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Michael Lowry
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Fintan O’Toole lays into Michael Lowry in the Irish Times today.
Michael Lowry is a cheat and a liar. He entered public life and rose to the highest level of public trust as a member of the cabinet but showed utter contempt both for the law and for his social obligations. Over a decade ago now, Mr Justice Brian McCracken pointed out the appalling damage done by “the public perception that a person in the position of a government minister and member of cabinet was able to ignore, and indeed cynically evade, both the taxation and exchange control laws of the State with impunity”.
Many people wonder why time and time again Michael Lowry gets elected topping the poll. When people know the extent of what he has done.
In Ireland the Dail is not seen as the debating chamber that it is constitutionally. The Dail gets very little input into legislation, the legislator is king. So that scenario the life of a TD is to become a super -councillor. Petitioning all in sundry for medical cards and reduced prison sentences. For this role as super councillor. TD’s get paid about €100,000. Now some of them do very little others do a lot. Michael Lowry is the case of the Later. Ask anyone in North Tipperary and they will mention something that he had a hand in that benefited the locals greatly. Be it the rejuvenation of Semple Stadium to the Drainage scheme of the Mulchear river. Compared to the other TD’s from the constituency he is seen as the best TD.
So what about his massive Tax evasion? Well this has two aspects to it. One for a lot of people tax evasion certainly in the early 90s was acceptable. People thought” fair play to him for doing it I wish I could do it”. People paid plumbers and carpenters in cash. Did people say no I want to do this in a way to insure it was taxed? No of course not people in this country have always tried to evade tax. The scale of the crime does not matter. An awful lot people simply look at Michael Lowry’s crimes and think that he was harshly treated by Fine Gael to be tossed out by the party. All in an attempt to avoid Taxation. What Lowry did was little different then what the ordinary joe was doing. And then their is the other aspect the “because he’s worth it argument”
He was deemed to have worked hard for his TD’s Salery while other TD’s were deemed not to have. They were deemed to be getting their high salaries for nothing and if they are worth that then Lowry was worth more and that him taking more illegally was in a way fair. Look at Dail at any given day. It is usually empty. People say they don’t see their TD’s between elections are they deserving of taking their €100,000 a year salary.
Whether you agree with the actions of Michael Lowry and in the current climate I am not sure many do anymore. The fact remains he was a great servant to the people of North Tipperary in his role of Super-Councillor and that is why they re-elected him time and time again. That is why he was celebrated in the Ragg.
The question that North Tipp voters ask is which is more honest a hard Worker who earns their salary and evades tax or a someone who says they will work for you disappears for 5 years and earns their salary. And as Lowry Tops the poll each year you can guess the answer.
Michael Lowry is the typical local boy made good type. He’s not a particularly attractive character – putting it kindly,a wooden persona or perhaps a semi-refridgerated one?
He was no star parliamentarian. He made his maiden speech in the Dail, if I remember correctly, the day he was appointed a Minister by ‘his best friend, forever’ John Bruton. Anything he had to say after that in his brief Ministerial career amounted to set pieces penned for him by his civil servants. There was much speculation at the time in political circles, and outside, that the only reason Bruton had elevated Tipperary’s Finest to the Cabinet was because of the amount of money he had managed to raise for the party in donations. As for his imprint on Ireland Inc., I doubt anyone would remember the first thing about him – outside of Tipperary North that is – were it not for the Tribunals and their reports. One or two still to come that may have further details of interest about this man’s life and times, that is if you could work yourself up to take more than a fleeting interest in anything to do with Michael Lowry’s life and times, or Tribunals either for that matter.
So why is Fintan O’Toole in such a lather of moralistic fury about one of the most irrelevant politicians ever to grace the national stage in Ireland? The IT piece is way over the top in its claims for Lowry’s influence on our national psyche or anything much else nationally, except perhaps the standard of refrigeration units in Dunnes Stores grocery stores throughout the land. We wait to see if in fact he did anything untoward in the allocation of the second mobile licence, but publication of the relevant Tribunal Report appears to be held up for the moment unfortunately. So we may have a long wait.
Mr. O Toole’s morality appears highly selective at times. For the life of me, I’ve searched hard, but I can’t find a single article by him decrying, for instance, Labour’s secretive voting pact with Sinn Fein in the last Seanad elections, which elected Pearse Doherty to the Seanad and in turn ensured the election of a number of Labour Senators, especially Alex White, in July 2007. Now there’s one for examination, debate and discussion by such a heavyweight intellectual and political commentator on the theme of national political ethics. I’m sure he must have written about it. It can’t have passed him by. It was such a politically significant event with long term implications for the operation of our democracy, the left/right divide, the fudging of former paramilitary links of that party with the PIRA and so on; the first time a major Irish political party had engaged in such a national pact to give Sinn Fein a leg up and position them to take a Dail seat in Donegal in due course. I’m genuinely interested in his take on it. I would be grateful if someone could help me out by posting a link?
If not, no doubt he’ll be writing about it, if and when, as expected, Senator White takes his seat in the Dail after the Dublin South by-election in June.
Hi Veronica, I see where you’re coming from but I think that there is a massive difference in how two political parties enter into voting pacts (whatever your view on the parties involved) public or not, and a TD who has repeatedly bent the rules when it comes to paying taxes. Tax evasion is illeagal and tax avoidance by a public official is morally wrong.
The reason I suspect that Fintan is writing about Michael Lowry is that the upcoming tribunal report is going to be somewhat critical (to say the least) of the TD and Lowry informed his constituents this week that they should expect as much.
And Simon, while the Irish people seem to have a high tolerance for skulduggery by their politicians, especialy on a local level, it doesn’t by any means make it right. I suspect (unsubstantiable) that it harkens back generations when skipping on taxes was seen a snub to the British government, but with all the talk of the decimation of our health service and education system over the past decade, hopefully the penny will finally drop for Irish people when it comes to either a) waste in the spending of public money (i.e. our money!) and b) people who don’t pay tax.
Harry,
Right now, I don’t think people are all that worried about politicians who may have evaded their tax obligations in the past – we’ve all been assuming that they’ve all learned their lessons on that score from the experiences of Lowry, Burke and various Councillors who’ve been called to account for themselves in the Tribunals over the past ten years. What has the general public exercised and enraged is the salaries and perks of our public representatives which are way out of line with any comparably sized democracy in the world and their current reluctance to take a pay cut, give up unmerited pensions, stop pretending that they’re like civil servants and therefore entitled to pay increments because of their ‘experience’ when they have nothing in common with the average civil servant except being tied to a similar pay scale, their chagrin at any curtailment of their unvouched expenses for ‘attendance’ at their place of work, travel and overnight stipends etc.
Most of all, what is unacceptable is this cant and drivel being trotted out about it not being ‘legally possible’ to follow through on what was outlined in the Budget. I thought their main job was as a legislative assembly? That they exist to pass laws? So if it’s not legal currently to do the minimum required by public opinion then they can change the law to make it legal, can’t they? And if it requires a referendum, God help us, I don’t think they’d have much problem getting a 100% ‘Yes’ vote.
As for political morality, I see where you are coming from too and appreciate your point. But morality of the purest kind as exemplified by Mr. O’Toole is indivisible. You cannot separate the actions of some individuals as utterly immoral and reprehensible because you don’t like them while judging, or ignoring, the political actions of others, that also may have long term consequences for society, simply because you support their particular ideology. There’s a word for that: hypocrisy.
I’m really not sure Veronica how you come to that conclusion. A voting pact between a Sinn Féin which has signed up to numerous internationally validated agreements, disarmed and not merely taken the constitutional route but now is in government in the North and Labour seems to me to be fairly uncontroversial. Hardly much different say to the situation that was extant in the Free State (I’m using the historically accurate term, not intended as a pejorative) in the early 1930s when FF first entered government. Moreover you seem to dismiss the capacity for change. SF in 2007 was not SF in 1987. Indeed the very point of the Peace Process was to normalise politics on the island. If you consider the very minimal cooperation between SF and Labour anathema or morally repulsive one wonders how you could possibly tolerate the much greater compromises in the North between the DUP and before them the UUP and SF. And all this is to ignore firstly the reality that Labour as currently constituted is an amalgam of DL, which came from WP about which one need say little as regards its own particular history, and the LP. And beyond that the reality that all parties in this state either were founded in violent actions (including let’s be clear the Labour Party which can draw on a Citizens Army lineage) and have also made significant compromises, as with Fine Gael which entered government in the late 40s with a Clann na Poblachta that was arguably made up of the anti-Treaty Republican rejectionists who thought Dev was a soft sell-out.
Which seems to me to suggest that you’re invoking the thermonuclear option, rhetorically so to speak, because O’Toole critiques Lowry. Fair enough. Don’t quite get it though.
I’ve no difficulty with Mr. O’Toole or anyone else having a go at Lowry. But he’s a soft target and whatever else one might say about Mr. O’Toole’s column it was definitely over the top in ascribing to Lowry such influence over the development of the political culture of this state. Enough about Lowry.
The issue I raised is that O’Toole’s brand of political morality is indivisible. Yet it does not appear to apply to any actions by left-wing parties which remain curiously exempt from his scrutiny. The example I provided was the curious deal on the Seanad elections between Labour and Sinn Fein in July 2007, which one would have thought would have excited O’Toole’s interest. It appears not to have done so, in his columns at any rate, since no-one can unearth one for me and all my own searching has come to nought. I’m open to correction on that one and willing to take it all back – if anyone can unearth the column for me.
As Mr. O Toole would no doubt agree, what may be politically right for any party is not always morally right and is therefore open to scrutiny, debate and comment, or should be. By his very high standards, it should be. It’s perfectly obvious that if FF or FG had engaged in a similar deal with SF in the Seanad elections all the media moral Rumpelstiltskens in the land would have been leaping up and down in outrage and condemnation. And if this proposed arrangement was all such perfectly normal politics then why was it kept secret until the media got hold of it?
SF in 2007 were most definitely not SF/IRA of 1987, as SF in 2009 have moved on from where they were in 2007, which is all to the good and in the interests of us all as well as SF itself and its political prospects in the long run. But by the time of the 2007 general election the controversy about the murder of Robert McCartney was still at its height as was the furore over the Northern Bank robbery and a couple of other things that had motivated both FF and FG, well in advance of the general election, to rule out any prospect of relying on SF as a government partner or even of making any deal with them to provide votes to support whatever government might be in prospect after the election.
Labour’s then leader, Pat Rabbitte, also had form on decrying SF’s political modus operandi both North and South. For example, in his stance in 2002 in refusing permission to Joe Costello to travel as part of a proposed all party Oireachtas delegation to observe the trial of the so-called Colombia Three, an action that subsequently led SF Cllr Nicky Keogh in a letter to the newspapers to accuse Rabbitte of having joined the Unionist Party. Next came his speech in 2005 in which he directly warned against the type of community bullying by former IRA members in the North crossing the border into politics in the South. He was consistent in his critical stance on SF politics and in Labour having no truck with it right up to the 2007 general election, as exemplified in his numerous Dail and public statements on the McCartney murder and the Northern Bank robbery in which he emphasised that SF’s inadequate response to such examples of lawlessness and thuggery was what forced their exclusion from the normal political process. The SF/LP Seanad Pact therefore came as a bit of a shock to many in the senior ranks of the Labour Party when it was first revealed in the media, as it did to many ordinary members of the party.
Hopefully, this clarifies where I am coming from.
Incidently, on your point about SF being in government in Northern Ireland – so are most of the other parties under the existing power-sharing arrangements. Further, Northern Ireland is still part of the UK and is not a separate State. Ireland is an independent Republic with a written Constitution. There’s a world of a difference between the two.
It is a major factor of Irish political culture that most people vote for the TD that they think will best represent the interests of the constituency. TDs are not elected for their abilities to frame legislation or examine it or to control the Government ie. the executive side of the exercise of power.
I disaggree entirely with the statement that the “the legislator is king”.
Our government system does not have the full separation of powers between the legislative/representative assembly (Dail/Seanad) and the executive (Government/Rialtas). In fact all members of the Government have to be drawn from either the Dail or Seanad.
In this context, I draw your attention to the comment of a pre-revolutionary French political thinker “Where the exeuctive and legislative powers are united in the same person, there can be no liberty”
In our system, the Executive/Rialtas is in complete control. As we can see from events over the last 20 years, it is both out of control and incompetent. By getting the state into so much debt (first to property-based taxes and now to borrowing), they have limited our capacity to respond to current events.
It is all very well for Fintan O’Toole to vent his emotion on Michael Lowery and those who elect him. While this is both easy and necessary, it is hardly beyond a beginning. It does not offer any options on how to improve the way we govern ourselves. Fintan’s chosen role (and that of many others) is to remind us that we could do better, to suggest standards, to point out where things itch or grate badly – to put it mildly!
But that is not enough if we really want to limit the scope for the kind of excesses that commentators like to focus on.
We, as citizens in a Republic with a written constitution, have a lot of discussion and work to do if we want to ensure that we shift the kind of paradigms that Fintan has railed against.
The challenge to us all is best summarised by Madison, one of those who drew up the US Constitution.
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: first you must enable the government to control the governed and in the next place you must oblige it to control itself”
That article from Fintan brought all the usual cheerleaders and backslappers and all to no effect. I post this there as a counter point, not sure it would have been falling on appreciative ears.
“Wouldn’t it make far more sense to focus on the people who vote for him rather than this rather odd expectation that it is primarily or solely the responsibility of the so called great and good, whether it be Sean Kelly or Ivan Yates, to sort out the likes of Michael Lowry, who I think is a disgrace to Irish public life. But that would involve going beyond preaching to the choir which is what Fintan is doing here, and frankly is something that few people are either good at or interested in. Fintan has a valid argument about what Lowry is and was, but making the argument to a self selected audience of those who were going to be inclined to agree with him away as he has here is much like that adage about taking a leak in a dark suit, it gives you a nice warm feeling sure but no one else really notices.
Why not take your case to the people of Tipp North? Stand in an election, buy an ad in a local paper, do something that might make a difference to his standing in his community.”
I looked previously at an idea around reforming the way we elect the Oireachtas to ensure that if people want the Lowry’s as super councillors let them have them but not being elected to a legislative role.
http://dansullivan.blogspot.com/2008/09/oireachtas-reform.html
I know I’ve made some hay previously about reforming the Seanad to make it somewhat more consistent, but what about something more fundamental like reforming the entire electoral system. I believe that the Oireachtas, local government and large swaths of Irish public life are broken ,busted, banjaxed. I believe that the current system has served us badly.
Let’s take for a moment the view that the Irish people really do need all these people helping them with form filling and ringing up the planning office and coming to their funerals. So let’s keep people in the system to do that but let’s also keep them the hell away from the drafting, consideration and voting involved in legislation.
Take the number of TD 166 and for every 3 of them at present let’s try and suffice with just the 2 who will become what I would term public advocates. They will sit in a people’s chamber that gets to vote on legislation but only to reject it by a 2/3 vote. So, that’s 111 of them advocates to be elected by PR-STV. And then we should have 100 members of an actual legislature 80% of whom are to be elected by a list system on a provincial basis, and the remaining 20% by national list.
And those in the latter chamber would actually be the only ones who could draft, debate and vote on actual proposed new legislation. And then members of the cabinet can be drawn from both chambers or none. But they must be approved by Oireachtas committee (much like the US senate hearings to approve cabinet members.
And let’s pay the advocates more than those in the legislature so that people aren’t tempted to use it as stepping stone to get into the legislature as people currently use the county/city council seats. Pay the advocates 100K (after all they’re doing the work of 1.5 TDs and we pay TD’s 100K as of today) and the legislators just 80K say. Members of the cabinet get a top up to bring them up to 150K. And the top dog can have 180K and the use of a flat in town along with the lodge at Farmleigh for the family.
The system is ‘broken, bust, bandjaxed’ – How right you are Dan. But you’d need a revolution to bring about the changes you propose.
I do sometimes think that FO’T is selective, but consistent in his moral crusade against the ‘attitude’ to sleaze and all its variations. In this case he is, IMO, pulling us back to a time when we all thought Lowry was a sleazebag, even those who benefitted from being his constituents. His dealings with Dunne and the way he used his company to hide all sorts of dishonesty was what Justice McK was getting at.
FO’T is reminding us that most if not all of that sort of stuff is alive and well and forms the basis for where we are now, in a much more grave situation.
He is also pointing out that some people who have media presence, such as the bookie, are willing to line out with Lowry, thus perpetuating the ‘acceptability’ of Lowry’s behaviour.
michael lowry is a manipulator of truth….he evades, misrepresents and lies constantly ……… people believe lies and liars do well in life…….but it doesn’t make it or him right……don’t like the guy don’t like the guy don’t like the guy