Inspired by a visualisation done last year of $1 trillion, I spent a little time playing with Google Sketchup to try and understand just how much money Anglo (ie the public) is expected to lose in its latest fiscal year. So I started with the average male as used in Sketchup (let’s call him Seanie) and drew him next to €1 million in €100 bills, to scale:
Next here’s Seanie next to €10 million:
And now Seanie next to €100 million, on a standard euro sized pallet:
And oh yes, Seanie next to €1 billion, in cool hard cash:
And finally, Seanie next to the lower end projected losses for Anglo: €11 billion:
Effectively, that is the same as the historical position on records. One could get any record if the period was reduced to five years. That is too short although I accept that 30 years is too long. I have little involvement with the 30 year papers but they are organised in my Department each year. To do that for five year papers would be wrong and I will give an example with regard to that. Later today, I am dealing with Northern Ireland matters and the Good Friday Agreement which was negotiated five years ago. If the papers were available about the same issues being negotiated today, there would be major difficulties. It is not possible to reduce the period to five years when one is dealing with the same people, process and issues.
I am not arguing that the period should be 30 years. The Act came in and I did not take issue with it at the time but five years is too short. On all other matters, no matter how inconvenient, such as how many telephone calls I made or what restaurant I went to, if I had lunch with somebody, or how much petrol my car uses..
So said former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in 2003, during the change to the FOI legislation. He is referring to an amendment that made significant changes to the legislation, one of which was the increasing by five years of the expiry of Section 19 of the Act – records relating to Cabinet and interministerial communications.
It would appear that not only have the opposition failed to see the political import of the availability of Cabinet records from 1998 and 1999 (and now January/February 2000), but so have the media. Section 19 of the Act no longer applies to records that are over 10 years old. This 10 year limit started on April 21, 2008, and is a rolling process. For every day that passes in 2010, another day of records becomes available from 2000.
The Government that is in power now is more or less the same that existed in 1998, 1999 and 2000. Some new ministers, some old, musical chairs on the rest. Why would it not be political interesting for journalists and the Opposition to look back at decisions made in 1999 for example? The Redress board scheme was planned in 1999, the apology to victims was made in May 1999.
The Opposition in 2003 were quite vocal about the changes being made to increase the five year rule to 10 years. Enda Kenny even penned an Irish Times opinion piece, arguing that Bertie Ahern was increasing the limit in order to save embarrassing documents being released surrounding Ray Burke (the Fitzwilton payment came to light in the summer of 1998) among others.
I started the process of examining the issue of Cabinet records some months ago, and have requests pending with the Department of the Taoiseach. It is important to try and understand how such records are held in order to more accurately request information – this also involved trawling what made the headlines in 1998 and 1999, to remind myself what was scandalous, and what was newsworthy over that period.
Of course it is also important to read the Cabinet handbook to understand exactly what the records are called and what their purpose is. As a result of this process I have requested, and received, some initial records from that period. I will begin publishing them today, and all of next week. First up is the agendas for all Cabinet meetings between April 21, 1998, and December 31, 1999. These agendas only became FOIable after the 10 year rule had expired in 2008. I will upload them as I scan them, which will take some time.
The [Irish] government responded to this with what is now regarded – rather disconcertingly – as “standard” policies. They guaranteed all the liabilities of banks and then began injecting government funds. The government is now starting a new phase – it is planning to buy the most worthless assets from banks and pay them government bonds in return. Ministers have also promised to recapitalize banks than need more capital. The ultimate result of this exercise is obvious: one way or another, the government will have converted the liabilities of private banks into debts of the sovereign (i.e., Irish taxpayers).
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The government is gambling that GDP growth will recover to over 4% per year starting 2012 — and they still plan further major expenditure cutting and revenue increasing measures each year until 2013, in order to bring the deficit back to 3% of GDP by that date. The latest round of bank bailouts (swapping bad debts for government bonds) dramatically exacerbates the fiscal problem. The government will in essence be issuing 1/3 of GDP in government debts for distressed bank assets which may have no intrinsic value. The government debt/GDP ratio of Ireland will be over 100% by end 2011 once we include this debt.
Ireland had more prudent choices. They could have avoided taking on private bank debts by forcing the creditors of these banks to share the burden – and this is now what some sensible voices within the main opposition party have called for. However, a strong lobby of real estate developers, the investors who bought the bank bonds, and politicians with links to the failed developments (and their bankers), have managed to ensure that taxpayers rather than creditors will pay. The government plan is – with good reason – highly unpopular, but the coalition of interests in its favor it strong enough to ensure that it will proceed.
Baseline Scenario, Kwak and Johnson, definitely one to subscribe to.
I hope to attend Farmsubsidy.org‘s datafest in Brussels in May. I am also in the process of appealing a decision by the Department of Agriculture to refuse a request I made for details of all CAP payments made to Irish farmers from 1999 to 2009. This is a video about what farmsubsidy.org is doing:
Next up is the campaign by the Sunlight Foundation for the POIA (Public Online Information Act)
The final quarter of the list of tax defaulters fined or penalised by Revenue during 2009 was published last week. As usual details for name, address and penalties incurred for each defaulter, along with some information on the individual’s occupation, were included. I’ve used that to extrapolate further information and form statistics which can be seen in the graphs below.
Revenue gets our money back into the tax coffers in a number of ways. One is by fining people for, typically small, instances of tax avoidance. That type of case is often for cigarette or alcohol smuggling, failure to lodge income tax returns or the sale, delivery or use of laundered oil. In such circumstances the relevant individuals or companies are usually fined between €250 and €7,000.
In other cases companies make settlements to pay back taxes which, through an audit, Revenue has discovered they owe. These settlements usually involve much larger sums. Almost all of those who make settlements are companies or wealthy self-employed invididuals. Revenue does not publish most settlements of less than €30,000.
To give some idea of the scale between the values of fines and settlements; in Q4 of last year fines totalled €770,000, settlements reached nearly €18million. This was despite there being multiple times the number of cases where fines were made than settlements. It would be an oversimplification (but broadly accurate) to say fines are against the labourer, settlements are made by the developer.
Tim Berners-Lee‘s TEDTalk on open data was Youtubed this week. 6 minutes worth watching. He’s the man known for inventing the dubilya-dubilya-dubilya.
I made a similar argument to the one made in the first three minutes of the clip at Ignite Dublin on Thursday. In my tirade waffle talk I encouraged people to submit FOI requests and publish them online no matter the perceived importance of the contents due to the potential contexts through which those official documents could be viewed at a future date. Of course my talk was poorly constructed and laden with tangents by comparison to the one below, but let’s not dwell on that…
This says a lot. Sigrún Davíðsdóttir, London Corr with the Icelandic state broadcaster, on corporate governance in banking…
Why is Lehman being scrutinised so thoroughly and not banks that governments in various countries have recapitalised? The UK Treasury had to intervene with Northern Rock, Bradford & Bingley, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland, banks that would have followed Lehman into bankruptcy if the Treasury hadn’t saved them. But as far as is known, the accounts of these banks haven’t been picked over like Lehman’s.
Recently, there were fleeting news that the Treasury had contemplated the idea in connection with Lloyds but then given up on it. It was thought, at the time, that there was no time to do it – but as a major shareholder the Treasury has all the time in the world to go into the banks’ universe and start reading. The same goes for Ireland: AIB, Bank of Ireland and Anglo have been recapitalised, they are still reporting huge losses – and their management in the months up to autumn 2008 hasn’t been scrutinised.
John McHale on IrishEconomy writes about the Innovation document thingy. Innovation Baybay! Woot! Here comes the recovery! …Wait, wait, wait, haven’t the powers-that-be been closing universities’ access to journal libraries, been generally anti-intellectual and, in broad terms, remained in position despite their monumental fuck-ups of late? Oh yeah. Anyway, this latest document undoubtedly changes all that. Or something. Definitely. Yeah.
So what then happens when that editorial production process is disrupted, in Schumpeter’s phrase, by the destructively creative forces of new technologies?
If you accept the case I make in SuperMedia, that journalism is moving towards new forms of production then this begs the question of what we mean by ‘quality’ in that reconstructed media environment. I raise the issue in the book, but now that networked journalism is becoming the norm rather than the exception, I think it’s a good moment to attempt a further exploration of the implications for the idea of quality.
Take some time to view this lovely short film-reel about Dublin broadcast in the ’60s in cinemas; ‘See you at the pillar‘. Won’t embed for me but worth clicking through to watch.
Lastly, below Jimmy Bullard celebrates Wash & Go’s 21st birthday. Craic. Gotta love that man. Nice marketing move from the Wash & Go peeps as well.
Interesting the public report “differs substantially” from the one given to the Garda Commissioner and the Wheelock family. I was not aware of that detail.
