is, to the club players who make up 98% of the GAA’s playing population, and should be glad of the seat at the back of the bus, the scuts – ASF] supported through a Development Programme in specific recognition of their commercial importance and significance to the GAA in three main areas - the sale of sponsorship deals, broadcast rights and gate receipts.” says the GPA’s FAQ page.

What your correspondent can’t get through his cabbage head is why, for all their rhetoric about elite tier players and commercial significance, one of the most elite of Gaelic football’s elite tier players is currently on the brink of penury and ruin while the GPA seems to be doing nothing – nothing! – to support him.

The Indian Summer of Kieran Donaghy was one of the stories of last year’s Championship, and the single most important factor in Kerry’s winning of their 37th All-Ireland. Donaghy has been named captain of Kerry this year and what is his thanks? He’s out of a job. That’s his thanks.

The Irish Independent reported last week that Donaghy has quit a fine job in the bank in the heat of the worst recession in Europe since the 1930s because of his football commitments. What’s the man expected to live on? Air? And him with a young family to support as well. It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is. It’s a scandal.

Where are the thousand GPA swords leaping from their scabbards to protest this injustice? Why isn’t Dónal Óg Cusack doing a piece to VT for RTÉ Prime Time, followed quickly by Minister for Sport, Transport and Tourism Pascal Donohoe being asked “but Minister – what about the children?” by Miriam O’Callaghan over and over again?

It’s a long time between now and 2016, when Donaghy will be able to work again. It’s a long time to be without a steady income. The steadfast Gaels of Erin endured rapine, famine and oppression for eight hundred years before our Gaelic culture, handed down to us by Almighty God, was able to take its place among the cultures of the earth, and were glad to do it. Are we now to stand idly by while one of our greatest current exponents of Gaelic football, that jewel of Gaelic culture and sportsmanship and athleticism, starves on the side of the road?

Can we bear the thought of Kieran Donaghy, a hero and role model to the youth of Ireland, living from hand to mouth for an entire year, never knowing where his next hot meal is coming from? Is he to spend the next twelve months using one teabag for four mugs of tea, watering down the breakfast milk and – horror of horrors! – economizing further by ating rice instead of spuds with his dinner? I should bloody hope not.

This column knows where our duty lies. This column calls on all Gaels to rally to the cause. Footballers, hurlers, handballers, Scór tin-whistlers and even whoever exactly it is that claims to play rounders are to get out now and start collecting non-perishable goods, clothing, fuel and other necessities of survival and common human dignity. Parcels are to be made up and shipped to Kieran Donaghy, c/o Fitzgerald Stadium, Killarney, Co Kerry.

Blankets would be good too – with the way the summer is shaping up already, the poor man might be glad of them. And when winter comes around, maybe someone can stick a knife in that damned Bóthar goat and send the carcass down to Donaghy. He can ate the thing himself and then try to flog the skin to a bodhrán-maker to get the price of a bowl of hot soup or something. Star will need all the help he can get in the long, cold winter.

We Have Learned Nothing in Irish Politics

First published in the Western People on Monday.

I, for one, welcome our new overlord.

The analysis of the by-election results in Dublin South-West and Roscommon South-Leitrim has focused heavily on how voters are turning away from the major Irish political parties. This was especially obvious in Dublin South-West, where Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour managed just 26% of the vote between them.

To put that in perspective, there has never been a government in the history of the state that hasn’t featured at least one of those parties in its makeup, and now they can only manage one vote in four between the three of them.

Why the public are so disillusioned is certainly due to a combination of reasons, one of which seems under-discussed in the national media. Could the disconnect between the mainstream political parties and the mainstream of Irish political life have arisen because the mainstream political parties have treated the electorate like fools since the crash, if not before?

For instance: during the end of the bailout debate in the Dáil last year, the majority of speakers made a point of commending the Ballyhea Says No Protest.

Ballyhea is a village in County Cork. Every Sunday without fail since March 6th, 2011, a group of locals have held a protest against the bank bailout.

There is a better chance of the GAA stripping Kerry of this year’s All-Ireland title and awarding it to Mayo in apology for events in Limerick than there is of the Ballyhea Says No protest group doing anything other than getting colds now that the weather has got chilly again. The Ballyhea protest is an attempt to get toothpaste back into the tube or water to flow uphill. The world doesn’t work like that. It just doesn’t.

Ballyhea says it’s not our debt. Of course it’s our debt. If it weren’t our debt, we wouldn’t be bloody paying for it, would we? This is how the world works.

Does anybody stand up and say this in the Dáil? No, they don’t. If the people were told that the milk is spilled and is now gone, never to come back, could they deal with it? Of course they could. Milk gets spilled all the time and the world doesn’t end. The world carries on just the same. But the Irish political establishment doesn’t trust the Irish electorate to come to terms with that.

Whether they were right or wrong, whether they were had their arms twisted or they were just thick, the government that signed the bank guarantee were fully mandated by the people to sign that guarantee. That’s what representative government is.

The sovereign people elect representatives to make decisions on the sovereign people’s behalf. If the government screws it up, it’s partly the fault of the sovereign people who elected them in the first place.

This isn’t news. This principle goes back to the Ancient Greeks, before the birth of Christ. There is nothing novel in this.

But representative democracy can do something that toothpaste-back-in-tube movements can’t do. They elect someone else. And that is what the voters in the two by-elections are clearly eager to do.

That is what they did the last time, but they were sold a pup. The people remain eager to get what they voted for, and so we get the voting patterns in the recent by-elections. The sad thing for the country, though, is that the new dispensation is just as likely to be a mutt as the last.

Michael Fitzmaurice, the new TD for Roscommon South Leitrim, seems a good and honest man. The type of man on whom you can rely to help you when you need it and pretend after that he did nothing at all. In the case of Roscommon South-Leitrim, the man’s own decency and likeability may have had as much to do with his victory as anything else.

But the reality is that he’s just one man. One man can’t govern. To govern, you need to form alliances, and how many Michael Fitzmaurices are there in the Dáil? The Independents dream of some sort of we’re-all-Independent-together faction in the next Dáil, but where is the common ground between Shane Ross, Michael Fitzmaurice and Michael Lowry? The gap is too big to bridge.

And then you have the socialists. Paul Murphy, Joe Higgins, Clare Daly and Joan Collins were all in the Socialist Party once. Presuming that the Anti-Austerity Alliance isn’t one and the same with the Socialist Party, the four of them are now in four different parties, even though they all agree with each other on policy.

They all agree, and they can’t get on. They won’t be forming any government, or if they do, it’ll probably have broken down in the time it takes them to go the Phoenix Park to get their seals of office from the President.

Besides. The establishment parties aren’t alone in not being entirely upfront with the electorate. Paul Murphy was elected in Dublin South-West because he is anti-water charge. Most people who voted for him won’t be liable for water charges in the first place. There are places in Dublin South-West that are so deprived, so far removed from mainstream life, that even to drive through them feels like having crossed into another country.

If there were honest politics in this country, the only issue on the doorsteps in areas like Jobstown and Cherry Orchard should be that candidates would move Heaven and Earth to keep children in school and on the straight and narrow. Dysfunctional though the adults’ lives may be, if it can be brought through to them that it may be possible to save the children from perpetuating the cycle, that would a treble victory for the people, the community and the nation.

What did we get instead? Extraordinary placards that beseeched us to stick our water meters up our bottoms. Not quite Meagher’s speech from the dock.

So here we are. Faith is lost in the establishment parties. The only people to rally to Lucinda Creighton’s flag were those who had nowhere else to go. The alternative parties hope to get their chance but, if their slogans are a guide, it’s hard not to think of the men to whom WB Yeats referred in The Fisherman one hundred and one years ago – “no knave brought to book / Who has won a drunker cheer.”

There are no leaders here. The country continues to go around and around in pointless, hopeless circles.

Forgive us, Frau Merkel. Come back to Erin, Mr Chopra. We promise to be nicer to you than those beastly Scots, Mr Cameron. Please. Somebody take us in. We just can’t make it on our own.

Bias in the Media

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Although his politics are shared by very few people in the country, Joe Higgins, TD, has always been lauded for being a “diverse” voice in the Irish political landscape. Political correspondents often remark in their end-of-term parliamentary reviews how good it is to have Joe Higgins in the Dáil to provide “balance” to debates.

Well. We all must be careful what we wish for, and the national media discovered this the hard way when the terms of reference to the long-awaited Banking Inquiry were announced recently.

The Banking Inquiry was conceived, originally, as a fine instrument for dipping the previous government into a vat of boiling oil. However, that methodology would probably give some busybody in the UN another reason to give out to us, so the current government had to adjust the terms of reference.

The Banking Inquiry is now set to investigate all banking practice in Ireland from 1992 until the crash, some sixteen years. And just as everybody was about to sign off on this, Joe Higgins put his hand up and made a last-minute suggestion.

Higgins proposed that the inquiry examine “the development of a prevailing consensus, including the role of mass media and advertising and mortgage brokers, financial consultants and property development and sales companies.”

Since the crash, we’ve all heard a lot about “groupthink” in Irish political life. But Joe Higgins’s amendment to the Banking Inquiry is the first effort to discover what exactly this groupthink is, where does it come from, what does it do and is it a good or a bad thing.

Not everyone is happy about this. Ciarán Lynch, TD, chairman of the Banking Inquiry, was on Morning Ireland the week before last to discuss the Inquiry, and he seemed a little shocked to be hauled over the coals about the media angle.

“The media has no legislative power,” the Morning Ireland presenter kept repeating. Mr Lynch may have considered replying that a government backbencher doesn’t have all that much power either, but probably thought he’d only get into more trouble.

It is unlikely the nation wll be any the wiser after the Banking Inquiry. Anyone who expects anything other that stonewalling from witnesses and grandstanding from committee members hasn’t been following these Oireachtas Committee very closely.

People can be compelled to appear but they are under no obligation to say anything of any interest whatever once they’re there. So it’s all for show, really, a lot like the Houses of the Oireachtas themselves.

What makes this twist about the media interesting though is that it gives us an opportunity to consider the question of bias. All news reporting has to deal with bias, from the very start of a news cycle. By reporting one thing and not reporting another, any media organisation has already taken a step that may be affected by bias, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s how the media organisation deals with that bias inherent in the news-gathering process itself that’s interesting. And there are two schools of thought here.

The current fashion is for admitting bias from the start. More and more media organisations don’t even try to be fair, but simply tell their audiences what they want to hear. The right-wing Fox News in the USA is (in)famous for its partisan reporting, but there are plenty of channels in the US who shout for the Democrats too. The problem is that people don’t get to see both points of view at once, and this causes a democratic deficit.

The classical model of good reporting in journalism is to acknowledge bias but to strive to overcome it at every opportunity. This is the model practiced here in Ireland – in theory, anyway – but it seems Joe Higgins is inclined to double-check that idea, just in case.

Does Higgins have a point? Well. It certainly is a remarkable thing that the entire country was convinced that the housing market could provide infinite wealth for so long. It also a remarkable thing that when the crash came, the country was equally convinced there was only one reason behind it. How much of these twin illusions was due to the way the boom, the bust and the repercussions were reported in the media?

The media is all-pervasive in our lives. When you get up, you know if the shower was hot or cold, you know if you could find your socks, you know if there’s milk in the fridge when you open the door. You could look out the window to see what the weather is like, but you know that could change in fifteen minutes or less.

For everything else that impacts on your life, you need the media. Do you need a new car for the morning commute? Can you afford one? Are car prices going up or down? Are petrol prices going up or down? What will it cost to tax and insure the thing? Should you forget the family saloon and buy some sort of jeep, because the road is all potholes and it costs money to repair broken axles?

You don’t have time to study economics to see overall market trends. You can’t keep up with the geopolitics of the oil-producing countries, or the physics of all the new ways of getting oil out of the ground. And you certainly can’t pop in to Leinster House and find out what future taxation and infrastructure policy will be. There are plenty in there who have no idea no more than ourselves.

So you rely on the media for this information. You watch the news and listen to it on the radio and buy a daily paper along with your weekly Western and you take a sneaky glance at the web at work too.

But reader – can you fully believe what you read in the papers, hear on the radio or see on the TV? Is everybody trying really hard to maintain objectivity, or do they go on the occasional crusade every now again? Or not even that – could it be that one side of the argument is presented, and a balancing counter-argument just doesn’t make an appearance? Who exactly is telling us what to do?

The Boys in the Bubble

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Someone wrote once that the reason the Irish media so loves the Labour Party is that the Labour Party, above any other party, guarantees the media something to write about.

Keeping one’s own counsel was never the Labour way. The average Labour Party member seems to believe that theirs is the only party with a conscience. Not only that, but Labour must wrestle with its conscience in the full glare of publicity.

Pat Rabbitte once accused his former Party Chairman, Colm Keaveney, of regularly pirouetting on the Dáil plinth, wrestling with his conscience. It was like a farmer being shocked to discover one of his hens has feathers.

And now, where they only had a empty summer ahead of them, the political writers will have one solid month of a Labour Party deputy-leadership race with which to entertain the nation. (And isn’t it really extraordinary that there are so many more runners for the silver medal than the gold? What’s going on there?)

Once the race is won, journalism will then have a fortnight of sorting through the tea-leaves to see if dissent remains, and then there’ll be the reshuffle. And for all the biting and fighting that will occur over all of that, it’ll look like Saturday night on Lough Derg compared to the holy war that will ensue when the Government tries to cobble a budget together.

The heartbreaking thing about it is that it’s all for naught. Irish journalism is busy watching the band while the Titanic sinks beneath the waves.

Journalism is odd in that it’s both necessary to the running of the state and has nothing to do with governance as such. There is no election for Editor of the Irish Times or Senior Greyhound Racing Correspondent of the Racing Post.

Because it’s not part of official governance, journalism is as much prey as predator. It is a predator to governance and authority, keeping them on the straight and narrow, but prey to market forces, which may destroy its outposts at any time.

And this resolves itself in the eternal battle of what the public wants to know, which will also defend journalistic outlets from predators, and what the public needs to know, which fulfills the fourth estate’s basic remit of keeping the other three estates in check.

The public wants to know if Kim Kardashian had a nice time in Ireland on her honeymoon. The public needs to know what the next President of European Commission thinks about the Irish bank bailout, because that will have a much bigger impact on our daily lives than Ms Kardashian, lovely and all as I’m sure she is.

What does Kardashianism have to do with the Labour Party (deputy) leadership race? Is the race something we like to know about, or need to know about? We like to know about the race, because it’s so interesting. Politics is a real world soap opera, with all the thrills that entails. But we only need to know who wins the race, and whether the result means the Government will collapse before Christmas or battle on into 2015.

Because politics is such a thrilling and addictive pursuit, it’s easy to lose perspective. Because journalists know and socialise with the contenders in the Labour deputy leadership race, they’re drawn into the story, and every little thing seems interesting.

But being drawn in can cause journalists to miss the elephant in the room. While the cosy comforts of the Irish political system may feel like home once you’ve done your few years on the circuit, for the ordinary people of Ireland the Irish political system is a wreck.

While the same suits are shouting the same slogans at each other the country, especially the rural parts of it, is withering away. A friend of a friend is currently home from Australia and he tells a story of himself and twenty other people from his home village all happening to be in the one bar somewhere in Australia one night.

I’ve been to the home village in question. If twenty people were in Australia I am not at all sure who was left, because that place is no urban centre. The foxes will walk the streets of that village in the middle of the day if the pattern continues.

The people voted for change in 2011. They didn’t get it. All the indicators are that they’re fully prepared to take another swing at getting it once the next General Election comes around, not least if it comes around soon.

So while the political creatures cocooned in their Dublin 2 bubble think the Labour Party elections are the most important thing happening today, the people outside that bubble may think differently. The people of the nation, that homely place outside the weird triangle bounded Kildare Street in the west and Baggot Street along the south, really don’t care about political dramas or the point-counterpoint niceties of claiming credit and dumping blame.

They want to know why family occasions are conducted on Skype between the four corners of the Earth this year. They want to know why sick children are losing medical cards. They want to know why the Government can soak up so much money and the people themselves see so very little of it.

They want to know why the Government was calling itself Champion of the World for a deal on Promissory Notes when there aren’t five hundred people in the country who could tell you what those Promissory Notes are. And they want to know all these things now. They voted for change. Why hasn’t anything changed?

This isn’t discontent any more. This is rage. An Taoiseach spoke of the recent election results as an expression of rage, but he sounded like a man who expected that rage to die down. What if it doesn’t? What if it’s only building up? Wouldn’t the press be better served reflecting that, rather than the ins and outs of a competition that won’t make a blind bit of difference to anyone?

Hello Again, Square One

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Houses of the Oireachtas rise on Thursday for the Easter break, and do not return (descend? Hardly an inappropriate verb) until May 6th. Siesta time in days gone by, whatever the whining from the members, but not this year. This year there are two elections coming to the boil over the holidays, and every party expects boots on the ground to get the vote out.

The sovereign nation was told that things would never be the same again as the votes of the last election were being counted, the election that routed Fianna Fáil and saw the current Government sweep to power on a five-point-plan ticket. Things, we were told, would never be the same again.

Well. That didn’t work out, did it? A recent opinion poll in the Irish Times saw Fianna Fáil neck-and-neck with Fine Gael, the Government parties using their huge majority to protect the Minister for Justice at the cost of a massive amount of public goodwill. The Government had a mountain of public goodwill when elected. It’s safe to say the needle is now as near to zero as makes no difference.

Enda Kenny, had he so chosen, could have created a Second Republic three years ago by claiming a single-party mandate and daring Fianna Fáil to support him as he carried out Fianna Fáil’s own Troika-dictated blueprint for recovery. The moment Fianna Fáil’s support quivered, Enda could damn them as traitors to the recovery, run to the country and achieve not only the first-ever Fine Gael overall majority, but the end of Fianna Fáil for good and for always.

Enda Kenny choose the more stable option in coalescing with Labour, but now, bizarre though it sounds, the country is too stable. The Crash seemed like a wake-up call at the time, a painful lesson that the state has been run badly and could never be run the same way again.

But nothing has changed. Yes, the bailout is over and the sky didn’t fall in, but what has changed as regards the fundamental structures of the state? The recent controversies would suggest: nothing. Nothing at all has changed, or will ever change.

And as such, the pendulum swings back to its default position and Fianna Fáil, having being laid out on its back by the General Election, could be standing on its own two feet again come the summer, and chomping at the bit for the next general election.

Irish politics has been on a twenty-year cycle since the Second World War. Fianna Fáil governs for sixteen years, the country tires of them and gives the other crowd a go.

Even though it’s been sixteen long years since the other crowd were in charge, they’ve managed to use that time to learn nothing about how to last for longer than one term when they get back. It is genuinely extraordinary.

Last week a British junior minister had to resign because a claim of £45,000 in expenses to which she was not entitled.

In Ireland the Minister for Justice is at the centre of controversies that include using Garda information as a political smear, phone-tapping (official), phone-tapping (unofficial), not reading letters that are his duty to read and the Lord knows what else. One of those alone should have cost his job. Not one of them did, nor ever looked likely to, either.

Where will this all lead? In a game where a week is a famously long time, it’s a risk to project into years. But we’re all friends here so let’s take a shot.

The mystery about who gets elected from our current European super-constituencies exists in inverse proportion to how very little it matters. We could send the Shamrock Rovers first XI for all the difference it’d make. Toothless tigers. Pointless.

What is more interesting are the local elections, and how badly the Government parties fare. Fine Gael and Labour celebrated the exit of the Troika, but they haven’t had a moment’s luck since. And if the local elections are a disaster for the Government parties, could we be looking at a double-heave?

Joan Burton has made noises recently about the need for Eamon Gilmore to have a Ministry based in Ireland, but it’s more likely she’s doing that to twist his tail rather than launch her own bid. Gilmore will go down with his ship. Anyone who took over now would take the blame for the likely massacre at the next general election, and who wants that?

As for Fine Gael, Enda Kenny’s stubborn loyalty to Alan Shatter has depleted his goodwill reserves within the party. The sensible thing to do was to either pension Shatter off or else simply fire him. The longer the thing went on, the more it cost Kenny.

And Kenny’s enemies have never gone away. The question for conspirators now is whether or not to launch their heave before or after Phil Hogan is made European Commissioner, as seems to be the general expectation in the corridors of power. Hogan is Kenny’s chief lieutenant – Kenny will be more vulnerable without Hogan to keep the troops in line. However, if Kenny is sufficiently vulnerable after the local elections, the rebels may decide to treat themselves, on the basis that two heads are better than one.

Independents will be the big winners in the locals, but the big winners in terms of the next general election will be Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin, of course. The commentariat insist that the Sinn Féin rise is due to Mary Lou McDonald’s undeniably impressive performances on TV. The opinion polls say that Gerry Adams has the highest leader-satisfaction in the country. So it’s not easy reconcile those opposites.

The real turning point of the next election, then, will be whether Fianna Fáil are the majority or minority party in coalition, and how broad will that coalition have to be. We are too far out to tell, but it’s hard to see the Government turning their fortunes around short of a heave, and the Reform Alliance have missed the most open goal since the foundation of the state. Hello again, Square One. This is Ireland. We’re back.

The Island of Sheep and Suckers

What’s more depressing about the #IrelandInspires video that’s so popular currently on You Tube? The very fact of its being there, or the fact that people seem to be taken in by the thing?



Hasn’t anybody read the titles on the film? Does anybody think about what those titles are saying, or what a strange way this is for Bord Fáilte – of all state bodies – to communicate? Or, in an age of six-second attention spans, is this the 21st Century’s iteration of Juvenal’s bread and circuses – the distractions that keep the masses entertained while the Government does what it damn well pleases?

The viewer who has learned the price of naivety the hard way starts getting suspicious when he or she notices that #IrelandInspires has miscounted the Irish Oscar winners who were born here (as opposed to being Irish), and the number of Irish Nobel laureates (ten, not nine, by my count).

OK – we Irish aren’t known for being smart, are we? How would we be able to count anything other than potatoes? But all bets are off when #IrelandInspires gets to its piece about Italia ’90.

The summer of the 1990 World Cup was definitely a turning point in the nation’s history. But that watery line about Bonner suggests that the people who made the #IrelandInspires video don’t truly understand the importance of that World Cup, and that’s unforgivable in a film that is meant to celebrate Irishness.

Con Houlihan, God have mercy on him, said that he was disappointed to have missed Italia ’90, having been in Italy at the time. That’s the kernel of what happened during the 1990 World Cup.

The 1990 World Cup is significant because, for the first time, it gave Irish people a sense that we had just as much right to the world stage, to the best things in life, as anyone else. That there was to be no more doffing of caps or tugging of forelocks before our betters. Without Italia ’90, could there have been Roy Keane? Without Roy Keane, could there have been Brian O’Driscoll? That’s the significance of Italia ’90. Italia ’90 made the Irish believe in themselves.

What film clip should #IrelandInspires have used instead of Bonner? John Healy, a big, fat, bald man, the greatest journalist of his generation, weeping with pride after Ireland won that game against Romania. You’ve seen it on Reeling in the Years, and you can now see it every week on TV – it’s part of the Second Captains opening sequence.

The Second Captains know Healy weeping sums up Italia ‘90. Why don't these lemons?

And why is #IrelandInspires so taken with the dismal science of economics? When Leonidas and his three hundred guarded the Pass of Thermopylae against Xerses and the Persians, did he inspire his men by quoting Sparta’s year-on-year GDP? When Wolfe took Quebec, did he inspire his men by telling them that house prices in Montreal had show year-on-year increases for six consecutive quarters, when adjusted for inflation? No, he did not. Wolfe recited Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard instead, and said he’d sooner have written that poem than win the coming battle. Wolfe was a man.

There is no poetry present in #IrelandInspires, but economic detail is packed into every minute. “Ireland’s the first Eurozone country to successfully exit an economic assistance program,” trumpets #IrelandInspires. Which means – what, exactly?

That Ireland is the first of the Fort Knox bullion robbers to get time off for good behaviour? That Ireland is the first husband on the street to stop beating his wife? That Ireland is the first cook to see the advantage in removing the egg from the boiling water with a spoon, rather than his fingers?

Besides. What is all this economic material doing in a Bord Fáilte video? 1,033 companies choose Ireland as their European base? Ireland has the most adaptable – whatever that means – workforce in the world? What’s any of that got to do with going on your holidays? Shouldn’t that be in an IDA video? When you buy your Rough Guides or Lonely Planets, do you see much mention of the adaptability of the workforce in Corfu, or the quality of scientific research in Marbella?

And why does Haiti get a mention, of all places? It’s four thousand miles away. Are there long and historic ties between Ireland and Haiti? Of all the disadvantaged countries in all the world, why choose Haiti?

#IrelandInspires tells us “our culture and music have reached the world,” while showing performers performing the ancient and traditional Irish art of fire-eating. #IrelandInspires was published during Seachtain na Gaeilge. Any mention of the first language over the three minutes? God between us and small farms.

Seventy-one years ago today, in his St Patrick’s Day address to the nation, Taoiseach Eamon De Valera said “the Ireland that we dreamed of  … [was of] a people who … devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.”

#IrelandInspires isn’t buying any of De Valera’s old blather, whoever De Valera was. Getting time off for good behaviour when we’re caught with our hands in the cookie jar is inspirational now. Not having any understanding of the tide of history, not just long-term history, but the history of the current generation, is inspirational now. And most of all, the Ireland that we dream of has an eager willingness to lie down with every single multinational that pulls into the quay, without ever stopping to wonder what will happen when the multinationals move on to the next service provider.

At the last election we were told that the crisis would damn a generation. Now, three years on, we’re all on the pig's back? Who’s fooling whom this St Patrick’s Day, Ireland? Who are the eejits here?

Radical Thinking? No Thanks

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Ministers for the Environment and Social Protection, Phil Hogan and Joan Burton respectively, are rolling out a new scheme for the long-term unemployed. If you’ve spent over two years on the dole you’ll now be offered a job with the local council, from street-sweeping to working in the local library or anything in between. You get another twenty Euro on top of your unemployment assistance if you do it, and your dole gets cut if you don’t.

Reaction, unsurprisingly, was mixed. There was a vocal section of the community who felt this was exploitation of people who were in a bad situation already, and a disgrace to the very notion of social justice and the dignity of the person. Then there was the less vocal population who thought a spot of hard labour was good enough for the work-shy layabouts..

The scheme, called Gateways, isn’t the worst idea in the world. The problem is that it’s so very far from being a good idea that it’s heartbreaking. For all the rhetoric after the crash and leading up to the last election, it’s clear that the new boss is just like the old boss, and any vague chance of innovative thinking is now lost. For all the trauma of the crash and the nation’s shocking return to the earth from the highs of empty-suitcase holidays to New York, we at least had a chance to rip things up and start again.

And did we take it? No, we did not. We settled, as we always do, for some tokenism. Now that the Troika are gone, it’s like neither the crash nor the boom ever happened, and politics has returned to what it would have been like in the 1980s if there had been no Charles Haughey to give it spice. Local squabbles given national importance while the country sinks slowly away and her young people leave in droves.

And the ones that don’t leave have nothing to do except pad around the house in despair, not going out because they can’t afford to, and watching the years suddenly accelerate by. And then two years are up and you get a letter from Gateways telling you that you’ve been chosen to cut the long acre by the cemetery outside of town and you wonder God, will you get an orange suit as well, like they get in Guantanamo? Will you sing spirituals while you work? And aren’t things bad enough without you being publically humiliated like this as well?

Say your business went wallop like so many did during the crash and you know that the people in the village are saying that your cough wanted softening alright, you and your coffee machine and smart phone and three pairs of shoes. What will they say now when you’re out with your long-handled sickle? Could the Minister not just put you in the stocks in the town square and be done with it?

And then there’s the other side. Even at the height of the boom, there were still long-terms unemployed people in Ireland. When it seemed like every single person behind a shop counter was from Liberia, Lithuania or some parish in between and could no more speak English than the average Irish person can speak Irish, there was a still a large indigenous population who couldn’t get any of those jobs, even when they spoke English all their lives. There’s something funny going on there.

So there it is. We talk about the long-term unemployed like they’re a homogenous lump, the one just like the other. Whereas they’re exactly like ourselves because they are ourselves, but for accidents of circumstance – bright people and dumb people and busy people and lazy people and every sort of pilgrim that ever walked.

On the face of it, the Gateways initiative sounds great. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Once the novelty has worn off it’s just another hoop in the social-welfare infrastructure of the state, that’s good enough to keep the disadvantaged from starving but not good enough to break the generational cycle of the thing.

The people voted for radical thinking. Where is it? What’s being done that’s a radical approach to this? For instance: Denis Naughten floated an idea before Christmas about welfare payments to families being linked to children’s performance in education. Did anything ever come of that? Was it discussed at the Reform Alliance Conference? Or was it let just wither on the vine?

What are we doing about reskilling people? The universities are pumping out IT graduates but the IT managers who drink pints with this column when this column is off-duty all say that hiring is hellishly difficult at the moment. Yes, the graduates have skills but they’re not the right skills, in the same way a plumber’s skills aren’t a carpenter’s.

So what can people do? If you can learn one computer language you can learn them all. What opportunities are there to get quickly qualified in a single-hot skill language? None. Irish tertiary education isn’t modular. You have to do a three year course and what in God’s Holy Name is the point in doing a three year course to learn one single language you can learn in three months?

You could buy a book from Amazon and learn it that way, of course. But if you don’t have a qualification the recruiters recognise, the recruiters don’t want to know.

So. if the Government really wanted to be radical it could:

• Run modular courses for different computer specialties, as informed by the major employers in that sector
• Phase out benefits rather than suddenly cutting them off when someone leaves the long-term unemployed list
• Persuade employers and recruiters to be a little more expansive in their hiring policy, and to remember that skills are only a component of what makes a good employee. Skills can be taught. Character, not so much.

And that’s just three things that the Government could do at hardly any cost but with tremendous potential reward. What do we get instead? Job-bridge apprentices and Gateway grasscutters. Have we any tears left to shed?

The Politics of Healthcare

I diagnose - money. Lots
and lots of money.

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The politics of healthcare are always difficult. You can only ever build so many hospitals and employ so many doctors. There will always be a gap between what people think they need and what a service can provide. Not every health care story will be good news, by the very nature of the business.

For all that, the politics of healthcare have taken an unedifying dip in recent years that reflects badly on all concerned. In arguing over budgets in the media instead of in their offices, where they belong, those involved in running the Irish health service are terrifying ordinary people who have enough to worry about as the nights continue to lengthen and the cold winter bites.

The most recent instance of this is the dispute over pay to the Chief Executive Officers of different hospitals in the State. It started some weeks ago, when the CEOs of the Mater, St James’s, Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin, and Tallaght Hospital published a letter they had written to the HSE, predicting all sorts of calamity should funding to those four hospitals be cut any further.

This letter was covered on Prime Time and made the main story on Morning Ireland the next day. Further calamity in the health service, doctors and nurses working 23-hour-days, what are the people to do?

At no stage did anyone stop and stay: wait a minute. Has anyone done the sums on this? Do these people have a point?

The wheel has come full circle now, as someone – goodness knows who – has leaked the salaries of certain hospitals CEOs to the media, and the shoe is now on the other foot. The salaries of the hospital CEOs who dare not cut one cent further are now in the news and, to the surprise of no-one, they are both big and fat.

This is what happens when amateurs play politics. They get your hands dirty. By entering the political arena, the CEOs have found themselves out of their depth, and are being outspun and outleaked at every turn.

And this would all be very funny if it weren’t for the fact that we’re talking about health spending. The story itself is now dead – the CEOs will be keeping their beaks tightly shut after this, while the HSE now says that the bonus money paid to the CEOs will be taken out of the relative hospitals’ grants. And that closes the book on the hospital CEOs’ shot across the HSE’s bows – the game ends in a score draw.

But while the story is dead, the smell of it lingers on. Pat Leahy noted in his recent book about the first two years of the present Government, The Path to Power, that the Government got blamed for the ideas that were floated but not implemented in their first budget.

The prospect of real cuts was fixed more firmly in people’s minds because they could relate to them. People don’t remember details of different budgets – how could they? But hearing that they’re losing their medical card or that a particular benefit was being cut – that’s very real and easy to relate to.

People will have forgotten the details of this storm in a teacup by Christmas – who got paid what and by whom. What they will remember is the chills that ran through them, in these times of austerity, when they first heard the details of the CEOs’ letter.

Future reductions in spending could “seriously threaten the quality and safety of patient services,” we were told, and that there are “unacceptable delays for treatment of certain cancer patients due to overwhelming demand.”  That’s what lasts in people’s heads, even though we don’t know if it’s right or wrong. The media has moved on, but the fear remains with ordinary people. And ordinary people have enough on their plates without being terrified out of their wits the next time they turn on the news.

Very few people on this island could estimate how much the CEO of a hospital should be paid. If you have to ring a man to come out and fix a gutter that got blown away in a storm, you’ll have your head well scratched figuring out how deep you’ll have to reach into the pocket to pay him. You haven’t a hope of having a correct option as to what Doctor O’Mahony of the Rotunda is worth.

When Liam Doran of the Irish Nurses Union comes on TV with his latest (long) list of grievances, you naturally sympathise with the nurses. But can you really make a call on whether or not their grievance is fair and just? How could you? The matters involved in health administration are so complex you’re lost as soon as you begin.

Better, then, for the media to be a little more judicious in how they report health stories, and not go for the terror angle. They ought to keep the narrative within certain bounds, and settle for that. For instance, here’s one way to go about it:

The British Government spends about seven hundred billion pounds sterling a year, give or take. One hundred billion of that spending is spent on the National Health Service – one pound in every seven.

The Irish Government spends about fifty billion Euro a year, give or take. Fourteen billion of that spending is spent on the health service – one Euro in every three.

Ireland is paying twice as much for half the service. How can that be? Where is the money going? Is it being wasted? Why is it being wasted? What’s being done to stop the waste? Who’s responsible? Who’s going to fix it?

Everyone can relate to those questions. It would be nice to hear the answer to even a few of them. Nice, but not at all likely.

Brian Cowen - An Fear Gan Aithne Air

Theip ar Brian Cowen mar Thaoiseach go h-uile is go h-iomlán. Is léir sin do chách. Ach an rud nach léir d'éinne ná cén fáth gur theip air chomh dóna sin? Cén fáth nach bhfuil cara dá laghad ann a sheasfaidh leis anois? Cén fáth nach bhfuil aon duine ann a rachaidh ina chosaint?

Tá an t-Iar-Thaoiseach sa nuacht arís agus agallamh leis chun chraoladh i gceann dhá lá. Tháinig scéalta ón agallamh - ar Chomhrá, ar TG4 - amach sa meáin an seachtain seo caite. Ní dúirt sé go raibh brón air, a thuairiscíodh. Cén fáth nach bhfuil brón air?

Ní raibh suim ag éinne sa méid a dúirt sé - ag fánacht ar an dólás amháin a bhí na meáin. Ní raibh spéis dá laghad acu le cad a bhí le rá ag Cowen, agus ní raibh ó 2008 nuair a tharla an tubáiste.

A leitheoir dhílis, an bhfuil fios agat cad é an rud is spéisiúla domsa maidir le filleadh gairid Brian Cowen sa saol pobail? Go ndearna sé as Gaeilge é.

Cén fáth Comhrá ar TG4? Is é Brian Cowen atá i gceist - dá gcuirfeadh sé glaoch gutháin ar eagarthóir ar bith in Éirinn beidh an príomh-leathanach aige agus gach leathanach istigh mar ba mhaith leis. Brian Cowen ab ea an chéad aoi ar an Late Late Show le Ryan Tubridy - nach síleann tú go mbeadh an dara fáilte ag Tubs dó? Cad faoi Marian, máthair faoistine na bpolaiteoirí le sách fada an lá? Cad faoi Pat Kenny, agus a chlár nua ar Newstalk?

Ach níor bhac Cowen le éinne acu. Shuigh sé síos le Máirtín Tom Sheáinín Mac Donnacha, fear atá chomh fada le galántacht Bhleá Cliath 4 mar ab fhéidir a shamháil.

Is dócha go bhfuil an tuairim amach go raibh fíos ag Cowen go ngeobhadh sé agallamh níos boige ná mar a gheobhach sé ó Marian nó Pat Kenny. B'fhéidir. Ach rinne Tubs iarracht a thaispeáint go raibh carraigeacha aige san agallamh úd sin ar an Late Late ach níor bhuail Tubs sonc dá laghad ar Cowen. Is é Brian Cowen an fear a rinne agallamh ar Morning Ireland agus póit damnaithe air - má tá peacaí air, níl faitíos roimh an micreafón ina measc.

Tá go leor rún ann maidir leis an Taoiseach is míchlúití riamh. Cén fáth gur theip air chomh dona? Cén fáth go raibh sé chomh soineanta maidir le cúrsaí polaitiúla, ina bhfuil an blás níos tábhachtaí ná an briathar, mar a bhí sé? Cén fáth gur chaill sé a ghuth nuair a cheapadh ina Thaoiseach é? Bhí clú ar Brian Cowen roimh a cheannaireacht gurb é ceann de na polaiteoirí is cliste sa nDáil, go raibh meas ag an lucht polaitiúla air mar pholaiteoir agus mar fhear smaointe. Cén fáth ansin go bhfuil an tuairim amach go docht daingean anois gurb amadán an bhaile é?

Cén fáth, cén fáth, cén fáth. Tá scéal mór le insint, agus cinnte an leabhar polaitiúla na hÉireann is fearr le scríobh ag Brian Cowen, más mian leo. Ach tá sé damnaithe deacair a thuiscint cad is mian leis an Taoiseach rúnda seo.

Seachas rud amháin. Tá rud amháin cinnte faoi Cowen tríd is tríd, ón a chéad lá mar Taoiseach go dtí an lá a d'fhógraigh sé an toghchán ina bhain an pobal a ndíoltas amach air, go dtí an agallamh seo le Máirtín Tom Sheáinín a chraolfar i gceann dhá lá. Is fear tírghách go smíor é, agus meas sách laidir ar chultúr agus ar teanga na nGael.

Tá súil agam go scríobhfaidh sé an leabhair. Agus má scríobhfaidh, scríobhfaidh sé as Gaeilge é.

Dismal Reporting of the Dismal Science

First published in the Western People on Tuesday

Of all the many surprises adulthood has in store – some wonderful, some completely horrid – one of the least-expected is a sudden and intense interest in what Victorian philosopher and critic Thomas Carlyle called the “dismal science,” economics.

Prior to about 2008, the nation was happy to be interested in economics only insofar as it affected the price of beer, wine or Ryanair flights. And then suddenly Lehman Brothers bit the bullet in the States and we all turned to each other and asked “who or what in blazes are Lehman Brothers, and why are they scaring me so?”

Five years of relative misery later, we’re still no wiser. Not really. Some people have read up on economics, in a desperate attempt to get some sort of handle on what’s going on. They’re still reading. An Taoiseach told the nation at Christmas 2011 that “these are not our debts,” but still continued to pay them. Why would we pay bills that aren’t ours? Aren’t our own bad enough?

And then there are the good-hearted innocents of Ballyhea, County Cork, who still protest the bank bailout weekly, turning the village into something out of one of the poorer episodes of the Irish RM. God love them.

Into this general confusion stepped one Mr Ashoka Mody, who spoke at length on the News at One on RTÉ Radio One last Sunday week. Mr Mody, who was part of the original IMF team that visited Ireland when the then Government were saying there was no way, no how the IMF were coming here, told the News at One that the current policy of austerity is wrong, and that innovative alternatives were needed. He did not say what those innovative alternatives were, of course, even though we’d all be curious to know.

The IMF itself reacted quickly on Monday, saying that Mr Mody didn’t work for them any more and did not represent their views. “There is no evidence that Ireland’s fiscal consolidation is self-defeating”, they said.

So who to believe? This is where it gets interesting, especially for those of us who always feel a bit thick when we can’t keep up with economic conversation.

RTÉ describes Ashoka Mody as the former IMF chief of mission to Ireland. However, a November 19th, 2010 article in the Irish Times describes Ashoka Mody as “assistant director in the European Department of the IMF.” Mody is described in a November 19th Irish Times article as “the IMF’s expert on Irish affairs.”

When Ashoka Mody was described as IMF chief of mission when he was interviewed on RTÉ in April of this year, also criticizing the bailout, but when exactly was Mody chief of mission? The current chief of mission is Craig Beaumont. When did he take over? How long did Mody reign?

The questions continue. Do any of these titles matter? What exactly is a chief of mission anyway? Is it better or worse than Head Bottle Washer?

Sometimes, when the plain people of Ireland scratch our heads at this stuff, we’re told it’s our responsibility to inform ourselves. And so it is, but it’s also journalism’s job to explain these things a little better too. Not everyone has a degree in economics.

This is a quote from the RTÉ interview with Ashoka Mody – brace yourselves: “At this point it looks like, given the debt dynamics, if debt levels remain where they are and growth remains where it is, there is never going to be a reduction in the debt ratio the foreseeable future and so logically we are left with the only other option: Generating growth by abandoning the severe commitment to austerity and hoping there will be a short-term boost to growth, which not only improves growth, but brings down debt levels.”

What does that mean, exactly? Debt dynamics are what, exactly? What’s a good debt ratio? What’s a bad debt ratio? Who are you people? How did I get here?

If you read the quote carefully, you’ll notice a hostage to fortune in the text. It’s “hoping.” Mr Mody is “hoping there will be short-term boost to growth.”. Mody hopes that abandoning austerity would work, but that’s really not the same as counting on it. Not least if you’re in Government, and have to put the nation’s money where your mouth is.

So how has it come to pass that this man addresses the nation instead of someone else, like the lugubrious but straight-shooting Colm McCarthy? Why aren’t we quite sure of what exactly Ashoka Mody’s job title was with the IMF? And why isn’t he asked these questions?

There’s no doubt that Ashoka Mody knows his stuff. He lectures at Princeton, he has a knockout CV, he’s very far from a daw. But it’s journalists’ duty to be accurate in how they describe people, what those people do, and what those people say.

Journalists have to break the jargon down into terms the people can understand, without breaking down so much the people can’t understand them. That’s the job.

Which is another reminder of what a terrible loss George Lee is to RTÉ News. George may have been one of the most hopeless politicians ever, but as a newsman on economic issues he was superb. Standing in the rain outside the Central Bank or the Dáil, blinking behind his glasses, reaming off fact after fact.

There was also something in his delivery – a certain tension, a repressed twitch, an edge to voice that suggested that George had seen the books and they made the Third Secret of Fatima look like something out of Spongebob Squarepants. Ireland needs George. We need to know what’s going on. We are surely owed that much.

Jobs, Work and Culture

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

Everything that the Government announced last week about their long-term jobs initiative is to be welcomed. Why should it not be? It’s been a summer of political strife over the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill and battle will be re-joined over the Seanad Abolition Amendment come the Autumn.

All the while, 422,000 people endure the misery and humiliation of queuing up for their few shillings’ dole. For the 177,000 who are classified as long-term unemployed, it must feel like the state has given up on them.

Therefore, anything that’s done to help the unemployed get off the Register is worthwhile. While politicians try to score points in the Dáil, actual people in the dole queues wish to God those same politicians would just shut up and point them to where the jobs are, so they can return to life and normality.

The most impressive detail of the Government’s jobs initiative is the idea of a tapered return to work, something broadcaster and parliamentary assistant Noel D Walsh has often mentioned in different media appearances. If you’re living a hand-to-mouth existence on dole and its combined benefits, the one month that you have to survive until your first paycheck arrives can be a very long month indeed.

Rainy day savings may have run out long ago, and it might not be possible to make ends meet between the end of benefits and the start of wage-earning. This is the reality of life on the dole when your money runs out. You can do nothing. The money is too small. There is no wriggle room.

As such, any provision that the benefits can be extended and then paid back, or tapered off gradually, is to be applauded. The Government can’t stand on ceremony about these things. They are correct to go with whatever works, and this provision is overdue if anything.

On the macro level though, all initiatives are just bailing water on a sinking ship unless broader questions of culture are addressed. You’ll have plugged one leak when another springs up – better to ask why the ship is sinking in the first place.

There are two problems culturally. The first is our post-colonial heritage, where the folk memory of the Irish hasn’t made the connection that cheating on taxes and defrauding social welfare isn’t sticking one to the eight-hundred-year oppressor, but souring our own sovereign Irish milk. For a small nation to survive, we need to show greater solidarity with each other, and support the system.

The nation will have matured when the fella in the pub boasting about foxing the welfare or the taxman gets pints poured on top of him instead of bought for him. We’re a while from that, but we have to get there. The sums just won’t add up otherwise.

The second cultural problem is one that a lot of people reading this paper won’t be familiar with. Most people in Mayo either grew up on a farm or else no great distance from one. And on the land, there’s no real way to hide from a day’s work. In urban Ireland, there are swathes of population where nobody has had a job in living memory.

Think about that for a second. Suppose you’re going to school in a deprived area. Your father is on the dole, as are all your aunts and uncles. So is everyone on your street, and so are the vast majority of the parents of everyone else at school. What earthly motivation is there for you to get a job when you leave school? What do you even know about working in the first place, when you’ve never seen it done? When it’s never been part of your life?

When it comes to urban decay, the underlying tone in commentary is that these people are dumb, that they need state support because they cannot help themselves. They are not dumb. They are simply living in a different world to you or I, with different stimuli and different reactions.

Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters sing that “slumber is more sweet than toil,” and they’re right. Why would you work when everything around you encourages you to stay in bed? If you’ve never had a job, what do you know of the dignity of work, or the satisfaction of a job well done?

What do you do to change that culture? What do you do to make that section of society give up a good thing for what our modern contemporary culture decries as “wage slavery”? Their time is their own, and if things are bad a visit to the CWO can sort that out. Why would any sensible person give up on that?

Besides; no government can create jobs in the first place. Everybody who ever ran for office in any country promised jobs, but that’s shorthand. What they actually mean is that they hope to create an economic environment in which it will be easier for employers to employ more people. But economics gives everyone a pain in the head so politicians say “jobs!” and the thousands cheer.

For people who were working and have hit the skids the Government’s jobs initiative is a godsend. It means they haven’t been forgotten, the system acknowledges their plight and will make it as easy as possible for them to get back to work if the job is there. For that other section of the long-term unemployed, it doesn’t matter a whit. They might not even know an announcement was made.

Taoisigh come and go, economies go boom and go bust, and still their cycle of life goes on, oblivious to all. And it’s wrong – it’s wrong that society is striated, that your destiny is decided by accident of birth, that not all children have equal opportunity. The Government’s job initiative is to be welcomed and has many fine points, but the problem of the generationally long-term unemployed will prove a tougher nut to crack.

The Sickest Joke Is the Price of the Medicine

First published in the Western People last Tuesday.

Anglo is spilt milk. If it serves any purpose now, other than making otherwise sensible people gnash their teeth and jump up and down in impotent fury, it should be to ensure that this sort of messing will never, ever, happen again.

Of course, that’s not what it’s doing. Forget Oireachtas enquiries. Those things do nothing, as discussed in this space before, and besides, there have been four enquiries into the bank guarantee already. How will the fifth one make any difference? The odds are never on your side when you draw to an inside straight.

We cannot change the past. We can only learn from it, and hope it will aid us in the future. But something happened last week that suggests that, as ever, we have learned nothing, and our regulatory practices remain firmly on the side of the fat cat and against the interests of the citizen.

Some years ago a proposal was enacted that would have pharmacists prescribe generic medicines instead of brand name medicines, as the active ingredients are just the same and it’s only the branding that makes a difference. This was seen as quite a considerable step, as the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most lucrative in the world.

We live in a vain age. Drugs that promise to make us look older, younger, fitter, fatter, taller, shorter, darker, lighter and any combination of the above abound in the shops and in advertising. Feeling peaky? Drink this, it’ll cheer you up. Feeling perky? Better eat this, it’ll calm you down. At every crossroads in daily life, there’s a box of pills to help you turn left, turn right or stay exactly where you are.

A lot of these pills have got brand recognition, which means that civilians have heard of them and then demand that brand from their doctor. For instance – there are a wide variety of anti-depressant pills but Prozac has become the most famous, just as people think of Hoover when they think of vacuum cleaners. A woman called Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a book in the early 1990s called Prozac Nation about her own reliance on the drug and all of a sudden it was seen as the glamorous cure-all for the blues.

Good news for the company that makes Prozac. And good news for the pharmaceutical industry in general, as the idea spreads that there’ll always be a pill for what ails you.

Business being what it is, the pharmaceutical industry is inclined to make many types of pill for ailments, real or perceived, for which there is a market demand. As for ailments that are fatal but sufficiently rare to have no market traction – well. Every rose has its thorn, doesn’t it? Very sad, very sad. Here – take a few of these with a glass of water, they’ll cheer you right up.

That’s what made the decision to encourage doctors to prescribe generic medicines so worthwhile. It took the marketing glamour off the drugs and presented them in their most basic form. To move from the esoteric world of pharmacy and medicine to the everyday world of the breakfast table, it was as if householders were on an economy drive and decided to buy the supermarket’s own brand corn flakes for breakfast, rather than that other familiar one with the rooster bedecked in the beautiful green and red. It doesn’t seem fully quite the same but it does the trick and it’s a good deal easier on the pocket.

Imagine, then, everybody’s surprise when the Economic and Social Research Institute published a report last Thursday that said the price of the generic meds and the fancy-schmancy meds turns out to be pretty much the same.

How could that happen? How are the own brand cornflakes the same price as the famous ones in those beautiful boxes, with that Mayo-liveried rooster crowing to break the day? Either the own-brand price is too high, or the expensive price isn’t expensive any more at all.

In this world, prices don’t come down. The doctors have been doing their bit – prescriptions for generic drugs have doubled in the past few years to fifty per cent of all prescriptions filled. But why do that when the only reason to make a distinction, the price, doesn’t exist? If the price is exactly the same, why bother?

This leads to some questions.

1. When did we find out the prices were the same?
2. Were the prices always the same?
3. If the prices were always the same, why bother with this dog and pony show over the generics in the first place?
4. If the prices of the generics went up, when did they go up?
5. Who benefited from the price increase?
6. What is going to be done about it?

If the nation has learned its lesson from Anglo, these questions will not only be asked but answered. This isn’t a trivial thing. The Government has to save money. The generic drugs initiative was an attempt to save the money. The taxpayer would have some of the burden lifted from him or her because medicine would be cheaper, and the Government’s medical card bills would be cheaper because cheaper drugs were being prescribed.

But money isn’t being saved if the generic drugs are the same price as the branded ones. And if money is not being saved here, the Government must then save money elsewhere, by laying off teachers and nurses, by closing hospital beds and burdening the people even more.

Anglo is the spectacular abuse of money. But in its way, the price of drugs is just as bad. The difference is that while Anglo is now a thing of the past and something that we cannot change, we can do something about how the price of generic drugs went up right now. The question is: will we?

The Public Accounts Committee is a Toothless Tiger

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

A member of the PAC yesterday

Mr John McGuinness TD, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of Oireachtas Éireann, has been having a hot time of it lately in the pages of the Irish Independent. Why is neither here nor there at the moment, but a rumour has been floating around that there have been midnight meetings at crossroads by persons unknown who fear McGuinness and his Committee investigating the Bank Guarantee, and those same persons unknown are leaking to the Independent to stop him at any cost.

Most rumours are to be taken with a pinch of salt. We may need the full packet for this particular one.

There are two reasons for not giving this theory the time of day. The first is that Oireachtas Committees aren’t quite the Irish version of the Spanish Inquisition that they are often portrayed to be. This was brought home by Alan Dukes’s appearance before the Finance Committee during his time as chairman of the ghost ship that used to be known as Anglo-Irish bank.

Under strident questioning from then-Senator Shane Ross, Dukes made it clear that he knew very well that Ross and his committee were all bark and no bite, and underlined that by witheringly remarking  that he was “not here to write a column for the back page of the Sunday Independent.” Dukes had no intention of helping Ross make headlines, and there was nothing Ross could do about it except sit there, fuming. When Dukes puts you in your box, that’s where you stay.

The other reason that McGuinness and the PAC will never investigate the Bank Guarantee is that there no history of such accountability in the history of the state. A parade of the great and the good marching in and out of the committee, giving their version of what happened on the night of the bank guarantee? Not before Hell freezes over.

It would certainly be interesting to find out just how that deal happened. The late Brian Lenihan himself did his best to get his side of the story out before his sad and untimely death, and his family have been burnishing his legacy since. Against that, there are many conspiracy theories about fat cats and golden circles being protected at the expense of the poor eejit who is currently paying a €400k mortgage on an €80k house. That man would like some answers.

But, God help him, he’ll never get them. There is no culture of going on the record in Irish politics. It doesn’t suit our nature. It’s not what we do.

In recent times, we have had the tribunals. What was the function of the tribunals? It wasn’t to discover funny business. Even the least-informed of the dogs in the street could tell there was funny business going on during the boom. The purpose the tribunals served in going on for so very long was twofold.

Firstly, they made truckloads of money for legal profession in providing representation that witnesses didn’t need, those witnesses being immune from prosecution by anything said in the course of a tribunal.

The real legacy of the tribunals is that they were a slow release of highly toxic news that, if released in one go, could have been cataclysmic for the political system and caused a root and branch reform. But over seventeen long years, no one revelation has the power to cause that sort of upset. By the end, first-time voters were going to the polls who could not remember a time when there weren’t tribunals. They were just background noise at that stage, a faint buzzing in the distance that, while certainly annoying, were no reason to go rocking boats.

Not only does Irish political culture not do inquiries, neither does it do going on the record. This is illustrated in a telling story in Frank Dunlop’s memoir of his time as Government Press Secretary, Yes, Taoiseach. Dunlop is disgraced currently, but his memoir is a very interesting and seldom-told account of just what goes on in the corridors of power.

Dunlop was originally hired by Jack Lynch as press secretary. When Lynch resigned in 1979, Dunlop called in to see him as Lynch was clearing out his office. Dunlop found Lynch was filling great big plastic bags full of notes and documents from his time as Taoiseach.

“Will you use those in your memoirs Taoiseach?” asked Dunlop. Lynch laughed at him. Memoirs, indeed. Writing memoirs was the very last thing on Lynch’s mind. All those notes were going into the bin and from there to sweet oblivion.

It would have been nice if Jack Lynch thought differently about his time in office, and all the changes he had seen. He had such an interesting life, he was such an extraordinarily popular figure and he governed at a time of great crisis on the island.

But there is no history of going on the record in Irish politics. Deals are done when they are done and the details are kept firmly within the power triangle of Leinster House, the Shelbourne Hotel and Doheny and Nesbitt’s Public House.

And that is why there is no plot to silence John McGuinness and the Public Accounts Committee. Because even though the public would dearly like to know what happened on the night of the bank guarantee, the public really don’t have a say in it.

There is no tradition of openness in Irish public life. Why would a reliable and definitive account of the bank guarantee ever emerge if we still don’t know what happened in the Arms Trial, forty-three years ago? Behind the twinkle in the eye and the lovely, lilting voice, what exactly did the Taoiseach know about gunrunning to Northern Ireland? That’s accountability in Irish public life.

Have We Learned Anything in the Past Five Years?

Des Geraghty, late of the Workers’ Party, Democratic Left and SIPTU, said something in passing when reviewing the papers on The Week inPolitics yesterday that should have made the nation stop and take notice. Presenter Seán O’Rourke asked Des about Cyprus. Des replied that “unfortunately for Cyprus, it’s the latest part in the on-running saga about the Eurozone. The crisis seems to shift from country apart from our own.”

Apart from our own. At the start of the Eurozone Crisis, which itself is a subset of of the worldwide Great Recession, Ireland was identified as one of the countries most at risk of economic collapse, the so-called PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (it’s only last week that anyone outside of either Cyprus or Greece found out that Cyprus was even part of the Eurozone, of course). If the crisis is, as Geraghty says, shifting from country to country apart from our own, does that mean that our country might have – gasp – done something right? Might have weathered the storm? Might yet take her place among the nations of the Earth?

You would think, after the long hard years of austerity and Morgan Kelly prophecies and IMFs and Troikas and the rest of it that there would be some sort of national holiday declared. That the Taoiseach would address the nation with this happy news, that the nation is at safe harbour once again.

Of course, a reason not to do that would be that Ireland may not be in safe harbour at all. So much unexpected doom has descended from clear blue skies in the past five years that the Taoiseach would be forgiven for taking nothing for granted. But that said, Cyprus has been an object lesson in what happens when you try to bluff the financial world’s royal flush with your miserable pair of fives. You get whomped, and whomped good.

And how could it be any other way? People talk about right and wrong in these things. There is no right or wrong in financial markets. There is only capital – who’s got it, and who wants it. Nothing else.

The government, both this one and the last one, recognised that from the start and got with the program. That is why you’re reading this at your leisure now, rather than queuing at an ATM for your daily ration of what was once your own money.

The tragedy for the nation is that the nation doesn’t know this. As far as the nation is concerned, Angela Merkel is the worst oul' wagon since Maggie Thatcher, we’re all slaves to Europe and musha, I don’t know what we’re going to do at all.

There is a fundamental disconnect with how politics is conducted in this country and how its perceived by the electorate – the people who mandate the politicians to conduct the politics in the first place. We elect politicians to fix drains and get harangue low grade and underpaid civil servants to get pensions for people who don’t deserve them. When it comes to global economic catastrophe, having one over on a county manager somewhere doesn’t really cut it.

This week sees the Meath East by-election, where the favourite to be elected is the twenty-six year old daughter of the man who’s tragic death caused the by-election in the first place. She is surely doing her duty by her lights, but it’s a lot to ask of anyone who’s been through that trauma to just step up like nothing happened. Meanwhile, the other candidates are usual suspects, with the exception of a Captain Birds-Eye lookalike who makes Mick Wallace look like Pericles of Athens.

After the crash we were told things would never be the same again. Things are exactly the same again. The world has changed. Ireland has gone through the valley of darkness and come out the other side, but the people haven’t really noticed. And two years on from the Moriarty Tribunal, it’s very much business as usual behind the closed doors of Irish public life.