Digest – May 10 2010

InDigestion, see below.

– HOME

This story is nuts (“Anglo boss ‘was told to keep quiet'” – Sunday Times). I think the people have shell-shock from the constant stream of similar stories coming out of Anglo and the Department of Finance. “Oh, that again? Heh. Yeah.”

Irish Times business podcast feature on public sector reform in Minnesota is interesting.

May 5th; Singing the sash, May 7th; singing the blues, from Slugger.

Abigail Rieley on the moment the jury returned the verdict in the trial of David Curran and Sean Keogh for the murder of two Polish men. Touching.

Dierdre O’Shaughnessy of the Cork Independent writes from Port Au Prince.

The most mundane aspects of life are here: women wash clothes in small basins of water distributed from tankers; they cook whatever food they have outside their tents at small camp fires; they hang clothing to dry on their tarps.

Cracker of an opinion piece from Patrick Freyne on the back page of the Sunday Tribune.

Yet, apart from a public sector march here or there, a once-off kerfuffle over medical cards for pensioners, and four million late night pub-rants, the Irish public have been very, very compliant. In Iceland, the populace responded to their economic clusterf*ck by descending on their houses of parliament banging pots and pans. In America, right-wing groups protest against their own healthcare interests with a network of gun-toting “Tea-Parties”. Here the public sector demonstrated their anger at pay-cuts by refusing to answer a few phones while the rest of us express our rage at a huge bank-bailout and the failure of our institutions by working harder (take that, banks!).

Faced with the same problems as Greece (and we have some of the same problems) I think we actually would resort to a campaign of dirty looks. We expect our politicians to guess how we feel, like the passive aggressive spouse in a sitcom called That’s Ireland! (“What do you want now, honey?” asks the Dáil shrugging its shoulders. “Is it a medical card? Is it a new road? I just can’t tell!” Cue laughter from the studio audience in the bond markets).

Feature on prostitution in Ireland by Conor Lally in The Irish Times.

– WORLD Continue reading “Digest – May 10 2010”

Anglo Irish JCF LLP

Last week I blogged about Anglo Irish JCF 1 LLP, a company with an illustrious list of board members. However, following some searches I found something else that looked strange.

According to the Register of Members’ Interests 2006, Senator Feargal Quinn invested in a similarly named company. It was Anglo Irish JCF LLP (without the 1). It is a curious coincidence. So I contacted Mr Quinn about the declared investment asking him the nature of the investment.

Mr Quinn stated:

I’m glad you asked as I didn’t actually invest in it, it was a mistake on my declaration.

I sought further clarification on the nature of the investment and whether Mr Quinn had corrected the record.

I regret that I cannot clarify further for you as I don’t personally deal with my investments and I don’t know the background. In relation to changing the record, your request has drawn my attention to my error and I will now correct it.

Interesting.

Der Spiegel explains…

There’s some very nice explanatory journalism in Der Spiegel today. Warning; long, long, long article is very long, but enjoyable and definitely worth reading.

Der Spiegel – The Mother of All Bubbles

Written for the layman with a global outlook, it explains how we… ehem… how we are where we are… and where we’re going. Pretty even handed – quotes from conservatives (e.g Niall Ferguson) and liberals (e.g Krugman) – in fairly equal measure.

Covers pretty much the whole globe, Ireland gets a mention or two. If I was to recommend reading one article today, this would be it.

Proposals for funding reform

I’m not in agreement with the suggestions in the The Irish Times editorial today for improving – in terms of reducing corruption and improving transparency – how our political system is funded. The leader writer is rowing in behind the Director of Public Prosecutions, James Hamilton’s recent comments. I quote today’s piece…

Some senior politicians still defend private sector political funding, even though it contains within it the seeds of corruption. They argue it is an important element in a participatory democracy. Invariably, they insist no favours are provided in return for such unprompted largesse. That self-serving bluster no longer carries any conviction, particularly in relation to planning matters, where the money trail has been easily identified. It is time to make a clean cut with the past.

When Director of Public Prosecutions James Hamilton warns that political corruption will continue for so long as there is private financing of political parties, what remains to be said? Do our politicians favour a continuation of dubious practices? After all, the State now provides alternative and generous funding for the political process. There was never a better time for comprehensive reform.

I’m inherently wary of suggestions that the State get involved in funding politics. As a firm believer in the value of diversity of viewpoints it irks me to think someone in the pay of the State would be deciding who gets what funding when. No matter how independent the office deciding the allocation, it won’t be independent enough. The possibility of tiered political system emerging also worries me. Continue reading “Proposals for funding reform”

"At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political."

This is an article by George Friedman republished with the permission of Stratfor. Freidman is a political scientist and intelligence analyst. In the following piece he argues that the current crisis is now a political rather than [solely] economic or financial issue. While looking through an American prism – though covering the European issues late in the article – much of what he says, particularly early on, is relevant to what happened, may happen and is happening in Ireland. It’s an interesting argument.

The Global Crisis of Legitimacy – George Friedman

Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions. The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political. Continue reading “"At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political."”

Irish CAP payments 2009

I’ve been over in Brussels for the last couple of days meeting the very good people from farmsubsidy.org. Thanks to their scraping efforts I’ve had access to the 2009 database in total, rather than the search mechanism the Department of Agriculture makes available via its website.

So, some figures. There were 137,748 payments under CAP in 2009 to Irish recipients. The average payout was €14,020. The total payout was €1,931,253,085 (€1.93bn). Here are the top 100 recipients:

The top 100 received just over €44m. The top 10 being:

THE IRISH DAIRY BOARD CO-OP
COMMERCIAL MUSHROOM PRS COOP
BAILIE FOODS LTD
GLANBIA INGREDIENTS VIRGINIA
ABBOTT IRL
R & A BAILEY LTD
WYETH NUTRITIONALS IRELAND
ROSDERRA IRISH MEATS GROUP LTD
IRISH AGRICULTURAL DEVELOP
WALTER FURLONG

Other interesting recipients include:

Robert Aylward (Mullinavat, Kilkenny) received €16,765.3
Michael Creed (Macroom, Cork) received €28,866.16
Francis O’Brien (Ballybay, Monaghan) received €80,849.71
Martin and Nicholas Mansergh (Tipperary, Co Tipperary) received €48,545.45
Noel Coonan (Roscrea, Co Tipperary) received €20,331.10
Thomas McEllistrim (Tralee, Co Kerry) received €12,313.74
Michael Moynihan (Mallow, Co Cork) received €15,507.77

And some other interesting ones:

Niall Mellon (Kilkenny) received €42,880.03
Blessington and District Forum Theatre Ltd (Wicklow) received €19,891
Thomas Bailey (Meath) received €8,513.95

One of the strange omissions, for which there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation (I’m not up on my food industry) is that Greencore, the biggest recipient in 2008 at €83,377,557, does not appear in 2009. Is this down to sugar?

Allowances for local council chairs' expenses

The expense allowances available to cathaoirleachs and leas cathaoirleachs (chair/mayor and deputy chair/mayor) of local councils are interesting to examine. Or at least would be if we could see them all in the one dataset.

Under the provisions of Section 143 the Local Government Act 2001 a local authority may pay an allowance to its chair and deputy chair for “reasonable” expenses. This means councillors vote on how much the council chair (also a councillor) gets for expenses, which are unvouched in the vast majority of cases and often untaxed. Of course that also means the allowances vary from one council to another.

Last week one New Ross Labour councillor, Bobby Dunphy, made a good case for changing this system. He proposed that mayoral expenses be reimbursed instead of awarded as a fixed amount. He told the News Ross Standard [paywalled link]…

All I was proposing was a system that would give greater openness and transparency. The only reason for opposing that would be that you did not want openness and transparency. For example, while the €8,000 is intended to cover anticipated expenses, in reality any expenses incurred can be and are claimed separately. The €8,000 is, in effect pocketed as a tax free salary. There is no scrutiny, no value for money analysis… Because it is public money we Councillors have a duty to oversee the proper disbursement of this money

It’s perhaps insightful to note that Dunbar couldn’t get another elected member to second his proposal. This meant he couldn’t speak from the floor to argue why such a change would be beneficial to the people of New Ross. According to the council website there is another Labour member on the council. Continue reading “Allowances for local council chairs' expenses”