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In Defence of Michael McDowell (Kind Of)
Read more about: Crime, Dublin
There are three issues guaranteed to make people care about who wins the next General Election: tax, immigration and crime. Fianna Fail are pretty tight on the financial stuff – while our taxes are high not that many people are complaining and the economy is buoyant (for now) so the majority of voters tend to be more worried about famously high socialist taxes if Labour take power than they are about the personal economic impact of continued Fianna Fail government. All parties are vying for the label of “most subtlety xenophobic and racist” on the immigration front and unfortunately all proving quite successful at that venture. However it is the arena of law and order that is most exercising our politicians at the moment, not least because of the unfortunate incidents of the last few weeks and the evocative character of the Minister for Justice (he’s one of those ‘you either hate him or love him’ types. I fall into the former, by the way).
Anyone who falls into the second camp would have spent most of the last few weeks foaming at the mouth at McDowell’s conduct and media coverage. A few weeks ago for example the Sunday Tribune had extensive coverage of his tenure as Minister for Justice which seemed saturated with news of his ‘failures’ relating to the Criminal Justice Bill (pretty valid criticism). This week’s Village Magazine is similarly critical. All of this tops of a few weeks of intense coverage for our camera-loving Minister who seems to relish the cut and thrust of intense political debate, particularly when it’s as Gaeilge or on radio chat shows. Micheal bocht is getting the proverbial kicked out of him right now but, much as I hate to say so and with the exception of his disgraceful behaviour towards members of the opposition, it’s all somewhat unfair.
Gangland criminality is growing in Ireland and with it comes all the hall marks of violence: firearms, execution-style killings and sensationalist media coverage. In addition, in true Irish style, we find someone to blame and that person, for now, is Michael McDowell. While I secretly relish reading column inches slating the man I can’t help but worry that our rush to demonise the most demonic of the Ministers carries with it hidden dangers; what happens after McDowell? (Otherwise known as ‘the end of history’?). The only response the Minister can make to the criticisms being levied at him is to “get tough” on crime (as the Taoiseach advocates) but long after this media brouhaha has passed the tough laws will still be there and, I’ll wager, gangland criminality will be more widespread than ever.
Much as those of us who have spent the better part of our adult lives with noses in the statute books would like to think so, laws do not deter crime. There are only three things that deter crime: personal morality, sufficiency of resources and opportunity, and fear of getting caught. Longer sentences and higher fines are exceptionally unlikely to work, especially as the people caught and punished are normally the lackeys as opposed to the big boys who wouldn’t deign to get their hands dirty actually commissioning crimes. Instead those people are doing what our justice system should be doing: investing in resources.
As the criminals’ technology and techniques get more sophisticated our ‘laws’ get tougher, our periods of detention without charge get longer, our Special Criminal Court gets busier and our streets get more dangerous. We have to stop responding to crime with tough words and draconian laws and longer sentences that we can’t afford to enforce and which we know don’t work anyway. Instead we need to focus on detection and, most importantly, prevention of crime. Let’s not kid ourselves – the vast majority of contemporary crime concerns drugs – drug running, drug taking, and drug selling. Therefore the key to solving our crime crisis is to solve our drugs crisis. How? Urban rejuvenation, rural rejuvenation, education, opportunity, alternatives, social responsibility, familial responsibility, jobs, hope.
As long as people remain poor and hopeless and rich and feckless drugs will continue to be the cancer that eats away at contemporary society and criminals will continue to rule our cities and, shortly, our byways as well. But no politician is ever going to propose the kind of programme we really need to eliminate this scourge – it costs too much, takes too long, carries too much risk and, worst of all, makes them look soft on crime.
Everybody knows that kind of plan would never get you elected.
[A modified version of this post was originally published on Mental Meanderings]
Fiona,
I have to question your assertion that in Ireland under the current government ‘our taxes are high’.
Estimated gross current expenditure by government for 2005 was 33% of our GNP of €122.5 billion, with exchequer capital spending of 6.4% bringing total government expenditure to 39.4% of GNP. Taxes and PRSI type income was just 34.6% of GNP and total government revenues were only 36.9% of GNP. The National Debt at end 2004 was a paltry 30.7% of GNP, and net receipts from the EU amounted to only 0.6% of our GNP. (These percentages would be even smaller if based on GDP but using GNP is the more honest measure.)
In comparison to which countries is Ireland a high tax economy?
ya i have to agree. the only thing high is vat
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/933
I mean that most people, when they receive their pay slip, look at their tax paid and think ‘ouch’, in other words that experientially taxes are high, as opposed to them being high from a comparative perspective. The tax point is not the main point of the article of course
Hi Fiona,
Gotcha!
My figures by the way are from the April 2005 Budgetary and Economic Statistics of the Dept of Finance.
I just had to challenge the accuracy of the phrase you had used because I knew it was not defensible and that you would not want your academic reputation sullied by my letting the phrase stand.
Incomes in the public sector are quite high. Many people may see the size of the tax they pay without recognising that their entire pay comes out of other peoples’s taxes in the first place.
I’ll read the rest of the article again now that we’ve got that straight
I am a bit of a fan of McDowell. His Citizenship Referendum evidently met with overwhelming support - including from me. Immigration-control is the “policy that dare not speak its name” in Dail Eireann. But it is popular with the public and that is what should matter. I strongly supported Pat Rabbitte’s recent expressions of concern on the issue of exploitation, displacement, and the general point he made on Questions and Answers about how immigration into a country of 4 million is not the same as immigration into a vast country like the US. The furore in the media about his “40 million Poles” remarks smacks of P.C. gone mad to me. Is this or is this not the actual number of Poles, or thereabouts? The answer is yes. The question is indeed whether we should have an “endless supply of cheap labour”. I believe we should not. We should not have to become a minority in our own country just to prove we are not racist.
That is not to say we should have no immigrants. Indeed some will be needed. But amidst all the propaganda from liberal economic think-tanks about out “need” for immigrants to keep the economy growing “at a reasonable level”, we need to see through this fog. The truth is that the supposed “need” for 50,000 immigrants a year is based on the idea of attaining 6% economic growth per annum. Now considering that even the UK is only forecast to grow around 2.5% in 2006, I think that they might have a different definition of what is “reasonable” than some Irish economists. Immigration is fuelling a construction boom but in doing so, it is exacerbating an existing overdependence on the construction industry - which already employs 1 in 5 of us - as immigrants need housing. Property prices are projected to grow 7% this year, meaning that the long-suffering young couples trying to buy a house are going to have an even harder time. If this rate of immigration continues, the housing prices will eventually reach a level so high than a large collapse in demand follows, resulting in potentially hundreds of thousands of construction jobs being lost.
As such, I would contend that we should aim for sustainable growth rather than just maximum-growth. The danger of a policy of maximising economic growth is that it will grow the housing-bubble too fast and it will burst, leading to a recession that could last years. And in that recession, who will keep their jobs? Cheap immigration labour from Latvia (average wage $3355 per annum) or Irish workers? Would it not be better to impose an annual quota on immigration so as to aim for sustainable growth of say 4% rather than dogmatically insisting on 6%? Demand is what is fuelling house prices and making it impossible for many to buy a house.
On the Goebbels remarks, I think McDowell blew his fuse but we all do that occasionally. A internal FF poll according to Phoenix magazine shows McDowell topping the poll in Dublin SE, followed by Gormley and Chris Andrews. So he is obviously doing something right. I cannot help feeling - especially given the relentless criticism he is subjected to in the media - especially Village magazine - that the print media - most of which opposed the Citizenship referendum - have a vendetta against him. His plans for a Garda reserve are correct and could have freed up Gardai from desk duties to deal with the Dublin riots. He is one of very few politicians in Leinster House to take some account of public opinion and I salute him for that, even if certain vested interests don’t.
Fiona
I wouldn’t have backed off your tax point quite so fast. Frank is right that calculated at the national level, the tax-take in the republic is low when compared to other countries. But our rates of income tax are relatively high — this is the ouch factor. Consider the upper tax band is 42%, and this is hit at 33,000/year. Recent CSO stats show that the average weekly inustrial wage is about 589 euro, which is annual salary of about 31,000 euro. So someone just above the average is already seeing nearly half of additional income go in taxation. Simon also notes the high VAT. The issue is that the tax base is very narrow, because there are large number of exemptions and allowances for non-PAYE income.
P.
All fair points, but you fail to also point out the redistributive and incentive receipts that the ‘average’ industrial wage PAYE worker enjoys, to be reckoned against what s/he pays in direct taxes and contributions from the monthly or weekly income - mortgage interest tax relief, child benefit, maternity benefit, tax relief on private pension contributions and health insurance premiums, for example.
I think that arguing about whether are taxes are high are not misses the point. What matters is whether people believe taxes are high or not and the major factor in determining that, is whether or not the can afford to pay for the things that they want.
Perception is everything. That’s why God invented spin- doctors.
Michael McDowell said he ‘believed’ that Richard Bruton was the … Goebbels of …
Didn’t make it so.
True.
Ricky Bruton isn’t a Nazi, but if most people believed that he was, I couldn’t see him winning re-election.
Niall,
I come from the lower end of the income scale, and got my third level education as a mature student during my time of emigration in the UK. I have been more familiar with the problem of the very low income levels at which taxes and PRSI contributions started being deducted n the past, and the paradoxical situation of working full-time but not taking home enough to pay the rent on a substandard flat in a converted Victorian property. From my perspective the important facts are
1. the minimum wage, which is set at a realistic level;
2. the starting point of income tax deduction means the full-time worker on minimum wage has enough earnings to live independently;
3. the benefit system is oriented to supporting not discouraging citizens’ flexible engagement and progression in the workforce, to achieve self-reliance.
When I was in the UK, 1980-1993, this country wasn’t producing the kinds of jobs that Irish people coming out of education felt like sticking around for, and research found that they and their children fared better overseas than they did at home. The majority of people (FF, FG, Lab) believe in the overall approach this government has taken to make the Irish people independent in fact and not just in word. All the public investment being made in education, health, infrastructure and good administration, and the redistributions to our older and less able kin, are the sine qua non of the buoyant levels of real income increases experienced by us all over the past decade.
There are dangers, of course. At the moment the demographics mean the public finances have fewer pensioners to support than other countries have. And there are constant warnngs of property bubbles. An economy is built on confidence and the taking of calculated risks. That is as much the case with investment of public money and personal time in education as it is with the prices people pay for houses and shops. They do it because they believe it will pay them back by enhancing their future earning potential. I believe that what riles taxpayers is not so much the visible deductions from their pay packages — you can’t have one without the other, really — as the perception of arrogance and incompetent management of the public finances.
Frank, I’d probably agree with you, at least for the most part.
I think that we need to take into consideration a few unusual factors that will play a role in determining whether or not taxation becomes an election issue. For example, SSIAs. When the SSIAs have matured, a large part of the country will be feeling rather rich, because they will be able to pay for things like houses, cars, holidays and other luxury items. SSIA holders, and there are a lot of them, will probably be less concerned about taxation than they might have been under other circumstances.
Second, those who use certain public services tend to come from particular sectors of society. Our health service might be in a terrible state, but there is a significant portion of the population who have no use for the health service and would not be willing to pay extra tax in order to “fix” it. The same could be said of education, roads and childcare.
Can I just say how fascinated I am that this thread has turned on the almost throwaway tax comment and we’ve pretty much ignored thinking about our pseudo-freudian need for a ‘harm man’ on law and order?
Hi Fiona,
I was waiting for someone else to deconstruct that bit
Is it UCD or Griffith College, BTW? Sorry if I got that wrong.
*That previos comment should say h a r d m a n as opposed to ‘harm man’ LOL
Have put correction in comments to your post Frank
Fiona, I find it hard to take Micky serious as a hardman. Let’s face it, he is only doing the same things that every Minister for Justice says, just louder and more often. If I was looking for a hardman on crime, I’d be voting for Gerry Adams.
I (sort of) agree with you on what is needed
to tackle crime and why it won’t happen, but I don’t see drugs as being the cause, rather the form that the cause takes. If it wasn’t drugs, it would be something else. Legalising drugs would not solve the crime problem (though I want to see drugs legalised).
The fact is that any psychologist would tell you that tougher sentences don’t work, and while having better detection would help, any ABA therapist will tell you that the key to eliminating delinquent behaviour is the differential reinforcement of alternative and incompatible behaviours.
That is what are prisons should be for. Criminals should go in, and they should stay in, until violent and criminal behaviours have been removed from their behaviour repetorie. If that takes a couple of weeks, then fine. If it takes a lifetime, fine.
Of course, then we have Joe Duffy and the Liveline listeners who make such a system impossible. They want to see criminals suffer and ignore any arguments about actually addressing the causes of crime. Remember the outraged voices who argued (and I use the term loosely) against prisoners being paid for their work? Those are the kind of people that Micky Dougal appeals to. Micky promises to get “tough” on criminals and they feel a little better.
Fiona,
‘how fascinated I am that this thread has turned on the almost throwaway tax comment’
You’re in the company of briliant minds on IrishElection.com, you know. We like to challenge.
I’ll update the references to your educational activities.
Hope you’re sleeping better now!
Frank,
Like you I spent a long time in UK, from 1975 to November 2005. This means that I don’t feel myself able to comment much on what Ireland is like yet. But one thing you said struck a chord with me: “arrogance and incompetent management of the public finances.”
Everything seems so raw to me. The A&E situation being so “third world” in a country where there is so much money swilling around. The number of reviews and tribunals which seem to facilitate the continuation of the status quo. The daily revelations about bribery of politicians. The revelations about how important public figures, like directors of AIB, set out to line their own pockets.
People seems to have become used to all the revelations. It’s old hat, people tell me.
The crudity of public discourse by the minister.
It feels to me as if it will take at least a generation for decent standards of accountability and ethics to prevail. Meanwhile, at least entrepreneurial activity flourishes.
I’m exaggerating (because it is too hard to put my finger on what I sense exactly) but isn’t this a Wild West country? Great vigour, energy. Great sucking in of people from other places. A lot of can-do culture dominating the free enterprise sector. Meanwhile, daily scandals in Health (not just A&E, but mental health provision and care of elderly too) and amusing scandalous inefficiency in public service.
I keep thinking that this used to be a society where the roman catholic church used to dominate everything, used to be in charge of schools, hospitals and all debate about ethics. So maybe we now live in a society which is in transition, a painful transition to post-catholicism. In such a society we will need strong interest groups, like a group to campaign for access to our countryside, so that we can walk freely over the land, despite private ownership.
I better return to the minister. He’s certainly good at getting publicity. But is he any good at engaging the intellect and creativity of the society? I keep waiting for evidence that he is remarkable. Maybe he is, in that he stands out and the others…?
Perhaps I should stay on in Ireland for a while to see how things pan out?
Paul,
I think you’ve summarised it quite well. I’ll try to give my thoughts at more length later. One point now, though, we are a state where the people are sovereign, not the sovereign, the Pope, the aristoccrats or the experts. That is the essence of republicanism as I understand the political philosophy.
Paul,
It feels too early in the year to be spilling the beans on the nature of contemporary Irish society, but there may be elements of the Wild West about it sometimes and in some places.
My blog is called the Land Of Ireland because that is all we have to win our existence and survival from. At independence we didn’t have coal and steel when coal and steel were worth having. We didn’t have agriculture on a scale to match American cattle ranches and grain growers. We had an agricultural subsistence economy and we exported our best food and our landless peasants to labour in foreign industrial economies.
If you accept the argument that land reform from about 1880 onwards was the fundamental emancipatory change in Irish society, and that our society remains broadly balanced between urban and rural dwellers, you would begin to understand that transferring a British right to roam ethos to Ireland is not much of a starter. Firstly, because the pattern of land ownership is quite different here and secondly because we actually have a good level of access through open wilderness areas without having to score political or class war points by making an issue of it, though that doesn’t deter some people.
The feverish entrepreneurial pace is all we have. We are a location for high-value investment, and we are a good country to live in. True, there are no money trees growing here, but I feel safer in Brian Cowen’s hands than I would in Gordon Brown’s. He won’t even let Northern Ireland have a reduced rate of company taxation that would let its economy start catching up with ours. Stick around Paul. It only took me ten years to start understanding that in Ireland we get along by finding others that we can identify with, we get into step with whoever we can, and wonder what’s going to come along next.
But we prefer not to sped endless hours talking about how we feel about things. We decide what we’re going to do, and we do it.
“If you accept the argument that land reform from about 1880 onwards was the fundamental emancipatory change in Irish society, and that our society remains broadly balanced between urban and rural dwellers, you would begin to understand that transferring a British right to roam ethos to Ireland is not much of a starter….”
I better say I don’t accept that argument at all. You go too far in saying the land reform was “the” emancipatory change. It was very important, I agree. But there were other important changes, like the rise to power of the roman catholic church, like the rise of Sinn Fein. Also, I’m not convinced that land reform emancipated anyone. I’m not even sure I know what emancipation means.
As for whether or not it is on the card to win a right to roam in Ireland, you are probably right. I don’t see any organisation equivalent to the Ramblers Association. I don’t see any tradition of Irish civil society organising itself to win such rights. Walkers are probably unorganised and almost incapable of organisation due to their inexperience of asserting themselves as an interest group.
On that score, I am inclined to predict that it will be farmers’ own self interest that most promotes increased access to the countryside. They are all so old and running out of economic prospects that they might be inspired into some new thinking: they might be coaxed into building up something for tourist walkers.
You shock me completely when you say that there is a “good level of access throught open winderness areas…” It is shocking that there is so little easy access to cross country walking. The UK is so brilliant in this respect. There is hardly anywhere you can go without seeing a stile and a sign showing a right of way over farmland. Bridleways too.
I’ve found a lot more to Ireland than the entrepreneurisl pace. In fact, things seem to move quite slowly here. Endless reviews, tribunals, planning applications… I agree with you that it is a good country to live in. Compared with where? A bit of benchmarking on quality of life wouldn’t go amiss.
Thanks for the invitation to stick around. We’ll see. I live each day as if it was on trial for its life.
I’ve picked up quite a bit of impressions from people who blog that Irish men don’t feel comfortable talking about their feelings. You seem to suggest that Irish people decide on action and do it. When exactly do consider they give vent to their feelings? I’ll probably carry on my own style because it’s taken my quite a while to develop it.