Irish Election - Coverage of Irish Politics, News and Current Affairs

Ivor Callely resigned from Fianna Fail before his party had a chance to deliver a verdict of ‘conduct unbecoming’ upon him. But he will remain a member of Seanad Eireann until its term expires because there is no mechanism whereby his peers can give him the boot. The Seanad Committee investigating the various controversies surrounding Ivor’s expense claims can’t go beyond 30 days suspension if, in their opinion, Ivor’s explanations fall short.

Ivor was appointed to the Seanad by Bertie Ahern as some sort of inexplicable ‘consolation prize’ following the loss of his Dublin North Central Dail seat in the 2007 general election. Thus, you might think there would be some sort of mechanism in place for the current Taoiseach to tell him to pack his bags and get lost. There isn’t.

Continue reading ‘The Lucky 11’ »

The latest NAMA loan transfer data – completion of “Tranche 2″ with Anglo loans — is out.  The discount on the Anglo loans is 62 percent.  Bloomberg News had a good quality leak over the weekend.  Since the discount includes the “long-term economic value” that NAMA adds to each loan, the implied value of the underlying loans is even lower.  These loans are worth about a quarter of their face value. 

Also illuminating is NAMA’s consolidated data for all the loans taken so far.  Anglo accounts for nearly half of the total and a huge majority of the number of loans: 1100 loans out of 1800 in Tranche 1 and 1200 out of 1800 in Tranche 2.  In other words, all this effort to extract and value thousands of Anglo loans, as opposed to sending new people into Anglo to do it.  And the Anglo restructuring plan already envisages that part of it will be left as a bad bank so Anglo is going to need those skills anyway.  So Anglo will spawn 2 bad banks — its own, and NAMA.   As the price tag for Anglo goes up and up, the policy makes less and less sense.

Minister engages in excessive expenditure for private jet citing pressures of schedule and lack of commercial options to attend an event.  Resulting public outcry causes minister to resign before he is sacked.

It’s France, last month, when the aid minister Alain Joyandet chartered a jet to go a donors conference for Haiti — conveniently located in Martinique.  Now it cost somewhat more than Noel Dempsey’s outing but the principle is the same.  The apparent difference: Joyandet’s superiors — the President and Prime Minister — have some sense of when gratuitous waste occurred and they got shown up by it.  That ain’t Ireland.

Central Bank board member* David Begg reviews Peader Kirby’s book on the collapse of the Celtic Tiger –

It cannot be gainsaid that the social outcomes were less than were hoped for but the last agreement, Towards 2016, was the closest we have ever come to a social democratic programme in this country. This collapsed in December 2009 and it may be that, like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun in our aspirations.

Social democracy without a social democratic party in government, and in the era when we now recognize that the seeds of a very capitalist crisis were being sown?  But anyway, here’s the text of Towards 2016.  Begg can certainly claim that it doesn’t reflect an emphasis on tax cuts, notwithstanding the many references to “competitiveness”.  Nevertheless, it does read like a document that was written before its real make-or-break element — the size of the the national pay increases — was determined, and it certainly was oblivious to the disaster building up in the financial sector, notwithstanding one reference to the risk of a property crash.  But does it deserve the burden that Begg places on it?

*also general secretary of the ICTU.

Shortly after he was made leader of the Labour Party in 2007, Eamon Gilmore promised to increase his party’s Dail representation to 48 seats or more in the next general election. Refusing to bow to the ‘two and a half party’ political culture, with Labour permanently designated as the half party, he vowed to change the face of Irish politics.

Pundits may have raised their eyebrows and privately scoffed at such delusions of political grandeur, but the surge in support to Labour in recent polls has caused them pause for thought.

Continue reading ‘Eamon Gilmore – Fifty seats well within his grasp?’ »

A little Saturday puzzler.  One likes to believe that the annual report of a financial organisation provides a somewhat comprehensive description of its activities and accounts.  With that in mind, consider the following: Where in the 2009 annual report of the Central Bank of Ireland is there a discussion of its approximately €10 billion loan to Anglo-Irish Bank, a loan which has been subject to the same assurance (“backed by quality assets”) as the guarantee was?

Continue reading ‘Who’s getting Anglo’s €22 billion?’ »

It’s all there in black and white and makes for fascinating reading: http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/Committees30thDail/PAC/Reports/document1.htm

No doubt the material will be filleted for gems that support political partisanship of one flavour or another, but for the ordinary concerned citizen, it’s worth skimming through the lot to get a flavour of what was influencing policy decisions at that time. Continue reading ‘The banks were bust – they just didn’t spot it.’ »

Just what is Michael Noonan trying to tell us?

Fine Gael’s new Finance spokesperson is reported to have told a radio station that, in his opinion, ‘New ERA’, FG’s €18bn centre piece programme to revive the Irish economy, will not create the 105,000 new jobs that is its headline promise.

The 105,000 new jobs number may have been the product of some over-enthusiastic PR people, the FG Finance spokesperson said, in the process making his party leader, who trumpeted the 105,000 jobs promise in his Party Conference address last March, look ridiculous. Continue reading ‘Fine Gael’s New ERA – 105,000 new jobs and counting…’ »

From the just released IMF annual surveillance report on Ireland –

The authorities agreed that property taxation would also help broaden the tax base while at the same time making it more stable than the current system of stamp duties. In the transition to a valuation-based tax, a flat tax rate is under consideration.

If you haven’t done the valuation work, then a “flat” tax can only mean some kind of levy per house.  A poll tax done as a house tax.  Is this what the government meant to communicate?

Incidentally, the IMF team also sought to disabuse the government of the notion that NAMA could somehow “time” the property market.  It is too big to time the market.  It is the market.   It will have to start selling some properties, soon.  No doubt there are more nuggets buried in this report.

UPDATE 22 JULY — Irish Times

While neither a property tax nor water charges are likely to be announced in the budget, there remains a possibility that the Government may impose some indirect taxes in the form of a flat-rate household service charge. While politically unpopular, this might be explored.

You read it here first.  The government is thinking about a community charge or poll tax.  Thatcherism how are ya?

It’s worth looking at this Bloomberg News interview with Brian Cowen.  Although Bloomberg was in some ways going along with the hype surrounding Cowen’s visit — “Ireland primes the pump” — the charts flashed during the interview told their own story.  More importantly, the interviewer extracted an acknowledgement from Cowen that AIB will almost certainly need more state equity to be recapitalized: “the other one [AIB] may require some help and we will provide that”.  AIB’s current market value is less than 1 billion euro, a bit of context for whatever multi-billion euro sum is sprung on us between now and the end of the year.   Of course the new EU stress tests, coming later this month, could upset even that calculation.  At least, from the government’s perspective, it’s 12 weeks before the Dail gets to discuss any of this.

In a week when the use of forged documentation in the asylum-system was highlighted with the rejection by the Supreme Court of the appeal of Nigerian asylum-seeker Pamela Izevbekhai against her deportation, FG and Labour are proposing the allow asylum-seekers to work. Despite 13% unemployment and mass-emigration – Alan Shatter and Pat Rabbitte are now arguing for the right of asylum-seekers to employment to be restored.

Mr Shatter said in circumstances where there are 450,000 unemployed people in Ireland providing access to employment for asylum seekers was a difficult issue. But he said condemning people to a situation where they cannot work for four or five years was wrong. He said access to the jobs market should be considered in a way that would be appropriate in the current economic climate. Labour justice spokesman Pat Rabbitte said that incarcerating people in direct provision with nothing to do for years was a disgrace. He said the correct thing to do was to enable quicker decisions to be taken on people’s asylum cases and change the situation with regard to the right to work for asylum seekers.

Continue reading ‘FG-Labour: Let asylum-seekers work’ »

Brian Cowen, today presenting the awards for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence in the Public Service –

It will be a challenge, and equally an opportunity – an opportunity to dramatically accelerate the pace of change in the Public Service, to the benefit of all stakeholders. And an opportunity to ensure that the Public Service continues to contribute to our return to economic prosperity. These are opportunities that we need to embrace with, to borrow from Seamus Heaney, “a compound of energy and artifice”.

 Brian Cowen, giving one of his early-Taoiseach speeches to the Institute for Public Administration conference on “A Public Service for the Future: The OECD Challenge” (remember that?) in May 2008 –

I want the Irish Public Service to be an exemplar of success; ‘fit for purpose’, performance-focused, integrated, and citizen-centred.  Perhaps the most challenging of these attributes is ‘integrated’.  In the words of Séamus Heaney, I believe this will require ‘a compound of energy and artifice’.

 The man sure loves that Seamus Heaney quote.  At least when the topic is transforming the public service.

More seriously, at which speech did he announce that his task force on transforming the public service had hit the ground running so well that it had already had its first meeting?

Both of them.

So again the notion that we lack public representatives with the experience and talent to sort things out and how electoral reform might serve as a means to get us better TDs who could serve in government is raised today by Dr. Ed Walsh in the Irish Times. We’ve been here before of course, indeed I suspect I’ve made annual visits to this topic over the past 4 years and let’s face it many more people have been talking about it for much longer than that.

Continue reading ‘Ed Walsh, electoral reform and the talents of our pols.’ »

July 1st, 2010.  A momentous day for Ireland, and one that will be remembered in history for a long time to come.  Not as momentous as July 7th, 1993 perhaps, but astonishing that we’ve reached this point just 17 years after Mary Robinson signed into law the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Today, July 1st, 2010, Dáil Éireann will pass the Civil Partnership Bill 2009.  Once it gets through the Seanad (which will happen, though I suspect it’ll get ugly), same-sex couples will be recognised by the state at last.  It’s not marriage, but it’s certainly progress. Continue reading ‘Civil Partnership Bill passing through Dáil Éireann’ »

Wall Street Journal (possibly $ req’d) –

Things are clearly starting to look up,” says Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham, Ireland’s biggest independent stockbroker. “Assuming the euro-zone debt issue doesn’t turn into a full-blown crisis, Ireland should be roaring back up over the next 12 months, led by a strong export performance.”

So it’s New York Times versus Wall Street Journal, then. Continue reading ‘Fasten your seatbelts’ »

The Department of Finance has issued a somewhat cryptic Friday afternoon statement from the Minister concerning the European Central Bank’s legal opinion on his legislation to create a new Central Bank Commission to consolidate the functions of the McCreevy-Harney two-headed hydra that was our former CBFSAI.  Somewhat tellingly, the statement doesn’t provide a link to the ECB opinion (it’s here) and indicates that it’s no big deal. 

Continue reading ‘ECB puts a kitten among the pigeons’ »