The heroic but failed champion of Tara is leading the campaign against a motorway near Newgrange

Vincent Salafia is back with a “Save Newgrange” campaign. A man with a panache for publicity, the populace associates the 43-year old with the Tara/ M3 and Carrickmines Castle campaigns. Now he is to address plans for a Slane bypass within a half kilometre of the boundaries of the World Heritage Site at Newgrange. Given the history of 22 road fatalities in Slane – caused primarily by articulated lorries – there are good reasons why

Slane’s residents want trucks to bypass their town. The NRA’s costly plan effectively delivers a motorway parallel to the M1, at one point only four miles distant, while causing significant environmental impacts once again in the Boyne Valley, making this the third motorway in the valley. It cuts between Slane and the Brú na Bóinne complex of Knowth, Dowth – and closest of all to Newgrange, Ireland’s most famous pre-historic site.

There appear to be serious questions about Salafia’s suitability to front this campaign. He has a history of falling out with campaigns over the years. As far back as 2004 Phoenix Magazine commented that he “seems to foment trouble in his own camp wherever he gets involved”.  It also noted that in 2003 “Salafia was accused by then An Taisce press spokesman, [Ruadhán] Mac Eoin (one of the co-authors of this piece), of censoring An Taisce press releases from the Carrickminescastle.org discussion forum, of which Salafia was the moderator”.  Endless self-referential and often abusive emails were exchanged between assorted environmentalists pleading with Salafia to co-operate with mainstream heritage groups, and Salafia and a small group of his cohorts. Salafia, for example, was accused of subverting an attempted alliance called the Friends of Carrickmines.

Now in 2010, Salafia has another campaign.  Once again cyberspace reverberates with personalised environmental vituperation and Salafia is being accused afresh of censorship, removing comments and distorting information. Meanwhile Salafia himself has just issued a press release, implicating others in cyber-attacks, stating “a complaint has been filed with the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation’s Computer Crime Investigation Unit, and Facebook Ireland, on behalf of the Save Newgrange campaign, alleging harassment, intimidation and cyber-stalking by the Bypass Slane Campaign”. It also complains “there has been a coordinated smear campaign against the Save Newgrange group” and that “attacks are increasing in intensity and malice”, before calling for “an investigation into the conspiracy, including links to the Fianna Fail party”. Salafia for his part says that, “the website is for supporters of the campaign only…we directed people to go to Boards [website boards.ie] and have those discussions” and that it is not a discussion forum.

As far back as 2001, the Sunday Business Post had carried a report titled “Hacker destroys Brehon Law research website”, detailing how Salafia had made a complaint to the Garda computer crime division that his website had mysteriously been attacked. How then does this heritage hero get so enmired in bitterness and fractiousness, having apparently split or been ejected from four high-profile environmental campaigns – “Carrickminders”, “Save Tara Skryne Valley”, “Campaign to Save Tara”, and most recently, “Shell 2 Sea”? He told Village “the thing is, in every single campaign in Ireland, there are always disputes: that’s just the nature of campaigns. It was the nature of the revolution in this country”.

Vincent Salafia first came to prominence in September 2002, as an occupation began at the Carrickmines Castle archaeological complex in county Dublin. At this stage Salafia was intermittently using the name “Michael O’Toole” (confusingly, his birth name;  he also passes as Ó Tuathal). At the outset of the Carrickmines campaign, Salafia had bravely indicated he would be the plaintiff in the proposed High Court action. He indicated he was a lawyer. Yet ultimately these cases were taken by fellow heritage activists Dominic Dunne and Gordon Lucas – with a subsequent case taken by Michael Mulcreevy.  While he had legal training in Florida, Village understands that although he applied many years ago to the Florida Board of Bar Examiners, he has yet to gain full qualification. Very early on at Carrickmines differences emerged between the campaigners. Around this time the first of multiple reports emerge of Salafia leaving behind debts, particularly to well-meaning environmentalists for rent. An unconscionable inability to work with others was gaining traction, with the proceeds from a benefit gig providing a source of acrimony here; a borrowed generator going missing there; and unapproved statements proving divisive thither.

According to Phoenix Magazine in 2004, Salafia was “booted out as a spokesman by the rest of the Carrickminders after several solo runs to the media”. In December 2003, while court action was underway, a press advisory was issued by Carrickmines plaintiff Dominic Dunne and others, stating Salafia “had no consent to either act on our behalf or imply any approval to do the same”. It also claimed “certain statements by him [Salafia] alluding to speak on behalf of others have been unreliable and misinformed”. Three years later in 2006, in the last of the three Carrickmines court cases, Salafia was once again turning up outside the Supreme Court, briefing the media. Once again a contradictory advisory was issued by Dominic Dunne. Salafia told Village that Carrickminders voted “democratically” for his continued involvement in the campaign, but others dispute this.

One of the more remarkable rows regarding Salafia took place in May 2004, involving the “Save the Tara-Skreen Valley Campaign”. Again campaigners issued a “please do not publish” press advisory, stating Salafia did not have either “consent or authority” to make press statements on behalf of the campaign or its individual members. As was reported in Phoenix, any committee members who voted for such action “got a solicitor’s letters from Salafia”. As at Carrickmines, Salafia had held himself out as the litigant for a legal action – while also promoting himself as spokesman. Village understands Salafia’s legal letters essentially accused the members of defamation by bringing his character into disrepute, after they asked him to temporarily stand down as spokesman. Many of the people who were involved were local, yet they subsequently disassociated themselves from further involvement with Tara. Some of Salafia’s most articulate and effective allies simply felt they could not continue.

Twelve months later, in May 2005, Salafia sought leave for a judicial  review of the Tara motorway. This High Court case was heard in January 2006. By that Spring the road was under construction. However, when the judgment on Salafia’s case came through in March, the result was a total and bitter defeat. Crucially, an irritated Mr Justice Thomas Smyth said it was inexplicable that Salafia had taken no part in the oral hearings held by An Bord Pleanála into the routing of the motorway. He was un-impressed that Salafia “spent his time writing newspaper articles” about the issue rather than going through the procedural niceties.  In one public email exchange with Michael Smith, then Chairman of An Taisce, now editor of Village Magazine and co-author of this piece, Salafia had in 2003 accused him of not getting “his ass frozen” out in the hills of Carrickmines – as Salafia and the Carrickminders were.  Smith replied that he and An Taisce were at that time engaged in a large number of road objections, including spending three weeks at an oral hearing on Tara – which Smith then warned would “make Carrickmines look like a tea party”. Salafia did not apply himself early on to Tara and in the end this failure cost him his locus standi i.e.  he was deemed not to have been an appropriate person to have taken the case.  Another plaintiff might have had more luck with the unfriendly legal system.  Salafia’s strategic nous further let him down when the expert witnesses lined up to assert that Tara – as a whole – was a national monument, decided, at least in part because of the way Salafia was handling the case, not to give evidence – only to change their minds in the end to the bemusement of the judge who refused to contemplate their change of heart or to hear this most crucial of evidence.  Arguably, Salafia’s fractiousness was at least a significant factor in the loss of the case.

Yet despite having €600,000 costs awarded against him, Salafia vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court. Indeed, as was widely reported at the time, to “take the case to Europe” (in fact Europe has a limited role in heritage litigation and even that depends on a reference by the national judge). However ultimately Salafia, unlike Carrickmines plaintiff Dominic Dunne who went all the way, in October 2006 agreed with the National Roads Authority to drop his appeal provided the NRA agreed not to pursue the outstanding costs. Salafia’s own press release at the time noted “from the very first day of trial my case sank into a procedural quagmire”. Salafia has since said to Village “the fact of the matter is that I never received one penny from the government…the state agreed to absorb their costs and pay their lawyers and I agreed to absorb my costs”.

Then and subsequently, Salafia exhibited a prodigious talent for enlisting high-profile celebrities like Stuart Townsend, Charlize Theron, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Seamus Heaney. Tara has been the cause célèbre of Irish heritage over the last decade.

Meanwhile another Tara group emerged in January 2007, the “Campaign to Save Tara” (CST). Set up with Kevin Hayes as co-ordinator, CST had a 5-point strategy – a vigil on top of Tara, a hands-on protest group, a political campaign, a PR campaign – and a legal campaign to be headed by Salafia. Within a week, Salafia resigned and the litigation strategy was dropped. According to Hayes, CST subsequently “allied cohesively with members of Meath Archaeological Heritage Society, academics, and others”. However he says, Salafia was a moderator on an on-line Tara discussion board and pursued “a constant virulent campaign against CST, with vicious attacks on individuals”.

Just over a year ago, in September 2008 Salafia turned up in Mayo at Shell 2 Sea, while Maura Harrington, one of its leaders, was on hunger strike. Harrington, no stranger herself to abrasive campaigning, claims she “immediately told him” that she “wanted to have nothing to do with him” and following a “short sharp exchange, he was gone within the day”.

So what explains the phenomenon of Vincent Salafia? On the one hand, he presents as a fearless, genuine and indeed charming promoter of progressive heritage causes. He has energy abundant and a certain genius for publicity (he once announced he was running for the Presidency of Ireland). Without him it is unlikely the Tara campaign would have been ingrained quite so indelibly on the national conscience. He has a catholic interest in issues of mainstream public controversy – from Brehon Law to the Presidency to the Libertas anti-Lisbon campaign. Yet he alienates a great number of his fellow campaigners. He is said to be particularly un-loved in the upper echelons of the Green Party which he, with some justification, considers betrayed Tara.

One decade and four campaigns on, it is seemingly clear that Salafia risks bringing divisiveness, strategic recklessness and fear to causes that deserve a better champion. Back in 2003 Michael Smith had suggested in a contribution to a Salafia-controlled website that Vincent Salafia attend anger-management classes. He never took the advice and in 2010 it seems to be the case that Newgrange awaits a grown-up champion. For his part, Vincent Salafia feels that he is the victim of personalised campaigns, saying: “again this whole thing is being individualised to take a personal swipe at me rather than to address the bigger issues”.

For those who see the media affected by liberal or secular bias, for those who see the media as agents of corrupt power, reading the editorial direction of any particular newspaper is a simple task. They can always find confirmation of their view in particular opinion pieces or news stories.

Ireland’s newspapers do not define themselves as those of many European countries do, on liberal/conservative, left/right, secular/religious lines. Our newspapers, like our main political parties, have a bit of everything.

Assessing a newspaper’s orientation thus requires more than a reading the (little-read) editorial opinion columns or contributor opinion pieces. These can give us clues, but little more. Newspapers make it their business to ensure a spread of columnists: Joe Higgins TD and Senator Ronan Mullen write in the Irish Daily Mail; John Waters and Fintan O’Toole write in The Irish Times.

Inclusions and exclusions in news selection, the tendency and tone of headlines, the choice of vocabulary – all of these details, and many more, contribute to the impact a newspaper has on its readers. With these characteristics in mind I took a snapshot of The Irish Times in an arbitrarily chosen week, Monday 23^rd to Saturday 28^th April.

Several major themes ran through the news coverage and opinion pieces for some or all of those six days: the referendum on the fiscal treaty, the troika view of and the prospects for the Irish economy, media ownership and diversity issues and internal disputes at Independent News and Media, the French presidential election and its possible impact on EU policies. All of these were also extensively covered by other media.

The Irish Times also had its selected themes, carrying several stories prominently on education, and on the Catholic Church, and on the connections between them. It ran features under the rubric, The Politics of Water, and a series of pieces in the foreign news pages about the Caucasus region, ahead of a meeting in Dublin of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

No other Irish medium showed anything like the same interest in the OSCE meeting. The Irish Times’ piece in this series on Azerbaijan excluded any reference to the capital, Baku, as the location of the Eurovision Song Contest, so it did not try to connect the subject to a broad readership. The choice of topic and its treatment reflected the agenda of the inter-governmental organisation, OSCE, and of its host this week, the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.

The newspaper takes this perspective in many other matters, basing much of its agenda on the government’s and focusing its coverage on individual ministers. Front-page headlines of this week name-checked Varadkar (Monday), Gilmore (Tuesday), Howlin (Wednesday), Kenny (Friday).

Gilmore was centre-stage on a report about trade unions advocating a No vote in the referendum. Howlin took the lead on a report about public service employees’ allowances being under scrutiny. Kenny was credited in a report that the state (deferentially State in The Irish Times house-style) might get a possible larger-than-expected proportion of the sale price of state assets.

The first two of these stories, at least, could have been told from other perspectives, e.g. Pressure builds on ICTU to advocate No, or Public service unions vow to protect allowances.

The Irish Times’s choices indicate a primary orientation to those in political, economic, cultural, educational and other elites: other front-page names during the week included O’Reilly (Thursday) of Independent News and Media, Le Brocquy (Thursday), whose death was very generously marked, and Bono (Friday), in reference to his role in a spat between property developers. Two members of the European political elite, Sarkozy and Hollande, were named in a page-1 headline on the French presidential election (Monday) as presumably familiar to readers.

Personal names and personal agency were less clearly stated when it came to questionable behaviour by people in authority. A page-1 report (Monday) on ministers’ spending €7 million on outside consultancies merely listed the larger spends, without giving any standard by which to judge whether this was a lot or a little.

A story on Michael Lowry (Tuesday) was another product of the assiduous work of public affairs correspondent Colm Keena: the reports on page 1 and page 5 recorded that property owned by a Lowry company was not recorded on the TD’s register of interests, and listed documented details about the company and about Lowry’s connections with disgraced financier Michael Fingleton. The Irish Times did not state, “Lowry fails to register land ownership”, much less explore his previous record in this regard or the sanctions for not making complete returns.

As it turned out, there was no failure of compliance on Lowry’s part: The Irish Times (Saturday) reported that an Oireachtas committee had ruled that Lowry was not required to register details of the property transaction, just his directorship of the company involved. If this was a correction of the earlier report, it was not presented as such. The Irish Times, if we are to judge by the minuscule Corrections column, very rarely gets things wrong, and then only on relatively trivial details.

A muffled 38-word first sentence led a page-1 report (Wednesday) on a Catholic priest against whom sex abuse allegations were made being allowed to continue in service. Here too, the passive voice much favoured by The Irish Times was used: “the parish pastoral council was not given any of this information”, “Father Benito was allowed to serve”, etc. The paper did not identify who was responsible for these decisions.

Coverage of the Catholic Church also included extensive coverage of the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress (Tuesday), including a striking front-page photograph of a woman with the veil she wore to the 1932 Congress, and a long feature (Tuesday) about church influence in teacher education that included some critical from students. However, The Irish Times did not give as much attention as other media during the week to church-government differences over mandatory reporting of sexual abuse claims, nor to the church’s censure of broadcaster-priest Brian D’Arcy.

In the D’Arcy story, as in that of ex-hurler D J Carey’s collapse, that of nurse Laura White whose mortgage debt was written off, and that of ex-TD Noel O’Keeffe’s arrest on fraud charges, The Irish Times gave minimum attention to the personalities involved. The D’Arcy and White stories were told as stories of institutions and their policies. As with stories implicating the government, The Irish Times represents public affairs mainly from the perspective of institutions and very much less from that of the individuals and groups whose lives the institutions affect.

Personalities and their images are not absent, however: début novelist Kathleen McMahon was pictured three times (Saturday) in various versions of the same photo, one displayed over more than a half-page. The story of her big publishing deal was told at length and her first novel was reviewed generously by Maeve Binchy. McMahon – and we were told this – is the niece of the late literary editor of The Irish Times, Caroline Walsh.

There was coverage over three pages (Thursday) of artist Louis le Brocquy’s death, including a handsomely-illustrated full page with appreciation by the paper’s art critic, followed by an extensive obituary and editorial (both Saturday), that further underlined his significance in Irish cultural life. This represented many multiples of the volume of coverage in other media.

On the EU treaty referendum The Irish Times presented the case for a No vote (Wednesday) from trade unionist Eamonn Devoy, immediately answered (Thursday) by a plea for Yes from IDA chief executive Barry O’Leary and further pieces (Saturday) from political editor Stephen Collins and columnist Noel Whelan. Whelan’s support was qualified by a concern that the government was tardy in initiating its campaign, just as European correspondent Arthur Beesley criticised the quality of the government web site stabilitytreaty.ie (Tuesday). The government was being told: must try harder.

Sinn Féin’s use of partial quotes from economists on the downsides of the fiscal compact was reported (Thursday) from the perspective of a government critic, Fine Gael TD Paschal Donoghue and was the subject of a page-1 Martyn Turner cartoon (Friday) that played on previous Sinn Féin controversies with customary skill and bite. The Irish Times passed over the opportunity to examine further the economists’ criticisms of the compact. As 31^st May approaches we can expect an editorial column that takes a measured view of the benefits and risks of the new fiscal rules and then plumps for a Yes vote. Within this framework, The Irish Times will likely strive to maintain some balance in its news coverage and invited opinion.

This orientation relates to how the Irish Times operates, at least in certain respects, as a public-service medium. The term has been appropriated for publicly-funded broadcasting only but can also apply to a newspaper whose operations are governed by a charter, that is controlled by a trust – however opaque its operations are – and is not beholden to shareholders.

Examples of public-service publishing included the well-presented, government-supported supplement marking the 100^th anniversary of the first Home Rule Bill (Wednesday) and the weekly Health supplement (Tuesday) that provides guidance and information in quantity and quality not justified by the level of advertising the supplement attracts. (Actually, that might currently apply to the newspaper as a whole, with typically one to two pages of paid display ads in the 20-page main section.)

The business (daily) and property supplements (Thursday) are different cases. The former speaks to and about the business elite, though the slightly awkward inclusion of the consumer page, Pricewatch (Tuesday), tempers that somewhat.  This week’s property supplement was trailered on page 1 of the newspaper with a banner, “Families feeling the squeeze in tight market”. Far from being focused on families and their difficulties, the report in question detailed the difficulties of estate agents in finding family homes to sell. The supplement’s main story concerned a Dublin suburban property for sale for €6.5 million – the kind of piece that stimulates the reader’s fantasy and the estate agent’s continued advertising support.

So, “the quality newspaper”? “The paper of record”? “The liberal newspaper”? These labels for The Irish Times tell us little of how it selects and reconstructs events for its readers. Quality is a continuum, not an on-off switch, and certainly not synonymous with broadsheet as much commentary implies. Fortunately, we no longer need a newspaper to act as a stenographic record of important events and The Irish Times is often behind other media in telling us what it thinks is important to know. Socially-liberal covers some of what The Irish Times represents, but so too does economically-conservative.

The Irish Times – like many other long-established and respected publications across the world – is an elite newspaper with a significant public-service mission. It operates within the range of interests and views of Ireland’s closely-connected elites. It is published for the attention of those elites and other educationally and socially advantaged readers. It presents its content as self-evidently significant. It presumes it knows its readers’ interests and does not have to exert itself to get their attention.

Brian Trench is a former journalist and lecturer in journalism and science communication at Dublin City University

The Egalitarian

Niall Crowley, equality consultant and former CEO of the Equality Authority, commissioned some alternative voices economically, socially and environmentally

We are constantly told there are no alternatives. The markets allow for no flexibility, they say. The Troika demand this, they tell us. Closing down the debate inspires a hopelessness and yet it suits the dominant and doomed economic project to get us back to where we were and to protect those interests that, supposedly, retain the capacity to get us there. It stifles public debate and locks all commentators into ways of thinking that narrow the range of solutions being considered. We need alternatives now more than ever before if we are to imagine a different and better future.

The current situation in Ireland “requires a refounding of the the institutions and culture of the Irish State, and a new development project for the country”, according to Kirby and Murphy in their book ‘Towards a Second Republic’ (Pluto Ireland, 2011). They bemoan the constraints to our social imagination. They quote Colin Hay writing about the situation in Britain: “that new economic paradigms are difficult to summon up, especially when you need them most”.

Those who are working on alternatives – alternative policies, strategies and even models for society and the economy  do not get the public space they need.

The Economist

Sinéad Pentony, Head of Policy with TASC, writes that tax determines society

Taxes provide the revenue that we need to educate our children, care for those who are ill, keep our communities safe and support those who are out of work or in retirement.  Ireland is an advanced economy, with western European standards of social and economic development.  If we wish to maintain and enhance these standards, our levels of taxation will also need to be comparable to those of our most advanced European neighbours.

In 2009, Ireland’s overall tax-to-GDP ratio was the third lowest in the European Union at 28 per cent, and the second lowest in the Eurozone.  This is compared to an EU average of 38 per cent.  The difference between Ireland and our European neighbours is primarily attributable to Ireland’s relatively low level of (employer and employee) social-security contributions, more commonly known as PRSI, and the relatively low levels of local-government taxation.

The tax base was eroded over the last two decades by a policy of cutting taxes when they should have been increased, and through the proliferation of tax breaks that undermined the tax base and fuelled the property boom.   We need a lot of painful adjustments to make up for the mistakes of the past.  TASC has been making the case for rebuilding the tax system in a way that creates the conditions for greater equality and sustainable and job-rich growth.

Government income and Government expenditure are out of line. The Government, in its first budget, has maintained the budgetary parameters set by the previous administration, prioritising spending cuts over tax increases.  TASC has proposed a different package of measures to reduce the deficit by focusing on revenue-raising measures that will minimise the impact on employment, economic growth and low-income groups.

Taxation measures that promote equality and sustainable growth must target high-income groups, property assets, unproductive activity and passive income (e.g. rent), as well as protecting the environment.   For example, this would mean that the Universal Social Charge is levied on all income from inheritances, gifts and capital gains in the same way that it is currently levied on labour income.  The thresholds determining liability to Capital Gains and Acquisitions taxes would be reduced.  While the last Budget made some progress in this regard, it did not go far enough.

Tax reliefs are generally regressive since they disproportionately benefit higher earners and property-owners.  The curtailment of pension-tax reliefs and reliefs relating to rental income would increase the tax take while minimising the impact on low-income families.  The domicile levy has failed to ensure that wealthy Irish people who are non-resident for tax purposes pay their fair share.  There is clearly a need for a radical rethink of how these wealthy elites should be taxed.  Other countries have successfully taxed their wealthy citizens through taxation based on citizenship or taxation of global assets.  The question is: do we have the political will to put in place equitable taxation measures for our wealthy citizens?

Ireland has very low levels of local taxation compared to other European countries.  TASC supports equality-proofed residential-property tax and water charges, as these measures represent an opportunity to sustainably fund reformed local services that are more accountable and responsive to local needs. Unfortunately, the flat-rate household charge is highly regressive because people on lower incomes pay proportionately far more of their income than those on higher incomes.

While there is a lack of clarity regarding how water charges will be implemented, the indications are that they will not be taking household size or circumstances into consideration, so registerig a disproportionate impact on low-income households and larger families.

Ireland also has very low levels of social-security contributions.  We should be planning for gradual increases in employer and employee PRSI, combined with general taxation, to provide free-universal healthcare and earnings-related pensions.

Minimising the impact of tax increases on low-income groups not only promotes equality and allows people to live in dignity, it also protects spending in the economy, which is crucial for economic recovery.   TASC’s taxation proposals outline in a credible way a realistic set of measures to move us away from an under-resourced, unsustainable and unfair tax system and towards a modern progressive European tax system.

The Sociologist

Mary Murphy, lecturer in Irish Politics and Society in NUI Maynooth and one of the organisers of Claiming our Future, writes that without a struggle of ideas there can be no political struggle.

In ‘Shock Doctrine’ Naomi Klein chillingly describes the Right as always ready, waiting for moments of crisis, to move in and apply its prescriptive ideas.  While the Left also expects opportunity in crisis, progressives have been found wanting by failing to grab the moment of crisis to popularise an alternative ideology to the one that caused the crisis. Writing last year Unger, for example, noted how there appears to be a lack of capacity to imagine and articulate alternatives and a tragic narrowing of political imagination and absence of progressive political projects.

The Right and Centre simply claim there are no alternatives and successfully narrow political debate.  They are aided by the Left’s collective failure to identify and popularise meaningful alternatives. Traditional political sources of progress like social democrats are backed into narrow defensive corners from where they tend to legitimate economic consensus. Marxist inspired alternatives often lack either credibility or vision.

This is where civil society groups come in.  Civil-society movements can work to popularise normative values or ideas about the good society and to build forums in which to deliberate and negotiate those ideas.  Since 2010 Claiming our Future, for example, has attempted to create new public spheres where people can deliberate about alternatives.

Over 1000 people met in the first event in the RDS in October 2010. Many more people have subsequently come together to reflect on and re-imagine democracy, local government and participation, new approaches to localism and achieving environmental sustainability, and fostering equality through minimum and maximum incomes.

A common concern at all the events has been the Government’s ‘Plan A’, with its excessive focus on public expenditure cuts and its absence of both progressive taxation and investment in jobs and infrastructure.  A constant theme for Claiming our Future is to argue that there are plausible and credible alternatives to this ‘Plan A’ status quo. ‘Plan B’ is Claiming our Future’s alternative investment and fiscal strategy.

Part One of this ‘Plan B’ identifies potential funding sources for a strategy of national investment in public infrastructure and human capital. These sources include cash reserves held by government, the National Pension Reserve Fund, a national strategic investment bank as promised, directed investment by the bailed out banks, incentivised private-pension investment, and more effective use of the European Investment Bank.

This investment strategy can create 100,000 jobs in areas such as training and up-skilling of the long-term unemployed, environmental technology, regeneration of social housing estates, social infrastructure (primary healthcare, hospitals, school-building, water-treatment and community services), and supporting indigenous local enterprises in IT, digital communications and local-food production.

This would provide the infrastructure for a sustainable economy and society.  Evidence from the Nevin Economic Research Institute (2012) shows there would be multiple returns on the original investment in savings made through reduced social costs, economic development and environmental sustainability.

Part Two of this ‘Plan B’  requires that the fiscal strategy would be rebalanced to focus more on progressive revenue-raising and  less on public-expenditure cuts. Progressive taxation would be increased to fund high-quality public services. National fiscal policy and each specific taxation, expenditure or public sector reform decision, would be evaluated against a national goal of equality.

Increased public expenditure as described would enable needs to be met. Public sector reform would enhance efficiency, effectiveness and quality. Savings would be achieved from renegotiated promissory notes and debt rescheduling.

Just because Ireland is  poorer does not mean Ireland has  to be more unequal. People are angry and fearful but they also need hope. ‘Plan B’, Claiming our Future’s two-track approach to getting Ireland back on the road to recovery includes a realistic strategy for investment in jobs and a rebalancing of the fiscal recovery to ensure that at the end of this disaster, Ireland is not an even more unequal place than it was beforehand.

The Environmentalist

James Nix argues for economic contraction – for the environment and for wellbeing.

In administering its poison, growth will kill off the planet’s inhabitants, or at least a great many of them, particularly humans. This eventuality is undeniable – but we don’t read much about it, particularly about the complicity of economic growth in the downward ecological spiral we are bringing upon ourselves. As bad news stories go, this one seems to have crossed a line, and be just too bad to cover – at all.

In mid-February leading scientists, including Brundtland, Ehrlich, Hansen, Lovins, Lovelock, Sato, Stern, and Watson, observed that “the rapidly deteriorating biophysical situation is more than bad enough, but it is barely recognised by a global society infected by the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever”. They warned that “The time to act is now … the adverse effects of climate change and loss of biodiversity cannot be reversed for centuries or are irreversible … the climate is warming at a rate faster than at any time during the last 10,000 years, biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate, fisheries are in decline in most of the world’s oceans, air pollution is an increasing problem … and large areas of land are being degraded”.

How do we get away from growth? By contracting our economies, by extracting, producing and disposing less, by embracing a way of life that treads lighter on the earth, in short, by de-growth. The practical steps required are well summarised by Serge Latouche (Farewell to Growth, Polity Press, 2009) and other authors: reduce dependency upon capital flows, step away from productivism and embrace locally-made goods, abolish the World Trade Organisation in favour of a World Localisation Organisation, buy less, replace foreign holidays with socialising in our own communities, work less and spread it out. Latouche foresees a cultural revolution in which TV-borne consumerism is rejected in favour of local conviviality.

Latouche paints a picture of a different society, one that has moved away from “the obsession with work” and the attempt to subjugate our surroundings. We have to stop trying to dominate nature, he argues, and instead become gardeners, tending the earth. Over-work and consumerism are replaced by the pleasure of leisure and the ethos of play.

Originally, it was contended that economic growth was good, that it improved well-being. Now that the evidence points the other way – and acutely so in wealthier societies – the main assertion today is that growth is “necessary”. Without more growth the economy will collapse, so the argument goes, and so will savings, social welfare, your parents’ income, your own financial stability and so on.

The central point, however, is that the construct of growth is going to collapse anyway. The sooner it collapses, or is collapsed, the more scope there is to manage the resources that remain. So society does not have a choice between degrowth and growth. Rather, it is a choice between an orderly and planned approach to degrowth or a bit more growth in the short term, and then unplanned degrowth kicks in with a vengeance.

Giorgos Kallis (in Ecological Economics 70, 2011) suggests that it is not simply that we will have a smaller economy, but also a qualitatively different one. While Kallis acknowledges that proposals on “how to degrow” are still fragmented and diverse, he does highlight some common threads from a range of sources including Tim Jackson, James Speth and Latouche.

Work would be replaced with leisure. This would be allied to a gradual de-centralisation and re-localisation of the economy. There would be reductions in throughput. Advertising would cease. There would be more employment in sectors with human contact such as health and education, financed by redistributive taxes and pollution levies. Locally-based complementary currencies are seen as a way of strengthening local economies. Moratoria would be placed on resource extraction and new infrastructure such as motorways and certain power plants. Investment would be made in new public squares, open spaces and community gardens.

Degrowth gets no support from Governments today. It is never likely to get support from industry, at least industry as we know it. Champions will need to emerge from the socio-cultural revolution described by Latouche, a revolution that is only the first step in overhauling the political system.

Social Partnership is corruption.

Illegal corruption – in its various forms and expressions – is hardly a rarity in Irish society. This much we know. Perhaps less well understood are the legally permitted forms of corrupt behaviour that contribute to social and economic degradation and undermine democratic institutions and the legitimacy of the State.

Economists identify corrupt activities to include illegal abuses of the system, such as bribery, cartels, collusion, price fixing, and embezzlement. But corruption also includes activities that fall into grey areas of the law – tacitly allowed: cronyism, nepotism, patronage and influence-peddling.

Over the years, the Irish State recognised these activities and somehow decided unofficially,  of course, to give their perpetrators the strongest political representation in the land – direct access to policy formation. In recent decades our Government and elites, Left and Right, went so far as to institutionalise the arrangement.

Since 1987, Social Partnership has constituted a closed shop with membership restricted to select organisations, representing certain subsets of Irish society. Since this membership restriction is codified and since Partnership is explicitly concerned with fixing prices for some forms of capital and inputs into production, it is both de jure and de facto a cartel. That it is a public cartel, as opposed to a private one, does not change its corrupt and corrupting nature.

This cartel actively and with State support promoted policies that led to gross distortions of markets and competition; and also led directly to the relegation of the State’s duty of care to consumers and ordinary investors.

Social Partnership rubber-stamped a policy of ‘Never at Fault, Never Responsible’ for our financial regulatory and supervisory regimes. It trumpeted the culture of unaccountability in the public and protected-private sectors. Without Social Partnership support, it is hard to imagine the State sustaining the very regimes that led to open, but never-prosecuted violations of the law (e.g. breaches of regulatory liquidity-requirements), ethical codes (e.g. loans-for-shares machinations and misclassifications of deposits), MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) requirements (e.g. the mis-selling of investment products by at least four banks in Ireland, uncovered two years ago) and violations of prudential ethics in financial regulation (e.g. resistance to full public-data disclosure and investor-suitability testing and protection in the case of property transactions).

Neither the Unions, nor any other Social Partners stood up at the Partnership Table in support of the handful of whistleblowers pointing to the above failures. The ‘straw man’ argument is that the Unions always advocated ‘more regulation’. Alas, history shows that other priorities miraculously took precedence time and again over the proper regulation of finance, the protected professions, quangos and pretty much every other aspect of Irish governance. These, of course, were pay and conditions for the Unions’ members, slush-funds for ‘training’ and ‘research’ activities, and State-board appointments, including to the boards of financial regulation and supervision bodies. Having been bought by the ‘robbers’, the self-appointed ‘cops’ have, since the late 1980s, stayed nearly silent lest they damage the regulatory charade performed by the Government and rubber-stamped by their own members in charge of the regulatory bodies.

In effect, the Irish State didn’t just tolerate corruption, it actively managed it. Even debating the merits of the form of corruption embodied by Social Partnership shows how instrumental ethics replaces real values when the cancer of corruption metastasises. Social Partnership is simultaneously a collusive cartel, a conduit for influence peddling, a vehicle for patronage and a price-fixing mechanism. Its goal is to preserve the status quo of wealth and income distribution, skewed in favour of the Partners.

It should come as no surprise that in 2011, Ireland ranked 19th in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) – the lowest of all small, open economies in the Euro Area, bar Estonia and Cyprus. As the Moral Sages of our Left ardently decry market economics, its flagships – New Zealand (ranked 1st in the world), Singapore (5th), Switzerland (8th) and Hong Kong (12th) – are less corrupt than the Social-Partnership-governed Ireland. In Political Risk Services International Risk (PRSIR) rankings, Ireland is placed 26th-31st in the world – alongside Uruguay, the UAE, Botswana, Israel and Malta. The only euro area country that scores below us for overall political risks is Estonia.

Higher corruption overall is associated with a significantly lower quality of economic institutions. The correlation between the CPI score, the Economist Intelligence Unit Country Risk Assessment score, the IMD World Competitiveness score and the PRSIR score is in excess of 0.9 or, in statistical terms, nearly perfect. This shows the costs we pay for corruption in terms of the quality of economic institutions.

In 2011, trust in the Irish Government as measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer – another metric of the quality of democratic institutions that correlates strongly with CPI – stood at 20%, against an average of 52% for the 23 countries surveyed in the report, making Ireland the lowest ranked country in the study.

Years of institutionalised corruption, sanctioned by the State and sanctified as Ireland’s panacea for industrial conflict and policy stalemate – Social Partnership – have definitely come home to roost.

CONSTANTIN GURDGIEV – April 2012

Dr Constantin Gurdgiev is head of research at St Columbanus AG and an adjunct lecturer in Finance at Trinity College, Dublin. He holds a PhD in Macroeconomics and Finance from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA in Economics from Johns Hopkins University and an MA in Pure Mathematics from the University of California

Gurdgiev mischievous in blame game

Macdara Doyle of ICTU responds to Constantin Gurdgiev

If Constantin Gurdgiev is correct – and he seems very sure of himself – Europe’s most progressive societies are corrupted to the very core and will soon endure an Irish-style collapse.

Social dialogue is a hallmark of the socio-economic model adopted by countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it has attained a level of sophistication not seen here, where the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model holds sway.

Much the same can be said of Germany, France and Austria, where social dialogue became a key building block of post-war reconstruction and development.

While the models vary, the essential common element is a desire for greater civil-society influence over the operations of the market. At a practical level this means comparatively strong representation rights for trade unions at both workplace and national level, along with an array of legal protections that are glaringly absent in Ireland.

Trade unions here – uniquely in the developed world – have no legal right to negotiate for members, and activists can be sacked with the full sanction of the law. It is a little difficult to reconcile this with the ‘truism’ advanced by Mr Gurdgiev and others that ‘unions ran the country’ during the years of social partnership (1987-2010).

The Gurdgiev Model postulates a causal link between trade union access to the centres of power, institutionalised corruption and inevitable economic collapse. Apply Gurdgiev to the Nordic countries and others that prioritise social dialogue and all should now lie in ruins.

Except they don’t. Indeed, the Nordics in particular seem remarkably unscathed by the current turmoil.

His is a fine theory in print, but a little less solid when confronted with reality. Indeed, it stretches the bounds of credulity when Mr Gurdgiev attempts to link social dialogue with the fraudulent activities of senior bankers, specifically attributing blame for the “mis-selling of investment products” and “misclassifications of (bank) deposits”.

‘Far fetched’ would be an understatement.

Applying the same standards of evidence, a compelling case could be made for the devastating impact social partnership had on the fortunes of the Dublin senior football team: just two finals and one title in its 23 year lifespan! And only when the shackles of social dialogue are thrown off do they triumph again! Uncanny.

But there are more serious (unspoken) assumptions at the heart of Mr Gurdgiev’s flawed proposition. Strip away the verbiage and it is the very right of trade unions to represent members and engage in dialogue with other national interests that is being contested.

Business has no problems with access. Government ministers meet routinely with business lobby and interest groups (many with questionable representative credentials).

And then there are the private lunches and social functions, the fundraising golf classics and ‘chance’ encounters in golf clubs that lubricate the modern economy, often with disastrous results. (As an aside, surely the role of golf in the collapse of late-20th-century Irish capitalism demands urgent study?)

Yet, when genuinely representative bodies such as trade unions engage in such dialogue, their right to do so is queried, their intentions depicted as selfish and malign.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is the single largest civil society group on the island of Ireland, representing over 800,000 working people in both jurisdictions. It represents working people as a matter of right, not by the grace and favour of business interests and commentators.

Equally, the attempt to tie unions to the economic collapse is but a variant of the lie that has flourished across Europe and the US since private banks and the buccaneering financial markets brought the house down: blame the public sector, blame the Government, blame social spending …

In short, blame everyone but the perpetrators.

Serious studies of the Irish experience of social dialogue confirm that it helped lay the foundations for a genuine boom in the 1990s, which generated real growth and real jobs, as opposed to the House of Sand model adopted post-2003.

In 1997, the FF/PD coalition assumed office, impelled there by front-page editorials claiming ‘pay back time’ for the taxpayer. They then diverted the proceeds of the real boom to fund their own pet ideological project – building the low-tax, low -regulation, bargain-basement economic model.

Mary Harney correctly framed it as a choice between Boston or Berlin. Business and government were as one and they prevailed. We got Boston. On speed. And now we have Berlin, afflicted with a bad case of historical amnesia.

Social partnership had its flaws and errors were made. But perhaps the greatest failing was its inability systematically to engage with and shape that key debate.

And trade unions too must take blame for failing to grasp the significance of what was then unfolding and contesting it more vigorously. Berlin no longer holds much attraction. Copenhagen anyone?

MACDARA DOYLE - April 2012

Macdara Doyle is Communications Officer with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions

RTÉ appears, despite its mauling over Tweetgate and the ‘Prime Time Investigates’ libel of Fr Kevin Reynolds, to be both successfully navigating the choppy waters of the multi-platform age and continuing to boast consistently high levels of public trust and viewership figures. You might therefore expect the Irish public to have a little more affection for its public broadcaster than it appears to. Alas, we in Ireland don’t do pride in our national institutions, and in the case of RTÉ, bashing it is something of a national sport.

It is hardly a surprise, then, to see that the first salvo of RTÉ’s programming as part of its ‘TV50’ commemorations has played it safe, encouraging us to bask in the warm glow of half-remembered Bosco clips rather than prompting us to look ahead to a deeply uncertain future. Those of us looking for more than what one senior RTÉ figure described as a “comforting slice of nostalgia” will have to wait a little longer.

RTÉ Director General Noel Curran’s thoughtful speech in DCU on the future of public service media and a recent circular to RTÉ staff demonstrate a certain humility in the face of mistakes and an awareness of the multitude of threats facing RTÉ. These include the present financial squeeze on the organisation; the incessant lobbying of private media organisations who wish to marginalise RTÉ’s remit (and who see its very existence as anachronistic and an unacceptable distortion of the free market); not to mention the technical challenges surrounding the impending analogue switch-off and the cultural shift towards non-linear on-demand programming.

Curran has been correct to identify these very real challenges. Yet, our deliberations on the future of public service media should go beyond online platforms and on-demand services, mobile applications and set-top boxes. Questions of financial efficiency, technical and managerial competence and regulatory box-ticking must be supplemented by broader ones, not least concerning what is perhaps RTÉ’s greatest challenge of all: how to serve a traumatised nation that no longer knows who it is or what to believe.

Quite apart from the profound crisis engulfing Western capitalism, we should recognise the general crisis of authority in an age when the dominance of the Catholic Church over minds and souls has been shattered in such traumatic fashion, as well as the steady ebbing away of legitimacy from all levels of the political system.

This is critical because RTÉ never was just another semi-state utility. It deals not with water, gas or electricity but with the stuff that democracy is made of: debate, ideas, questions, answers. In this age when the public sphere is under threat and unfashionable, defenders of democracy must re-engage with RTÉ and begin exploring the big questions about what role we want it to have in post-Catholic, post-Celtic Tiger, crisis-ridden Ireland.

Towards a new model of public service media

If the case for public service media is to be renewed, it surely must ask, among other questions:

• Can or should ideas like ‘national identity’ and the ‘public interest’ be neatly defined? If not, how should they be teased out?

• In a world where the old certainties have crumbled, and expert knowledge of many kinds has repeatedly failed us, do some professions and groups still have a privileged position to define our problems and propose solutions?

• Are journalistic imperatives like ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ possible or desirable in a complex world where just about every ‘truth’ is contestable?

• Is RTÉ’s increasing reliance on commercial revenue compromising its relationship to its public, tying its continued financial viability to demand for mass-produced consumer goods and thus aligning it to the economic status quo?

It is tempting for public broadcasters to equate the ‘public interest’ simply with what ‘interests the public’. Yet, armed with even a moderately critical attitude towards this view, we might begin to see various examples of programming in a new light.

For example, is the celebration of cut-throat entrepreneurialism in imported formats like ‘Dragon’s Den’ merely a bit of fun, ‘giving the public what they want’? Or does it, and programmes epitomised by 2007’s ‘Ireland’s Top Earners’ which heroised the “exceptional commercial acumen” of Seán Quinn and others like Denis O’Brien and Liam Carroll, in fact openly valorise inequality, equate wealth-accumulation with virtue and encourage us to see others in purely instrumental terms?

Similarly, we might ask whether the flag-waving, jubilant wall-to-wall coverage of the Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II visits really brought the nation together in a rare, much-needed and joyous shared celebration of its past and future? Or did they encourage us to adopt an uncritical attitude towards institutionalised power, fabricating a false consensus, an enforced ‘maturity’ and a superficial nationalism? These are questions worth asking.

There is cause for hope. Apart altogether from Tweetgate and the Reynolds débacle, some might criticise programmes like ‘The Frontline’, ‘Liveline’ and ‘Primetime’ for their hard-nosed capitalist realism and failure to recognise the totems of neoliberal economics as contingent policy choices rather than eternal truths. Yet, RTÉ’s instinct in these programmes and others is to engage itself with the people and problems of the country rather than turn away from them. It is worth pointing out that it does this far better than the BBC does, and with a fraction of the resources. For example, through the brave work of RTÉ journalists like the recently deceased Mary Raftery, the nation was forced to confront a variety of dark and traumatic chapters of its recent past, doing us all a profound service.

This high level of engagement with its own society should be praised and supported: it is simply the terms of that engagement which must be renegotiated if public service broadcasting is to be renewed.

A compass pointing to a better future

Public-service media must survive simply because the private sector, chained to the profit motive as their ultimate operating logic, cannot be relied on to foster a pluralistic, vibrant public sphere. The UK’s phone-hacking scandal is merely a symptom. The broader underlying problem is, as Mark Fisher argues in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, the dominance of the “peculiar logic of neoliberalism”, which tells us that treating people as if they were intelligent is in fact ‘elitist’ whereas treating them as if they are stupid is ‘democratic’. This is the Murdoch doctrine – and it sees the race to the bottom as a noble, even egalitarian crusade.

Fisher reminds us of the debased definition of free, equal and democratic that underpins this doctrine. He suggests that whilst the ‘choice’ offered by neoliberalism merely traps us in ourselves, allowing us to select among ‘minimally different versions of what we have already chosen’, the best kind of paternalism ‘wagers on a different ‘you’, a you that does not yet exist’.

The Reithian paternalism and elitism of the old BBC is gone and while we should neither mourn its passing nor seek to recreate it here, there is something to be said for public-service media imagined as something akin to a ‘gift’- after all, as Fisher wonders, aren’t the best gifts the ones that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves simply because we wouldn’t have thought of them?

A new democratic paternalism envisions public service media not as a vehicle of elitism or arbiter of taste, but as a means of our emancipation from unquestioned received wisdom and from the myths and prejudices that limit our thought, taking us beyond the limits of our selves. Ireland, a land not short of officially-sanctioned fairy tales, could do with some emancipation. RTÉ could play a more crucial supporting role to Irish democracy as a result.

In this interregnum following the shattering of the unquestioned hegemony of the old order of church, state and neoliberal capitalism, a revitalised model of public service media should act not simply as a window on the world or mirror on its society but additionally as a kind of compass, which, by giving full voice to the contradictions and foibles as well as the beauty and ordinary heroism of Ireland and its diverse peoples, may yet lead us towards a better future.

MARK CULLINANE - April 2012

Mark Cullinane is a PhD Student in Social Science in University College Cork, and an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Scholar

After a seven-month search by Fine Gael’s scrupulous Minister for Transport, Leo Varadkar, the appointment, over the becalmed Christmas period, of high-flyer Pádraig Ó Ríordáin to the role of chairman of the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) generated some turbulence.

Ó Ríordáin is a partner – and former managing partner – in Arthur Cox Solicitors, Ireland’s biggest law firm. The former Harvard classmate of Barack Obama has, according to The Parchment magazine, “been on the fast track since day one” in the aggressive Earlsfort-Terrace-based firm founded in 1920 by Arthur Cox, solicitor, senator and philanthropist who died in Africa after becoming a priest.

Ó Ríordáin is a non-executive director of Paddy Power plc and TVC Holdings plc, and a member of the European Commission’s Insolvency Law Expert Group (ILEG), which seems to spend a lot of time dealing with the banking sector. He chaired the quietly-axed advisory forum on financial legislation (2007-9). He did well from the Fianna Fáil/Green government and no less well from its successors in Fine Gael/Labour.

Arthur Cox has been perceived as close to Fianna Fáil: at one stage the Irish Independent’s Sam Smyth even speculated that Brian Cowen might ultimately join Cox’s, headed by the then Taoiseach’s UCD-Law class-mate, Eugene McCague.

Eyebrows were raised towards the end of the FF/Green coalition, when Arthur Cox was awarded valuable legal work for the Health Services Executive (HSE) previously undertaken by the less well-connected Byrne Wallace Solicitors. A tendering process was used but it is believed that Byrne Wallace’s cheaper offering was spurned in favour of Arthur Cox’s.

McCague was and is a member of the board of the HSE, appointed by Mary Harney, though of course this had nothing to do with the award of the legal work in which he had no role.

Ó Ríordáin himself was a key advisor to the previous Fianna-Fáil-led-government during the financial crisis from 2008, though he has noted, “I had never met Brian Lenihan or Brian Cowen before I started working for the State. I’m not party-political at all”.

Ó Ríordáin was integral to Fianna Fáil’s financial policies. His citation for the exciting award of European Managing Partner of the Year 2009 singled him out “for his work advising the Irish State on its response to the banking crisis including the bank guarantee scheme, the nationalisation and recapitalisation of Anglo Irish Bank and the establishment of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA)”. History does not record if his advices included any reference to any of these being almost treasonably bad ideas.

Ó Ríordáin was also the go-to advisor at the time of the EU/ECB/IMF bailout. The close relationship between Ó Ríordáin and the previous government was suggested at a conference of lawyers on the NAMA legislation shortly after its adoption. One of the speakers said to a rapturous audience that when Ó Riordáin was addressing the conference “he could hear the voice of Brian Lenihan”.

Arthur Cox was appointed government financial advisor in 2008 without a competitive tender at a marginally-discounted rate of €472 Euro per hour for partners (€100 per hour for trainee solicitors) on the basis the government considered an emergency response was required. Subsequently it won financial work by tender.

In 2010 Arthur Cox was engaged by the NTMA to draft the legislation creating NAMA after it submitted the lowest tender for the services. Nevertheless, some believe the work could have better been handled by the Chief State Solicitor’s office for example. At the time Arthur Cox commented, ‘‘Once NAMA is established, there is undoubtedly potential for conflicts of interest to arise for any firm working with NAMA in its transactions with banks and property owners. This is not what we have been appointed to do”.

Nevertheless Arthur Cox has been the highest earner since NAMA’s inception too. The Comptroller and Auditor General’s Report states that from September 2009 onwards, Arthur Cox was billing NAMA for €40,000 per month. Arthur Cox got €1.9 million in 2010 and €1.16 million in 2011 from NAMA. Recent reports from the Department of Finance acknowledge that the Department and its agencies have spent a minimum of €40 million in legal and consultancy fees in the last three years. And over the last five years it has paid a staggering €15m to Arthur Cox alone. The firm charged the department €1.6 million in 2008, €4.14 million in 2009, €5.9 million in 2009, €4.8 million in 2010 and €1.3m in 2011 for legal advice on the bank guarantee scheme, recapitalisation issues, nationalisation, NAMA, restructuring plans and the eligible liabilities guarantee scheme.

The law firm was paid a further €1.25 million by the State’s National Pension Reserve Fund Commission for legal services relating to due diligence on Allied Irish Banks.

Law Society Regulations for solicitors state that ‘‘if a conflict of interest arises between two clients in a matter in which the firm is acting, the firm must cease to act for either client in that matter”. However, in exceptional circumstances, one of the clients may consent to the other client remaining. Arthur Cox claims to operate ‘Chinese Walls’ for such clients. Once the legal advisor to Anglo Irish Bank, Arthur Cox discontinued to provide legal services to Anglo when hired by the Government to advise on the Bank Guarantee. But it continues to advise Bank of Ireland, even though that makes it lawyer for the sellers of loans (Bank of Ireland) and for their purchasers (NAMA).

Of course government is not Cox’s only work: Ó Ríordáin is rather coy on Cox’s annual haul of fees, but The Lawyer magazine estimate came to €106 million in 2010 or €1.02 million per partner.

Another conflict arises for Arthur Cox over NAMA in its dealings with Treasury Holdings. It represents NAMA and Bank of Ireland; and the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) that set up NAMA and under whose aegis it still operates. And it represents the Department of Finance to which NAMA reports and which appoints its board. So, for example, Treasury’s acquisition of its vast Battersea site in 2006 was part funded by Bank of Ireland, whose loans were transferred to NAMA in 2010. Arthur Cox has represented Treasury and its affiliate, REO, and indeed Treasury’s bullish legal head, Rory Williams, formerly worked for Arthur Cox on the Treasury account.

It was Arthur Cox too which sent the infamous letters to the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) threatening it about the never-published report the CPI was drafting on conflicts of interest in the now-tainted Dublin Docklands Development Authority, conflicts between some of its board members – bankers Seán Fitzpatrick and Lar Bradshaw – and its role doling out planning permits to developers, many of whom banked with those board members’ Anglo Irish Bank. A letter from Arthur Cox to all CPI board members informed them they could lose their family homes and other assets if anything legally dubious to do with Treasury was published.

Personal liability was also threatened by Arthur Cox to directors of Lancefort when that Company challenged a Treasury development on Dublin’s College Green in the mid-1990s, despite the company being a separate legal entity from its members and directors.

Mr Ó Ríordáin defended the firm in an interview last year saying that the legal practice had entirely separate teams acting for Bank of Ireland and the State, pointing out that he, and his team, represent NAMA and Arthur Cox Chairman, Eugene McCague, and his team, representing Bank of Ireland.

Arthur Cox’s wide-ranging conflicts of interest have attracted the spleen of a wide range of commentators including solicitor Barry Lyons and celebrity economist David McWilliams, who said, “I am not a lawyer, but if I was looking at this country’s potential and I asked myself, have they learned from the crisis, have they changed. I’d see something like a huge law firm working for both sides as a worrying sign”.

Nonetheless, in Government, both Fine Gael and Labour have been happy for Ó Ríordáin to advise on further restructuring measures in the banking sector. He was responsible for legally implementing the €5 billion burden-sharing with subordinated debt holders through liability management exercises and application for a subordinated liability order. He also worked with the new Government on the recapitalisation of the banks during 2011.

Furthermore, Arthur Cox handled the examination of the books of Irish Nationwide and EBS Building Society; and the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank.

More recently, Ó Ríordáin’s appointment to the DAA resulted in questions being raised about a further potential conflict of interest given that Arthur Cox acts as a legal adviser to Aer Lingus, the DAA’s biggest airline customer. Ryanair predictably characterised the gig as a “crony appointment”. A spokesman for the department of transport said no such conflict exists as Mr Ó Ríordáin does not personally advise Aer Lingus and has not worked on that account for many years. The decision to appoint Ó Ríordáin as DAA chairman is again perhaps surprising, given Fine Gael’s previous disapproval of the almost Rasputinesque ubiquitousness, and price, of the advisory role Arthur Cox held with the previous Government.

The antagonism towards the appointment of white-shoe lawyer, Ó Ríordáin, has been exacerbated by his stance against a government-imposed salary cap on semi-state bosses. The high-rolling new DAA chairman has openly warned of the effect such a salary cap would have on the DAA’s ability to secure an effective, high-calibre chief executive to replace Declan Collier who earned over €500,000 in his last year there but has now left to become CEO of London City Airport (at a similar salary). Ó Ríordáin told a joint Oireachtas committee recently that in his personal view, a €250,000 cap wouldn’t enable the DAA to effectively compete for global aviation talent.

This purse-string liberalism contrasts with Ó Ríordáin’s view, offered somewhat gratuitously, it was felt, to the lawyers’ conference that there would “have to be social welfare cuts”.

Ó Ríordáin needs to find a solution to the DAA’s hefty pension deficit; negotiate the politically tricky issue of separation for Shannon and Cork airports from the DAA; and oversee growth in passenger numbers . Even Aer Lingus, which is more moderate in its language towards the State-owned airport manager, has described the increases in passenger fees of recent years at Dublin airport as “insane”. Ó Ríordáin certainly will not find his DAA remuneration of €31, 500 the easiest fee he has earned.

DOROTHY JONES – April 2012

Dorothy Jones is an architect who lectures in UCD School of Architecture, including on NAMA

Village’s 2012 list: Party politicians, international economic overseers and people who have earned  respect.

We asked an informed and not unrepresentative group to contribute a list of who they think are the most influential people in Ireland; and to rank them.

We did not seek to influence contributors’ view of what “influential” means, except to say that it extends beyond politics and perhaps embraces “making a difference in society”; and that candidates must be alive. The contributors did not express any views on the merits of the people they ranked. We aggregated the contributions mathematically to form the list below. We had compiled a similar list in 2009.

The 2012 contributors are David Davin-Power (Political Correspondent, RTÉ News), Joe Duffy (presenter, Liveline), Karen Gogan (Cork-based Rada-trained actor and director),  John Gormley (former Minister for the  Environment and former Green Party leader), Constantin Gurdgiev (economist and academic, Trinity College, Dublin), Karlin Lillington (technology columnist, the Irish Times, board member RTÉ), Anne Lucey (freelance Kerry-based journalist), Justine McCarthy (Senior Writer at the Sunday Times, Ireland), Jack O’Connor (General Secretary, SIPTU), Bride Rosney (former director of communications, RTÉ), Michael Smith (editor, Village magazine).

No more than 30 of the 2009 list survived. Of course, all the 2009 Fianna  Fáil and Green most influential are gone. There are far more foreigners now, headed by Angela Merkel at 5. In general, the choices in 2012 are more circumspect. Contributors were less inclined to give credit to Irish-based institutions, particularly the civil service but also the media, less inclined to assume a mere title implies influence. Enda Kenny moves from an extraordinary 90th position in 2009 to first. There are 24 women. Vincent Browne is a phenomenon at 3. The Troika scores surprisingly low at 7.

In 2009 our list was best described as “party politicians, economists and businessmen”.  The 2012 list is perhaps better rendered as “party politicians, international economic overseers and people who have earned respect”.

1 Enda Kenny Taoiseach; Leader, Fine Gael, main government party; former Minister for Tourism; “father” of the house in Dáil Éireann.

2 Éamon Gilmore Tánaiste; Leader, the Labour Party. Former Democratic Left TD, Trade Unionist and Students’ Union leader.

3 Vincent Browne; Presenter ‘Tonight with Vincent Browne’ on TV3; columnist The Irish Times and Sunday Business Post; former editor, the Sunday Tribune; founding editor, Magill and Village magazines; serial attack dog for political mountebanks: Charles Haughey, Bertie  Ahern, Brian Cowen, Troika.

4 Susan Denham; Chief Justice and Longest-serving member of Supreme Court; chaired Commissions which led to Courts Service and Court of Appeal. Educated in Trinity, of which she was a pro-Chancellor, and Columbia, Universities.

5 Angela Merkel; First woman Chancellor of Germany; Chairwoman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU); a Hamburg-born physical chemist by profession, Merkel served as the deputy spokesperson for Lothar de Maizière’s democratic East German government before Reunification.

6 Michael Noonan; Minister for Finance, a minister in every FG cabinet since 1982; presided over blood-products scandal when Minister for Health; former UCD-educated teacher in Crescent College, Limerick

7-9 Troika; ‘A commission of three for reaching quick decisions in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin’; or latterly the tripartite committee led by the European Commission with the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that organised the financial rescues of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Wheeled out from time to time to say Ireland is complying with the terms of its bailout, it is an easy bogey-group for the austerity which followed our national binge, though the IMF of the three seems less keen on austerity, and indeed on repaying the unsecured bondholders whose repayment the ECB and Germany sees as essential for the stability of the EU’s other banks.

10 John Moran; New Secretary General in the Department of Finance, the country’s most powerful civil servant. Former lawyer and banker, juice-bar owner and restorer of French chateaux.

11 Michael O’Leary; Foul-mouthed Clongowes-educated aerosexual who profitably runs one of the biggest airlines in the world, Ryanair, headquartered in Dublin; specialises in cheapness and cost-cutting.

12 Michael D Higgins; Outspoken, Clare-born President of Ireland; socialist former Labour Party TD for Galway West; orator, intellectual, academic sociologist and mediocre poet.

13 Patrick Honohan; Governor of Central Bank, former professor of international financial economics and development in TCD with specialism in banking; broke precedent of department of finance alumni taking governership; fell to him to break news that Ireland was getting a bailout.

14 Denis O’Brien; Billionaire head of Communicorp, which owns Newstalk and 98 FM; biggest shareholder in Independent Newspapers; founder of ESAT on whose behalf he paid money to Minister Lowry to secure favourable treatment in the tender process.

15 Joe Duffy; RTÉ Radio phone-in-show broadcaster.

16 Diarmuid Martin; Moderate Catholic archbishop of Dublin; formerly worked in Rome for Holy See.

17 Mary Robinson; Former President of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, former barrister and Trinity Senator; academic lawyer. Now leading the Dublin-based Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice, which campaigns on climate change.

18 Fintan O’Toole; Irish Times assistant editor, author, polemicist, left-liberal, political correspondent and drama critic; former editor Magill magazine.

19 Miriam O’Callaghan; Popular presenter, ‘Prime Time’, RTÉ’s flagship current affairs/investigative programme and ‘Miriam Meets’, friendship-based radio programme. Formerly worked on BBC’s ‘Newsnight’.

20 Robert Watt; Secretary General of Department of Public Expenditure and Reform 41-year old economist; formerly had responsibility for expenditure policy in department of finance and worked with Indecon Economic Consultants and London Economics.

21 Ruairí Quinn; Veteran Minister for Education and Skills, leader of the Labour Party 1997-2002; Minister for Finance 1994-7.

22 Colm McCarthy; UCD lecturer, clear-thinking right–wing pundit; author, An Bord Snip report; founder of DKM economic consultants.

23 Phil Hogan; Minister for the Environment and Local Government; Enda Kenny’s right-hand man, whose interest in local government positions him well among Fine Gael’s local-authority base and whose interest in the environment – planning, climate change legislation, septic-tank monitoring, turf-cutting – is dubious but perhaps growing.

24 Pat Kenny; Highest-paid Irish broadcaster. Now presenting ‘Frontline’ TV show having moved on from ‘Late Late Show’. Presents ‘Today with PK’ show daily on RTÉ Radio 1; former lecturer in Chemical Engineering.

25 Nicolas Sarkozy; Hyper French President since 2007; facing an imminent election which he is expected to lose to Francois Hollande. Has been a force in the EU representing traditionally significant France to counter mighty Germany’s obsessions with austerity and avoiding inflation.

26 Brendan McDonagh; 43-year old Managing Director of the National Asset Management Agency (bad bank). Previously was Director for Finance, Technology & Risk with the National Treasury Management Agency and worked for the ESB.

27 Tony O’Reilly; Former CEO of INM and Heinz.

28 Kevin O’Sullivan; Newly-appointed ‘business-friendly’ editor of the Irish Times, of which he had been news editor since 2006. Previously night editor, special projects editor, environmental and food science correspondent and worked with the Connacht Tribune and the Tuam Herald. Has a BSc from UCD and a diploma in Journalism from DCU.

29 Mary McAleese; Former two-term President of Ireland; former academic lawyer and tv current affairs reporter; plans to study in Italy and will return to studying law.

30 Bono

31 Mark Zuckerburg; 27-year-old multi-billionaire CEO of Facebook, social networking site; a computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. Claims to speak French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.

32 Joan Burton; Minister for Social Welfare, former Deputy Leader and Spokesperson on Finance, the Labour Party; has bachelor of Commerce from UCD and lectured in accountancy in DIT.

33 Judge Peter Kelly; Formidable Tridentine-mass-attending head of the Commercial Court. Appears to take no nonsense from commercial and development types and their lawyers.

34 Brendan Howlin; Unprepossessing Minister for Public Expenditure & Reform, former Leas-Cheann Comhairle of Dáil, Minister for the Environment 1994-97, Minister for Health 1993-1994.

35 Barack Obama; President, the USA. Former Community organiser, constitutional-law lecturer and Illinois and US Senator.

36 Frank Convery; Chairman, Atlantic-Philanthropies-funded Irish Fiscal Policy Research Centre, board member Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Change, former member NRA, former Chairman, Comhar, senior fellow, the Earth Sciences Institute, UCD, former Professor of Environmental Studies, UCD.

37 Micheál Martin; Leader Fianna Fáil Minister for Education and Science (1997–2000), Minister for Health and Children (2000–04) – introduced smoking ban, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment (2004–08) and Minister for Foreign Affairs (2008–11).

38 Jack O’Connor; General President SIPTU and President ICTU. Has served on Labour Party executive though is also Sinn Féin friendly.

39 Joe Higgins; Irish-speaking former teacher and priest. Articulate socialist party TD for Dublin West; former MEP for Dublin; often speaks for the independent ‘technical’ group in Dáil.

40 Emily O’Reilly; Charlie-McCreevy-appointed Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, ex-officio member of the Standards in Public Office Commission, the Referendum Commission and the Commission for Public Service Appointments and Commissioner for Environmental Information. Former editor Magill and distinguished journalist, the Sunday Press and Irish Press.

41 Norah Gibbons; Director of Advocacy, Barnardos Children’s Charity, former Commissioner, the Commission into Child Abuse.

42 Gerry Adams; President of Sinn Féin, TD for Louth and former abstentionist MP for West Belfast. Former butcher and probable IRA leader, though denies it.

43 Noel Curran; Director-General of RTÉ. Produced ‘Kenny Live’, ‘The Late Late Show’ and Eurovision Song Contest 1997, whose winner he married; as editor of current affairs, he helped launch the “Prime Time Investigates series”.

44 Giovanni Trapatonni; Manager of the Irish soccer team at forthcoming UEFA Euro 2012, and former coach of Italy. The only manager to have won all UEFA club competitions and the Intercontinental Cup. He achieved this with Juventus over two spells with the club.

45 Diarmuid O’Flynn and other Ballyhea, Co. Cork, protestors Members of anti-bondholder bailout campaign. The Guardian reported: “the usually placid people in the Irish hamlet of Ballyhea have been so enraged by the government’s austerity measures that they have taken to marching in the streets every Sunday. But has anyone noticed?”.

46-47 Katherin Zappone / Anne Louise Gilligan; Have pending Supreme Court case seeking to have their gay marriage recognised.

Zappone is a Boston-College educated independent Senator, commissioner with the Irish Human Rights Commission; former CEO of National Women’s Council of Ireland; taught ethics, practical theology and education in Trinity College Dublin; led and established the Tallaght West Childhood Development Initiative.

Gilligan is a former Lecturer in St Patrick’s College in philosophy of education, modern philosophy and gender studies; she established and directed its Centre in Educational Disadvantage; and established and chaired the National Education Welfare Board.

48 Mario Draghi; President of the European Central Bank, Italian economist and former governor of the bank of Italy; described by Bild tabloid as “the most German of all the candidates” for ECB President; fellow of JFK school of government, Harvard.

49 Hillary McGouran; Series Editor and former reporter for, ‘Morning Ireland’. Graduated in Journalism from College of Commerce, Rathmines.

50 Christine Lagarde; Managing director of the International Monetary Fund 2011. Previously; was French Minister of Finance  and before that Minister of Agriculture and of Trade; first female chair of international law firm Baker & McKenzie. Her father was a Professor of English at Rouen University.

51 Niall Ó Donnchú; Assistant Secretary General of the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport with areas of responsibility in: Arts, film & music policy; Cultural institutions; Information Technology services; is on the Boards of the National Concert Hall and Culture Ireland. He is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and the London School of Economics.

52 Peter Mathews; Somewhat self-important Rosary-bead throwing former banker, financial expert and Fine Gael TD for Dublin South.

53 Pearse Doherty; Articulate and forceful Glasgow-born Sinn Féin finance spokesperson and TD for Donegal South West; 35-year old former civil engineering technician.

54 Tim Geithner; US Treasury Secretary and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Mandarin-speaking, Bangkok-high-schooled he worked for three years for Kissinger Associates.

55 Colm Tóibín; Acclaimed multiple-Booker-nominated author and commentator; worked as journalist for In Dublin, Hibernia and The Sunday Tribune, becoming features editor of In Dublin in 1981 and editor of Magill magazine, in 1982.

56 Matthew Elderfield; The Financial Regulator; former chief executive of the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA). Graduate of Cambridge University and has a bachelor degree in foreign service, cum laude, from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

57 Alan Shatter; Fine Gael Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, former solicitor specialising in family law; has taken fairly brave stance on competition in legal profession; pro-Israel; as a student, he was Director of the Crumlin Free Legal Advice Centre and later became Chairman of FLAC; for many years was chairman of Council Against Blood sports.

58 Anne Harris; Editor, Sunday Independent. Widow of Sunday Independent editor, Aengus Fanning; previously married to polemical columnist, Eoghan Harris. Feminist, anti-Republican former socialist she pioneered personalised, celebrity-oriented journalism in an Irish broadsheet; formerly worked for Hibernia, Irish Press and Image.

59 Gordon Jeyes; HSE National Director for Children and Family Services. He was the UK’s first Director of Children’s Services and has provided advice to governments in Scotland and at Westminster on the development of Children’s Services.

60 Stephen Donnelly; Independent TD for Wicklow and East Carlow. Studied engineering at UCD and MIT before joining McKinsey & Company. Has a Masters’ degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s JFK School of Government where he studied the interaction between the IMF and small states.

61 Ollie Rehn; Finnish European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs; former Commissioner for Enlargement; has a PhD from Oxford on the subject of “Corporatism and Industrial Competitiveness in Small European States”.

62 Ryan Tubridy; Talented and bouncy presenter, ‘The Late Late Show’, Ireland’s most watched TV Programme and a popular morning programme on 2FM; grandson of Todd Andrews and brother of Garret, unsuccessful local election candidate for Fianna Fáil in 2007.

63 José Manuel; Barroso President, the European Commission. Former PSD Prime Minister of Portugal. Has degrees in law and economics.

64 Máire Whelan; Attorney General. Offered unusually independent advice on fiscal treaty referendum; Labour’s former financial secretary and a member of the party for almost 30 years; protégée of Michael D Higgins; wrote legal textbook on NAMA; is former chairwoman of the Free Legal Advice Centres (Flac); studied at University of London.

65 Jag Singh; Editor, Namawinelake, well-informed website focused on National Asset Management Agency, economics, property and politics.

66 Declan Ganley; Federalist chairman of Libertas which campaigned for No vote to Lisbon Treaty and unsuccessfully promoted candidates for the 2009 European Parliament elections. Head of Rivada Networks which supplies telecommunications equipment to US military and emergency services. Uncharacteristically uncertain how to campaign in forthcoming referendum.

67 Michael O’Kane; Editor, the Irish Daily Star; previously worked at RTÉ where he reported from Northern Ireland; joined the Star in 2002 as News Editor.

68 Martin McGuinness; Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin candidate for the Irish presidential election, 2011. A former Provisional IRA leader, McGuinness is the abstentionist MP for the Mid Ulster constituency. Also a member of Northern Ireland Assembly for the same constituency.

69 Donal Óg Cusack; Well-known hurler and Ireland’s first openly gay elite sportsman; plays hurling for Cloyne and has been a member of the Cork senior team since 1999; an electrician by trade; revealing autobiography, “Come What May”.

70 John Crown; Senator, polemicist and consultant oncologist; New-York-born professor of cancer research in DCU and UCD.

71 Mick Wallace; Independent left-wing TD, property developer and former manager of Wexford Youths soccer team; pink-shirt-wearing philosophy graduate; developer of Dublin’s Italian quarter; threatened with bankruptcy in downturn.

72 Alan Mahon; Circuit Court Judge, now chairing Planning Tribunal, which has not sat for three-and-a-half years, despite clocking up expenses of €50,000 on lunches for judges and the tribunal’s legal team, and more than €200,000 in expenses for judges and their staff.

73 Catherine Day; Secretary-General of the European Commission. Former Director General for Environment. Economically-liberal Dubliner; has  MA in International Trade from UCD; was loan officer at the Investment Bank of Ireland in 1974; served in the cabinets of Richard Burke, Peter Sutherland and Leon Brittan.

74 Patrick Cunningham; Chief Scientific Advisor to government and champion of Dublin City of Science 2012 – Europe’s largest science conference; Professor of Animal Genetics at Trinity College, Dublin.

75 Michael Geoghegan; HSBC Group’s chief executive from 2006-11 before ousting by board; conducted recent review of NAMA which stated: “the agency’s focus to date has been on control and accountability” But it must now evolve into the “pro-active, externally focussed, entrepreneurial, confident business it needs to be”.

76 Connie Hedegard; Danish EU Commissioner for Climate Action. Hosted UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009 when she was Danish Minister for Climate and Energy.

77 Gavin Sheridan; Innovation Director at Storyful. Co-founder at thestory.ie; founded KildareStreet.com; worked for the Irish Examiner and blogs at Gavin’s Blog; obsessive about freedom of information.

78 Anna Carragher; Investigating officer for Broadcasting Authority of Ireland into ‘Prime Time Investigates’ programme Mission To Prey, which wrongly accused Father Kevin Reynolds of raping a minor; former controller of BBC Northern Ireland. Her investigation is important for future of Public Service Broadcasting in Ireland.

79 Pat Moylan; Martin-Cullen-appointed chair, Arts council; former Artistic Director of Andrews Lane Theatre; independent producer of ‘Twelve Angry Men’, ‘I Keano’, ‘Alone it Stands’; she produced the multi-award winning short film ‘The Breakfast’ and successful feature film ‘Borstal Boy’, both directed by Peter Sheridan.

80 Martin O’Brien; Senior Vice President for Programmes at Atlantic Philanthropies, based in Belfast; manages Atlantic’s four programmes – Ageing, Children & Youth, Population Health and Reconciliation & Human Rights. Crucially for strapped NGOs Atlantic will disburse its remaining endowment by 2016. Formerly co-ordinated the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ).

81 Paddy Prendiville (or is it Prendeville?); Elusive veteran editor of dirty-laundry-washing Phoenix Magazine, now owned by Aengus Mulcahy.

82 Katie Taylor; World amateur women’s boxing champion. Also plays with Irish Women’s senior soccer team; potential for gold medal at Olympics could lead to significant increase in women’s participation in minority sports.

83 Kevin McNamara; Curate at St Mary’s Cathedral in Killarney, who has fought the removal of religious symbols from hospitals and churches in the diocese.

84 John Herlihy; Head of Google Ireland, vice-president of Google’s global ad operations; believes mobile phones will supersede desktops within two years; has UCD B.Comm and formerly worked for KPMG Dublin.

85 Pat Rabbitte; Unflappable Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources; Labour TD for Dublin South–West; Labour Party leader 2002 to 2007; former ITGWU National Secretary and President Union of Students in Ireland (1972-74).

86 Paul O’Connell; Currently-injured Irish rugby captain; plays lock for Munster and Ireland; captained British and Irish Lions on 2009 South Africa tour; former star swimmer.

87 Fiach MacConghail; Director, Abbey Theatre; Senator; Chairman, We the Citizens initiative which championed a citizens’ assembly but, disappointingly, little else.

88 Josephine Fehilly; Chairwoman, Revenue Commissioners, since 2008; Revenue Commissioner since 1998; dislikes complicated legislation; worked in Charlie Haughey’s private office from 1977 to 1979 and found him “an exacting task master’’.

89 Loughlin Deegan; Director of The Lir, the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Trinity College; playwright, former arts manager for The Belltable and Druid, company producer of Rough Magic, and Artistic Director and CEO of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

90 Frank McDonald; Veteran Irish Times Environment Editor and author of many books including, notably, The Destruction of Dublin, 1979.

91 Clare Daly; Socialist Party & United Left Alliance TD for Dublin North. Formerly a Councillor for Swords; long-term opponent of land speculation and strong opponent of Household Charge.

92 Fionnuala Kenny; Wife of Taoiseach, Enda Kenny; once said her role was to make sure her husband didn’t have to worry about home or their three children; Dublin-born former press officer – the first woman – for Charles Haughey; former head of Governnment Information Service and former PR Manager for RTÉ.

93 Seamus Heaney; Northern Irish poet, playwright, and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, which cited his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”; Aosdána Saoi since 1997; Harvard and Oxford Professors of Poetry; Robert Lowell called him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”.

94 Richard Bruton; Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and Fine Gael TD for Dublin North Central; previously Minister for Enterprise and Employment; Deputy Leader of Fine Gael from 2002-2010 when he shockingly and unsuccessfully challenged Enda Kenny for leadership; educated at Clongowes and has masters in Economics from Oxford.

95 Eamon Sinnott; Vice-president and general manager of Intel in Ireland, which employs 4,000 in Leixlip, where it is refitting, creating 850 jobs; director, American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland; concerned to keep corporation tax down; MBA from UCD and BSc fromTrinity.

96 Éanna Ní Lamhna; Long-standing ‘naturalist’ member of panel of experts on RTÉ’s ‘Mooney’ programme; former president An Taisce; author; has a degree in Botany and Microbiology and an H.Dip in Education from UCD.

97 Ivana Bacik; Liberal leader of Labour group on, and deputy leader of, Seanad Éireann; on unpaid leave from Reid Professorship of Criminal Law in Trinity College; barrister; former head, Trinity Students’ Union, where she was sued by SPUC.

98 Tom Murphy; Dramatist for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and Druid Theatre, Galway. His work is characterised by experimentation in form and content. Recurring themes include the search for redemption. With Brian Friel considered Ireland’s greatest living playwright.

99 Adrian Hardiman; Supreme Court Judge, unsuccessful FF local election candidate, former president of the Students’ Union at UCD and Auditor of the L and H debating society, UCD; aficianado of James Joyce.

100 Andrew McDowell; Special Adviser to the Taoiseach – Head of Policy and Programme Implementation at Department of An Taoiseach; former Fine Gael economic advisor; former Forfás Chief Economist; cousin once removed, Michael McDowell.

- April 2012

Enda Kenny got into trouble by over-generalising on the sensitive issue of just who went mad with greed and borrowing during our distant boom, but he might just as well have gone the whole way and questioned which of us dabbled in corruption too.

Corruption, illegal and legal, has been endemic in banking, in the awarding of public contracts, in planning, in the exploitation of resources and the environment, in the unblinking repayment of unsecured bondholders and ultimately in the obscene maldistribution of wealth.
Ireland is regarded as suffering particularly high levels of ‘legal corruption’ – perhaps as many (not you dear reader or I, of course) need to look into their souls to see if they have been party to corruption as need to see if they are party to greed.
While no laws may be broken, ‘strokes’ and ‘cute hoorism’ such as nepotism, patronage, job-
bery, parochialism, political favours and political donations influence political decisions and policy to the detriment of the common good, disproportionately in this country. Influence-selling has yet to be completely outlawed, while political funding remains open to abuse through loose thresholds on political donations and weak disclosure criteria for political parties. Though legislation is proposed, political lobbying is entirely unregulated and political parties are not required to publish audited accounts.
Disgrace bears little consequence in this society. Ben Dunne still has a weekly column in the Irish Sun, although Moriarty found him corrupt and his principal defence seems to be that he had psychiatric difficulties. Bertie Ahern batted for the Star from behind the contents of a refrigerator and Celia Larkin pontificates on the issues of the day in the Sunday Independent. No-one cares what Moriarty said about civil servants. Denis O’Brien still dominates our Global Economic Forums, the Clinton Diaspora Summit and the horrible Ireland Inc St Patrick’s Day NYSE bell-ringing.
Whatever about the benighted Fianna Fáil, our current main ruling party raised, with corrupt Minister Michael Lowry’s involvement, €1.3 million to clear its debts between 1991 and 1994 and, despite that and an army of dodgy rezoning councillors, most of whom were recognised in the Mahon Report, it rose to political ascendancy last year as if it were a paragon of virtue. There was, and is, no sign of criminal proceedings
for corruption against Haughey, Burke, Lowry, O’Brien, the Bailey Brothers or Liam Lawlor. Michael Lowry, Ray Burke, Ivor Callely, George Redmond, Liam Cosgrave Jnr, Frank Dunlop – that galaxy of unworthiness – all retain their government pensions. Government promises to address Mahon recommendations and seek prosecutions are as tenuous as the forgotten pledges it gave after Moriarty.
Village likes to look at human progress in terms of four spheres that comprise human activity – economic, social, environmental and cultural. On probably all, certainly on three, we live in a corrupt society, morally and often legally.
Economically, Ireland Inc (that well-worn if emasculated phrase!) turns out to believe in bailing out people who were paid excessively for taking risks and then avoided responsibility when the risks went wrong. This reveals as insincere the very premise of the capitalism it purported to believe in. In this respect if you have to do capitalism, it is better to do it the US way with competition and swift criminal penalties for dishonesty.
In Ireland, we failed to regulate, even to maintain functioning capitalism, let alone to facilitate an equal and sustainable society. And from the
Beef Tribunal to the Moriarty Tribunal to the Planning Tribunal and various insipid banking inquiries as well as in cases involving insider trading, public tendering and the whole planning process, it is clear that there is widespread red- toothed corruption tainting important sectors of our economy and reaching right to the top; as well as ubiquitous ‘trading in influence’.
During the boom all the main parties promoted or went along with a tax-reducing, officiary-over- remunerating agenda and the now-ruling parties supported insane stamp-duty reductions. If not corrupt this was at least unfair and reckless. The biggest recent instances of economic corruption are repaying largely foreign plutocrats with their unsecured bonds and Nama‘s decision in most cases to retrieve not the original value of loans, but the haircut price it paid, so losing the potential upside benefit to the taxpayer; and revealing it as sustaining burnt-out speculators when we were expressly promised it would not. Predictably too, NAMA pays some of them up to €200,000 a year to run their troubled companies.
Socially, budgetary policy favours expenditure cuts which affect the poorest most and taxation policy favours the rich. Even during the boom we had very low public expenditure relative to income, leading to unnecessarily poor public services and quality of life. During the boom there were famously more Irish golf courses than playgrounds (the Great Recession will have taken care of more of the former than the latter). and there is a certain corruption in the structuring of society to suit the rich and make equality between people, who are equal moral agents, impossible. The CSO recently showed that the average income of those in the top 20 per cent of the population was 51⁄2 times higher than the average of those in the poor- est 20 per cent. a year earlier it had been just 4.3 times higher. The Gini coefficient which measures income inequality more comprehensively was .34 in 2010, a disimprovement from .299 in 2009 (when Sweden’s, for example, was .23). much other corruption derives from this social inequality. and as for the left campaigning against the idea of property taxes, this magazine despairs.
Environmentally, during the boom we had the highest resource-use per capita in the eU and the second-highest green- house gas emissions in the EU after
Luxembourg. Though emissions have dropped from 18 to 14 tonnes per capita this is due to the economic fiasco not good administration. Ireland has played the fullest role in international climate crimes.
Our water quality should be excellent due to demography and geography. In fact e coli levels in Ireland are seven times those of Northern Ireland and 28 times those of england and Wales (and our chosen antidote of chlorination now offers carcinogenic Thms in the drinking water of an extraordinary – and unknowing – 600,000
citizens). yet septic-tank inspections, mandated by the eU were recently described by protesters from Galway West, as “an injustice to rural people . . . an insult”. and environment minister, Phil Hogan, recently boasted that the new septic tank inspection regime would cover only ten per cent of houses near rivers and lakes. The debate on septic tanks proceeds on the basis that there is no value to the public in clean water. It is left to the eU to see the policy point; and the public interest.
We never had the appetite for good planning. The National Spatial Strategy was deliberately made toothless. and local authorities ignore it – as well as their own local plans, allowing Dublin for example to sprawl into surrounding counties; while cities and towns outside Greater Dublin languish. around 50% of the State’s housing output is built in the least sustainable form – one-off. Since 2001, 170,000 new one-off houses have been permitted in Ireland. Despite this there is a conspiracy to make out that the national spatial problem is the difficulty of obtaining permissions for one-off houses.
We have failed to learn the lessons of the planning Tribunal which have been evident for a decade and a half. While codes of conduct and legislation aimed at curbing corruption are in place for public representatives and officials, there appears to be little understanding and repeated transgression of the codes at national and local level.
politicians have not learnt the clear lesson that Development and other plans need to be assessed quasi-judicially, at the time of creation, for compliance with the National Spatial Strategy. Mahon recommends this only for decisions that counter
managements’ advice. In local government, the risk of fraud and corruption is particularly acute, heightened by the lack of adequate safeguards not just against planning corruption, but against false accounting, misuse of resources, influence-selling and fraud also.
Culturally, our contemporary artists have not held a mirror to our corrupt society. Too few of them have made targets of our ruling elite, too many of them seek the company of the wealthy and the corrupt. Ireland is the capital of the boy band and eurotrash. Colm Tóibín’s celebration of Michael Fingleton, Bono’s exaltation of capitalism and cultivation of Blair, Bush and Ahern, Seamus Heaney’s attendance at a Denis O’Brien dinner find no parallels in the worlds of Joyce, Beckett or Yeats. Aosdána is the smuggest colloquium in cultural history. Jedward.
Transparency International’s Corruption perceptions Index 2011 shows that Ireland’s ranking has fallen recently and it now compares poorly to other northern European nations. Ireland ranks 19 out of 183 countries with a score of 7.5 out of ten, down from 8 in 2010. The cul- ture of this country facilitates influence-selling and is indulgent of corruption, even in high places. That the national edifice should have collapsed was inevitable.
It is this infection mixed with a largely unadul- terated celebration of greed, rather than our mere, derivative, fiscal come-uppance and debt, that will keep this country down for a generation. Greed and Corruption are each rooted in base deference to money and self, rather than the public interest.
Without a change in culture we are doomed.

Irrational hope is the mortal enemy of resolve, as it blindsides us to our existential predicament. By John Gibbons

Is it a biscuit? Or is it a bar? Does the convergence of a range of environmental, energy and resource crises compound a problem – or a predicament? The question is neither trite nor trivial.

For the last several decades, environmentalists and scientists alike have attempted to frame our ever-intensifying ecological crises in terms of problems that, through a combination of better technology and increased efficiency, could be managed successfully. Hence the oxymoronic ‘green growth’ and ‘sustainable development’.

Self-help books along the lines of 50 ways to save the planet sell alongside volumes on everything from homeopathy and astrology. As long as we define our existential crux in terms of a series of problems that can be managed, this is a perfectly rational approach.

In a crisis, being able to distinguish between a problem and a predicament can mean the difference between life and death. In simple terms, problems have solutions, predicaments have outcomes.

“When faced with a predicament, seeking a solution isn’t just a useless thing to do; it is the wrong thing to do”, argues Chris Martenson, author of The Crash Course. Critical time and resources “should be devoted to managing the outcome, not trying to do the impossible… by failing to appreciate the nature of our collective predicament, we place ourselves at greater risk, because, if we dither, less time and fewer options remain.”

The sinking of the Costa Concordia in January is a case in point. The failure of the captain and senior crew to recognise their predicament (i.e. this ship has a giant hole in it) led to fatal delays in evacuating the vessel. Time that might have been spent getting people to safety was instead frittered away in fruitless discussions between the ship’s crew and its owners. Given the botched evacuation, had this disaster happened further from the shore, the death toll could have run into thousands.

All of which brings us to where we now find ourselves. Unsurprisingly, the world has arrived at precisely the position projected by scientists as far back as the late 1950s, and now realised beyond any reasonable doubt: Earth is being rapidly forced into a new, hotter, state.

A massive energy imbalance has been accumulating for decades, like a giant rubber band being stretched ever further. System inertia means that, in the shorter terms, these effects are dampened. At a certain point, however, the system either snaps entirely or recoils with a wallop. When that precise moment will occur is impossible to predict; that it will occur is a mathematical certainty.

What that will mean for those of us living in the era of environmental consequences is difficult to predict accurately; we do know it will be deeply unpleasant and quite irreversible. The fuse that is lit and is now fizzing towards the keg is atmospheric CO2. When instrumental measurement of global atmospheric carbon dioxide began back in 1958, CO2 levels stood at 315 parts per million (ppm). By 2011, levels had climbed to 392ppm – that’s an astonishing 25 per cent rise in a little over 50 years. In Earth’s history, only rare events on

the scale of meteor impacts have so profoundly altered the composition of the atmosphere in such a short time.

These CO2 levels are now higher than at any time in at least the last three million years, and the needle is climbing fast.

On the other hand, the freight train that is industrial civilisation needs to run at ever-increasing speeds, burning ever more resources and spewing out ever more pollution – simply to stave off economic collapse. That’s the predicament. All the wishful green thinking and lightbulb-changing in the world counts for naught when set against these realities.

April marks the centenary of another famous sinking, that of RMS ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It remains a potent metaphor for hubris and nemesis, and an apposite reminder of the hazards of melting ice.

In that disaster, to save lives, passengers and crew alike had first to accept the painful fact of their predicament, and then abandon ship. To save lives, we must first kill hope, for hope is the mortal enemy of resolve, holding out the chimera of easy fixes to our fathomless predicament.

The battle to ‘save the environment’ has ended. The long campaign to save our own skins has now begun in earnest.

John Gibbons is a specialist environmental writer and commentator and is online