Dukes and Ross at Finance Committee

Anglo Chairman, Alan Dukes, has just left the Oireachtas Finance Committee meeting in Committee Room One of Leinster House. The transcript won’t be up for a while – and I’m not sure if this will get any coverage in the papers – but Shane Ross asked him some most interesting questions. The Sunday Indo journalist and Senator put it to Dukes, in no uncertain terms that recent appointees to the Anglo board were foisted on them by Government.

Paraphrasing (will link when transcript becomes available):

Ross: “Did you interview the new board members? Did you even interview [the Fianna Fail fundraiser and ‘protege’ of Charlie Haughey] Aidan Eames?”

Dukes: “Eh, well… I’m not going to answer that question”.

Ross: Why not? Why not answer that question? How much are these people being paid? How much is the taxpayer paying them?

Dukes: You can look at our annual reports for this year when they come out, I don’t need to answer these questions.

And so it went on. It’s not necessarily revealing that the appointments were government-made – they were probably chosen by Brian Lenihan, as he had the option – what’s interesting is Dukes’s refusal to answer the question; by doing so he protects the Government from criticism as he doesn’t confirm Fianna Fail appointed one of their own. Dukes being the former public interest representative on the Anglo board, remember. Gone native, anyone?

Oh, and also from the Committee Room, as RTE reports…

Meanwhile, the bank’s Chief Executive Officer Mike Aynsley said ‘the lion’s share’ of the €22bn, which will be put into the bank by the taxpayer, will never be seen again.

… Okey dokey.

Department of Justice reference book

All public bodies are obliged to publish Section 15 and Section 16 reference books every three years under the FOI Act. The Department of Justice website says:

The reference books are available for inspection in public libraries, Garda stations, court offices and all offices of the Department.

Great. No sign of the actual reference book though.

So I now give you: the Department of Justice reference book, available exclusively on thestory.ie, after some deep searching on Google. It makes for very very interesting reading. After reading through it, you might see why the document was deliberately not placed on the Department of Justice website. I should say I have used this reference book for at least two FOI requests that I have yet to write about.



Burke on another HSE mess

Health policy analyst and one of the best health journalists we have, Sara Burke, on the miscarriage misdiagnoses. As she puts it “another damn mess”…

And essentially, the poor performance of our maternity services is is about under-resourcing. The physical conditions of our maternity hospitals and wards are generally appalling; they are bursting at the seams, under staffed and under resourced. We pretty much have the same facilities we had 10-15 years ago when there were just over 50,000 births – a 50% growth in births without a 50% increase in investment.

We have fewer consultants per population than any other EU country 2.2 versus 4.5 Holland, which is the second worst. Also in Holland, the vast majority of births are mid wife delivered, the opposite to Ireland. Here, there is an over reliance on junior doctors and a crisis in junior doctor provision.

Full post.

Digest – June 13 2010

<bloggery overshare>My dinner was lovely, fish and chips on The MV Cill Arne.</bloggery overshare>

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Constantin Grudgiev maps Dublin’s importance to the Irish economy.

Anthony Sheridan; expenses scandal confirms political system is still rotten to the core. Lot of quotes there I hadn’t read before…

P O’Neill with questions arising from the Honohan report.

Two former members of The Sunday Times’s legendary Insight team recall the time they spent investigating the events of Bloody Sunday…

Hours after the killings, we were sent to Derry as part of the Insight team by Harold Evans, the paper’s editor. We stayed there for two months. We interviewed 250 witnesses of what began as a peaceful, if illegal, civil rights march.

We saw Bogsiders, young and old, write carefully and purposefully in longhand on lined notepads about the horrific scenes they had witnessed that day. And we took our own statements. The pile of primary evidence grew and grew.

The families of the victims took us into their homes and into their hearts; people such as Lawrence McElhinney, whose son, Kevin, aged 17, wearing his Sunday best, a brown suit and new brown zip-up boots, threw some stones at the paras before fleeing the Rossville barricade as the live rounds came in. He was shot before reaching the flats.

The relatives remembered the brief and brutally truncated lives of their children, producing cherished photographs of happier times. Some of those we talked to still clung to the clothes their children were wearing when they died. One family had preserved a bar of candy that their son took to the march.

In their barracks in Belfast, the paras who fired shots made their own statements, equally harrowing, to the military police. Few of the young soldiers involved had ever before fired a shot in anger from their 7.62mm rifles, a weapon designed for use on the modern battlefield and capable of inflicting devastating injuries at close range.

We studied the army’s evidence as revealed in half a million words in those submissions. We talked to military officers and government officials. We collected 500 photographs to help us reconstruct the killing ground in the Bogside. An amateur radio ham gave us a recording of the army’s messages for the operations during the entire afternoon, an invaluable tool for reconstructing the day’s events.

Widgery concluded that some of the paras’ firing had “bordered on the reckless”, but our evidence suggested something worse.

Oh for journalists to be given the time to do work like that. Or for newspapers to have the funds to make it possible. It’s all about speed these days.

Are you involved with a non-profit or NGO? Journalist Markham Nolan wants to help out, no charge.

WORLD Continue reading “Digest – June 13 2010”

Kavanagh on IT/MRBI poll

Adrian Kavanagh has posted an interesting and extensive geographical analysis of the Irish Times/MRBI poll on the Political Reform blog.

He extrapolates resulting seat totals too. They would be Fianna Fail 40; Fine Gael 55; Labour 54; Green Party 0; Sinn Féin 11; Other 6. Which, if reflected, would leave us in a right tizzy, with no clear coalitions. Has Gilmore ruled out government with FF? I can’t remember but something in the back of my mind tells me he has…

Read the post in in full on Political Reform.

"No confidence"

Gary Murphy, Elaine Byrne and Eoghan Harris were on The Last Word with Matt Cooper yesterday for a “no confidence” debate. Listen to it here.

Elaine Byrne spoke for me –  a 22 year old Irishman – about feeling completely let-down by the State’s reaction to economic depression. While Gary Murphy argues against her on some elements I’m not sure his feelings are all that different, just less extreme. Eoghan Harris is a fool.

Partial transcript and comment below. Continue reading “"No confidence"”

Two years, what could you get done?

Ah sure it’s Friday, so I’m thinking, why not?… Gav Reilly just asked a question on Twitter; “Is Bertie Ahern on any Oireachtas Committees?”

Answer: Not according to Oireachtas.ie.

In fact, you’d wonder if Bertie Ahern knows where the Dáil is at all these days. Maybe he has just forgotten, like the time he forgot Cavan was part of the nation he led?

Here’s his Dáil record, courtesy of Kildare Street.

Bertie Ahern has spoken in 0 Dáil debates in the last year, well below average among TDs.

Bertie Ahern has asked 0 parliamentary questions in the last year, well below average among TDs.

The three most recent appearances of this member in the Dáil record are:

February 4 2009 – Death of a Member; Expressions of Sympathy (Tony Gregory).

May 7 2008 – Resignation of Taoiseach (Bertie Ahern)

May 7 2008 – Nomination of Taoiseach

So, Bertie Ahern has contributed absolutely nothing of substance in two full years. We pay him €110,000 a year to be a member of parliament. Does being a TD now count as a ‘Bertie-earner’, Suzy?

FOOTNOTE: I quite like this last stat from his Kildare Street record. Across all his speeches Bertie Ahern “has used three-word alliterative phrases (e.g. “she sells seashells”) 2139 times in debates — well above average among TDs”.

Department of Finance FOI logs 2007 to March 2010

Some time ago I sought the FOI requests of the Department of Finance for the period January 2007 to March 2010. This has been issued (in paper format and then scanned). I have published the logs in both PDF and Google Spreadsheets. The logs give an insight into what was being sought (mainly by journalists) over the entire period of the financial crisis. Any redactions are Section 28 (Personal information).

Finance request logs 2007 to 2010 (Google Spreadsheet)

Department of Finance FOI log 2007 to 2010

Digging into the Honohan report

Aside from the clear issues surrounding the dumping of information by the HSE last Friday (we are working on that in the meantime) the banking reports are also clearly an important issue. We will try to cover both of these issues over the coming days.

I am initially particularly interested in one small part of the Honohan report:

While there was eventually a broad consensus, including among CBFSAI officials, that the guarantee scheme for all institutions was the best approach, the idea of nationalising Anglo Irish Bank (implying an associated change in management) as an accompanying measure was also on the table. As a contingency (and highly confidential) precautionary measure, legislation to nationalise a troubled bank and/or building society had been in preparation for some time.

It was felt by some that nationalising Anglo Irish Bank – which was facing by far the most serious liquidity crisis – would reduce the reputational damage that it was causing to the Irish banking system. This bank‘s business model was also thought by many to be irrecoverably broken; although few participants were even beginning to think it might have actual solvency issues.

Among the arguments against an overnight nationalisation was the fear that it could present undue operational risks and that it might have a destabilising effect on markets. In the event, by the end of the week, the inflow of liquidity took the matter off the agenda.

10 Other options mooted included extensive use of Emergency Lending Assistance (ELA) from the Central Bank and/or the creation and use of a domestic fund drawing in addition on resources from the NTMA. The possibility of temporary support from the two largest banks was also envisaged. None of these options could be expected to do more than buy a few days – say until the following weekend.

11 This planning was first inspired by the experience of the UK Government in relation to the failure of Northern Rock one year earlier.

Northern Rock was nationalised in September 2007, a full year before the bank guarantee. So is the entire narrative about an emergency guarantee now defunct? As Finance Minister, how much did Brian Cowen know about Anglo before the bank guarantee, and indeed before the St Patrick’s day massacre, before the CFD deal with Sean Quinn. How much did Bertie Ahern know? How much did the Cabinet know? How much did the Department of Finance know? How many investigations were carried out into the loan book of Anglo over the period September 2007 to September 2008? Why, exactly, did Mr Cowen repeatedly refer to Lehman as the the core cause, when in fact his Department and the Central Bank were surveying problems for 12 months, and why did they solely concentrate on liquidity issues, and not include issues of solvency?

Further down the report, Honohan is critical of the night of the guarantee itself:

A detailed review of the ensuing discussions is hampered by the absence of an extensive written record of what transpired. Although the minutes of meetings of the CBFSAI Board and the Authority during the period contain references to various options, there is an absence of documentation setting forth the advantages and disadvantages of possible alternatives and their quantitative implications. While CBFSAI Board members expressed some broad views on possible approaches, no decisions were taken, as the solutions would need to be found at Governmental level. The key discussions took place via the very many informal contacts and meetings between senior officials of the DSG agencies, the NTMA, and consultants; what follows relies to a very large extent on the personal recollections of participants.

And:

There is no doubt that from mid 2007 onwards Ireland increasingly faced a potentially serious financial crisis. Although the deteriorating international environment was what finally set the flames alight elements had been building for some considerable time beforehand. The overly sanguine, even complacent, view presented in the 2007 FSR and the resulting ensuing conviction that whatever problems that might arise would only be one of a liquidity led to two missed opportunities; first, to convey a strong message to the banks that they needed to build up capital urgently to be able to handle contingencies, or even to require them to do so; and second, to undertake comprehensive preparatory work to analyse quantitatively policy options available in the event the unthinkable might transpire.