I was the only customer in the shop. Perhaps that was normal. Behind the counter they all appeared a bit grim. Perhaps that was normal too. Later that evening the IPU announced that they were calling off the strike. All to do with patient safety, they said.

I couldn’t help wondering if it had more to do with empty chemists’ shops whose customers could be relied on to buy a few other bits and bobs as they waited to have their prescriptions filled? Or the realisation that their protest action was going nowhere politically? Or that a recession-bruised public had more on their minds than sympathy with pharmacists and their shops full of overpriced medicines, shampoos and designer-label bath lotions?

Along the main streets of every small town we passed through on our western seaboard holiday there were 70% off sales in every second shop, closing down sales, shops units with signs for lease or sale, sticking out like a reproach. The unoccupied office and apartment blocks, the holiday home schemes that remain half finished, trim the outskirts of middling sized country towns like jaded baubles on a christmas tree that someone forgot to throw out after the last holiday.

In the pubs and restaurants proprietors claim they’re doing all right themselves, but pity about the other fellow down the street and lament the lack of visitors, the notable dearth of Americans and English this year, while welcoming the French. Perhaps they had not noticed the French so much before because there were so many others around to swamp their presence in other years?

People speak in hushed tones about local businessmen who’ve not been seen around and about for weeks, who are crushed and humiliated by the failure of their enterprises and whose only consolation is that there are bigger players locally who have fallen spectacularly too. They worry about the future and what’s yet to come. It can only get worse before it gets better, they say. They’re resigned to that, if stupified as to the reasons for it and its effects on their lives. They have no space left for sympathy for pharmacists or any other interest group who may seek to protect their own position, and profits, at the expense of the broader community. It’s as if they’re all waiting for something, like the good weather that never came.

–

In a decision sure to spark furious condemnation from “no” campaigners, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland has announced new regulations on airtime set to grant the political-parties the vast majority of airtime during the campaign.

Broadcasters are not required to allocate exactly the same amount of time to both the Yes and No campaign when it comes to editorial coverage.

However, they must ensure that the total airtime given over to political party broadcasts is equal.

The guidelines come into effect from Friday, ahead of polling on October 2.

Willie O’Reilly, chairman of the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland, said the Coughlan case meant broadcasters were strait-jacketed into dividing time equally, regardless of the merits of any argument.

“The perversity of this is that weak arguments gain traction with repetition, and charismatic leaders of doubtful representation are feted by the media,” he said.

“It is a cranks’ charter….Fine Gael TD Jim O’Keeffe said the forthcoming referendum on children’s rights had cross-party support, but the policy of giving equal airtime to both sides in a referendum debate could result in a group such as “a paedophile association” being given 50 per cent coverage”.

Article 40.1 of the Bunreacht na h-Eireann – largely the basis of the Supreme Court judgements – states:

1. All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. This shall not be held to mean that the State shall not in its enactments have due regard to differences of capacity, physical and moral, and of social function.

Mr Grealish also expressed confidence that he, Ms Harney and Ms O’Malley could forge a loose alliance that would act together when negotiating the programme for government and supporting the Fianna Fáil-led Coalition.

“I am hopeful the three of us can sit down and decide the best course of action. We have not had any discussions yet,” he said.

Ms Harney said she hoped that such an arrangement could be made.

She added: “The one thing the country needs above everything else is stability in government so that we can take very tough decisions. The decisions we will take in September and October will be much tougher than anything that has been seen in Ireland before.”

Is it right that the PDs will look to influence the renegotiation on the programme for government considering they were largely rejected not exactly endorsed by the electorate on the last occasion and will not be around to govern for the next one?

Cutting an expected comment off at the pass: Yes, the Greens are a small party and it could be argued that they will have a disproportionate influence on the program for government (on a TD to TD ratio) but at least they will be around after it is implemented, the PDs won’t. It’s therefore three individuals, one of whom wasn’t elected, looking to influence the direction of a Government they won’t be part of (collectively).

Cutting second expected comment off at the pass: The PDs, as a party, will look to influence the program for government in a specific ideological direction – which is different to what independent TDs do.

Or is it? Comments below.

During the debate in the Dail, Ms Harney said: “I find it strange that when we ask hospitals to make efficiency savings, some hospitals decide that the most sensitive area is the area that should be cut first.”

Those nasty hospitals….taking spin to a whole new level. Depsite the outrage, this is the new briefing line – implying the hospital didn’t try to find efficiencies in the first place.

Four links with a few highlights from each, all should be on the national curriculum well worth reading …

FIANNA FÁIL has failed to disclose to the ethics watchdog tens of thousands of euro in corporate donations

An Irish Examiner investigation has revealed the party [FF] took donations either side of the 2007 general election which were above the declaration threshold and should have been notified to the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) – but were not.

…

In all, 26 companies detailed donations in their accounts, with the total coming to €113,731 – only a small percentage was declared by the parties.

Spotlight on FF accounts system

REVELATIONS regarding Fianna Fáil’s handling of excessive donations has put the accounting system for its multi-million euro income stream under scrutiny.

Like other parties only a fraction of its expenditure is explained in annual disclosures. Other companies’ accounts show the party accepted payments in excess of legal limits and failed to report others it was obliged to do.

Two payments from Durkan New Homes (€15,658 and €7,390) and one from Mosney Irish Holidays (€6,500) breached the amount parties can take from a single company.

The limited accounts published ahead of Fianna Fáil’s February Árd Fheis showed it received €2.2 million from the state in 2007 and 2008. Its superdraw fundraiser in 2008 raked in €659,050 and its national constituency collection raised €536,000. During the four-week election campaign of 2007 it spent €3.6m. Regarding the payments revealed today the party insisted it abided by electoral law.

Reform of donations system needs more than lip service (Opinion)

Lip service has been paid to transparency and reform but the figures contained in the accounts – from a sample of companies – give an indication of another world of fundraising away from public scrutiny.

The €113,731 pot revealed today is not part of any database and ordinarily is not readily accessible to the public.

The businesses lodged the details with the Companies Registration Office, fulfilling their obligations under the Electoral Act to mark political donations in excess of €5,078 on their annual returns.

The list is of businesses who made this statement during 2008. These were made available under the Freedom of Information Act, and an application for previous years was denied.

A subsequent trawl of records revealed money given to political parties and elected officials ranging from €150 to €15,658 and totalling more than €113,000.

and finally…

Property developers were largest donors to parties

A sample of annual returns revealed 71% of the payments to six parties came from businesses whose primary interest was property development.

The highlights don’t do the stories justice.

Hats off to Conor Ryan, one of the Examiner’s political correspondents down in Cork for some frankly fantastic journalism. Ryan did some serious muckraking, over the course of a few months I’m told, to unearth some of the hidden funding the political parties receive.

The amount of work that must have gone in to breaking that kind of story is in my own experience often unappreciated.

All in all, great journalism from a name many would not have heard before but is someone who has been doing sterling work with the Examiner for quite a while. This will undoubtedly have an impact and be followed up by further investigations by other journalists, maybe Ryan has more up his sleeve, who knows. Expect to see this run…

What impact this will have on the already shaky coalition is yet to be seen. The Greens are implicated as well, although not to quite the extent as their bigger brothers. Whether they can use this to add to the mound of evil FF deeds that they plan to stand upon when they take a sta-… ah fuck it, it’s almost 2AM I’m just not going to use the poetic analogies. Whether the Greens can use this a bit of a reason to take a moral stance and pull out of government – is as yet unknown, that was easier.

Side-note: Libertas will undoubtedly use this as another reason why people should vote for them in the name of “transparency”. Hah.

Anyway, go biiiiy the Examiner, biiiy!

Back in March of 2007 I queried the professional backgrounds of the then FF/PD cabinet with respect to their experience of the realities of making things and what could be termed the productive sector of the economy. Batt O’Keeffe appears to have revived interest in the topic in recent days by suggesting that we need more people that are in his view business people, “farmers,managers and auctioneers”, in the Dail. So taking his key how does the new Cabinet measure up?

Taoiseach Brian Cowen – A local small town solicitor.

Mary Harney – was very briefly a secondary school teacher between her graduation in 1976 and her appointment to the Seanad by Jack Lynch in 1977.

Mary Coughlan - Very briefly worked as a social worker after college before taking her seat in a bye election.

Brian Lenihan – a barrister who was a lecturer in TCD and practised as a barrister before becoming a TD.

Brendan Smith – Oddly enough it appears he is the most professionally immersed in politics even while outside of elected politics as for a decade and a half he worked as special advisor to the Fianna Fáil TD and former Tánaiste John Wilson before becoming a TD.

John Gormley – Prior to entering full-time politics he ran an academy of European languages. So he was certainly in business though it was more the services end of things rather than what I’d term ‘making stuff’. Still it is a positive tick in his column.

Eamon Ryan – As far as I know he has run a couple of businesses involving the holiday trade and cycling. Another positive tick.

Bartholomew “Batt” O’Keeffe - Batt was a lecturer in CIT so I reckon that doesn’t count as a business background. Not sure what he lectured in but since it was a BA he got in UCC, I’m inclined to doubt that it was anything too technical or perhaps even all that practical either.

Dermot Ahern - A local solicitor

Noel Dempsey – A career guidance teacher

Mary Hanafin – A secondary school teacher

Micheál Martin – A secondary school teacher.

Martin Cullen – worked as a sales manager for a wine company. Seriously a wine company! He had at a point prior to that spent time in Zimbabwe or Rhodesia as it was then called seeking his fortune.

Willie O’Dea – O’Dea worked as a barrister and an accountant, and lectured at University College Dublin and the University of Limerick well it was still NIHE Limerick at the time he was there.

Éamon Ó Cuív – was manager of Gaeltacht Co-operative, a company involved in agricultural services including timber milling, tourism and cultural development. Apparently, this was very much a hands off role.

And finally while not a member of the cabinet but given his frequent appearances on the telly, his role in the Lisbon debate and his own belief in himself we should take a look at the FF main man from Wicklow.

REcently concludd partnership talks have the ingredients to annoy rather than placate businesses and workers alike while George Hook is busy rising the blue-shirts around him. FF will at least be using these events to cover a sharp drop in their numbers.

FF (-4) 36%

FG (+3) 28%

Lab (-1) 9%

Green (-) 7%

SF (-1) 9%

PD ( +1) 3%

The obvious irony of PD support rising as they exit stage left is overshadowed by the seriousness of a further drop in Labour support in the week their campaign HQ emailed all suporters to highlight an article extolling GIlmore as the real leader of the oposition. In the current economic climate with Cowen and his government failing to secure people’s belief the Labour leader will be very dismayed by the poll. If he is not then the job is not for him. Enda will be pleased for this sort of support next June might keep him his job.

A party of fiscal rectitude? Yeah, right. The first time they entered government, we witnessed the accelerator being applied to government spending. During the brief Fianna Fail minority government in 1987-1989, public expenditure was kept low (though the accolades being showered on the ‘tough decisions’at the time are also the stuff of myth which I will develop in a subsequent post). In the three budgets in that period, current expenditure was kept almost static – from €12.2 billion to 12.4 billion – a minuscule increase of 1.6%. When the PDs, under former Fianna Failer Des O’Malley, entered Government Buildings, public spending shot up. Spending over the next three years jumped by €3 billion – a massive 24%. This was the biggest three-year increase – either in nominal or percentage terms – in the history of the state.

What does this say for the PDs? Very little. They were free-loaders. The change came about because of the personal hammering Charlie Haughey took during the 1989 election campaign (the famous RTE radio phone-in where caller after caller gave out about the state of the healthcare system and Charlie replying he wasn’t aware how bad it was). So bad was the hammering and the subsequent election result that Fianna Fail jettisoned their most sacred principle – no coalition. They did the deal with the PDs but were determined never to be caught out again. They rampled up government spending. And the PDs went along.

The PDs weren’t so much the party of fiscal rectitude as they were the party of fiscal indifference – best exemplified by Michael McDowell’s comment prior to the last election that stamp duties could be abolished because the Exchequer didn’t need the revenue. Yes, they could spend with the best of them, they could create screaming headlines on tax – it was all the same to them. Fiscal rectitude was the handmaiden of vote-getting – and the poor maiden was rarely summoned from her closet.

The party of privatisation? Oh, yes, they did call for that. But that’s all they did. It was Fianna Fail, slip-streaming in the global neo-liberal gale, that did all the privatisation. Not one major privatisation came through a PD ministry. It was Fianna Fail, anxious to shed itself of its statist past (they were, after all, the chief architects of public enterprise-building), anxious to show that they, too, were part of the new world order, who drove that agenda, an agenda shared by so many parties, even of the Left (the Democrats dumped the New Deal, Blair dumped Clause 4, the German SPD came late but came with a vengeance with Hartz IV). So victorious was the neo-liberal agenda that privatisation no longer a pragmatic instrument but proof of one’s identity with a politically-conforming modernity.

The party of low taxes? The tax cuts came courtesy of a right-wing Fianna Failer – Charlie McCreevey. The idea that he needed ideological guidance from a small outside force is derisory. But clearly the PDs whooped it up – wanting more and more. How was this viable? It was due to the massive economic growth generated by multi-nationals whose presence here was courtesy of public sector policy – namely, the IDA’s new industrial strategy of picking winners in winning sectors. That’s hardly an advertisement for the invisible hand of the unregulated market.

And the tax cuts continued to flow – courtesy of Fianna Fail’s speculator-friendly policies. No one could claim this was a PD invention. Fianna Fail has been playing that game for a long time – all the way back to TACA. The PDs participated in the feast, but they didn’t come up with the recipes, never mind cook a single dish. At best, they brought polemical condiments.

The final argument that’s often used is Mary Harney and her effective privatisation of huge swathes of the health service. Surely this is proof of their neo-liberal driven agenda which was imposed upon an unwilling Fianna Fail. Oh, I wasn’t aware that Fianna Fail championed a public health-care system in recent times. They hobbled it so badly in the late 1980s that much subsequent investment was merely a catching up exercise. They stood over a system that subsidised the wealthy and the insured at the expense of the public – the famous two-tier system. Harney’s co-locationism was only a logical progression of fundamental Fianna Fail policy and their larger agenda – to reduce the scope of public investment.

But Fianna Fail could play this co-location game like real professionals. If a constituent complained to the local Fianna Fail TD, s/he could just shrug a shoulders, roll an eye – and blame it on ‘those PDs’. When a new health service came to town they would, of course, take credit – the spirit of de Valera alive and well. A good puppet-master knows when to let the odd string go this or that way – it’s part of the act. An act that Fianna Fail has mastered no matter who sits beside them at the cabinet table.

The PDs played at being neo-liberals. But they hadn’t a patch on the economic conservatives that dominated the Free State – the Ernest Blythes and cutting pensions, or Patrick McGiliigan declaring it wasn’t the job of Government to create jobs (and he was Minister for Industry!). These were hard men, true men – they practiced tough love without the love. The PDs, by comparisons, were wimps.

Ultimately, the PDs were runaway strays from the Fianna Fail kennel – a kennel that most will return to. To overlook this is to overlook the PD dynamic. For they merely aped their masters. The Fianna Fail boat has two oars and they can use one or the other or both or neither as it suits them. They have a strong right-wing, they have a one-nationist Lemassian wing; and both are trotted out and meshed when it suits them. Many on the Left don’t get Fianna Fail. They claim the Soldiers of Destiny have no ideology, just a relentless, ultimately pragmatic, pursuit of power but in fact the opposite is true – they are fiercely ideological and more class-conscious then any other major Irish party. How else could they so expertly balance their broad class alliance for decades – leading all others among the working class, the middle class and farmers? What other party could so easily move between Labour and the PDs and the Greens (Sinn Fein will be a doddle)? The Left tries to define Fianna Fail in terms of European cleavages – Lefts and Rights that emerged out of industrialisation. But Fianna Fail just laughs. And the Left still don’t get it.

Let’s, at least, get it right with the PDs. They could call for tax cuts, they could call for privatisation, they could oversee substantial expenditure increases and suck at the taxpayer’s teat (when subsidies were flooding in from the European taxpayer – over €30 billion since 2007 – the PDs stood on no other principle but ‘Please, sir, could I have another’), they could call for swingeing public spending cuts, they could support social partnership – something that hardly features in the neo-liberal lexicon (when in Enterprise, Mary H. brought in the national minimum wage over the screams of the business community). What’s more they could swing between the two larger parties. After all, their first electoral outing after they were elected to the Dail saw them in an electoral pact with Fine Gael, and Fine Gael was never off the agenda (surely there’s some kind of lesson here for Labour and the Greens).

In short, the PDs did all the things that Fianna Fail has done so expertly. Truly, they were their teachers’ students. Yes, they did split – the political tensions intertwined with Haughey’s polarising personality (was Charlie right-wing? Centrist? Corporatist? Or just plain Bonapartist?). They split, but as a right-wing Fianna Fail rump, when most of that right-wing stayed in Fianna Fail and is happier than any rump can be. They split, but like so many teenagers, they never strayed too far. They kept ringing the parents for money. And now their crib has collapsed, they’ve lost their jobs, there’s not much of a future in the cold world. They have no option – they’re returning home.

And when they do, you’ll never be able to spot the difference.