Oireachtas Comm meeting on electoral reform – Tue Feb 2
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Constitution is meeting in Trinity College tomorrow (Tuesday February 2) . It will, I believe, be thefirst time an Oireachtas body has sat outside the Houses of the Oireachtas. They will take submissions written by members of the public over the last number of months firstly. After the meeting is completed a discussion moderated by John Bowman will begin.
The panel for the post-meeting debate will include Noel Dempsey, Minister for Transport, Professor Ken Benoit, head of the Department of Political Science, Senator Ivana Bacik, Trinity Fellow, Seán Ardagh, Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee, Jim O’Keeffe, Vice Chair of the Joint Oireachtas Committee, The Hon. Mr. Justice Frank Clarke.
More details on PoliticalReform.ie
Myself and Gavin will be in attendence, as will Suzy. We hope to run a live-chat on this website during the post-meeting debate. The topic will be electoral reform, unsurprisingly. For those unaccustomed with liveblogs/livechats; there will be a box on this site which you will be able to sign into and post messages, we’ll be reading those messages and comments and hoping to put a few of them to the panel. Participants will also be able to chat amongst themselves. It’s a way to add virtual participators to a physical meeting, and focus an online discussion on a single topic, I suppose.
The meeting starts at 7pm, it will go on for circa 80 minutes, the debate will then run for approximately 60 minutes. If you’re online you might consider participating. All welcome – though the discussion will be moderated and idiocy/vitriol will not be tolorated. If you’re willing to contribute, pop along around 8pm (though the chat will – hopefully – be running earlier, I’ll stick it up here around 6pm).
FYI:Trinity will be running the livestream and we’ll probably by relying on their Wifi system. So don’t blame us if this goes belly-up.
Papal Nuncio FOI
Back in December, Allan Cavanagh of Caricatures Ireland contacted us in relation to his interest in the Papal Nuncio, and their involvment or communications concerning the Murphy Report. At the time there were calls for the Papal Nuncio to be expelled, over their apparent failure to cooperate properly with the Murphy investigation. We helped him draft an FOI concerning this issue.
Allan sent us a copy of the result, and we have OCRd and uploaded it for public consumption.
The documents do not contain much interesting information, as we expected Section 24 (Security, Defence and International Relations) was broadly applied. But even exemptions can contains valuable information.
What I am unhappy with in terms of the reply received is this. Allan sought:
All records, including but not limited to, notes of meetings, telephone calls,
emails and internal memoranda relating to communications between the
Department and representatives of the Vatican, the Catholic Church, the
Dublin Diocese or any other representatives of the Church or Church bodies,
in the time following the publication of the Murphy Report up to the date of
receipt of the request.
The Deciding Officer said:
Your request, which was received on 10 December 2009, is one of three requests
received for access to similar records. As there is a considerable degree of overlap
between the three requests, I have taken the decision to consider the requests together.
My response may therefore include some records which do not fall directly within the
scope of your individual request.
The schedule of documents does not list any communications from “the Dublin Diocese or any other representatives of the Church or Church bodies”. I cannot see how any Section 24 exemption would apply to such a communication. It could be argued by the Department that such communication would “contain information communicated in confidence to any person in or outside the State from any person in or outside the State and relation to a matter referred to in subsection (1) [including “the international relations of the State”]…and expressed by the latter person to be confidential or communicated in confidence”. This would not necessarily be the case in relation to communications from the Diocese, since it may not have related to inter-State communications.
But the reply does not appear to deal with this part of the request at all.
Cowen to face inquiry questions in public?
You would have to wonder whether you could call the proposal for a bank inquiry an ‘inquiry’ at all. It certainly does not appear to have much in the way of grilling the people who caused the mess, or of dealing with the decisions post September 2008, all of which were the critical ones.
I made the point earlier to Senator Dan Boyle (who is said to have offered his resignation over the inquiry). I tweeted to him: “…forgive my cynicism then. Will I see TV pictures of our leaders for the past 12 years being held to account for their decisions?”
To which he replied:
Brian Cowen, at least, is a start. But Bertie Ahern, being the Taoiseach who oversaw the entire period would be another must see. And Messrs McCreevy (Finance), Cullen, Dempsey, Roche and Gormley (Environment) would be others. As I said to Mr Boyle, accountability behind closed doors is not accountability. Accountability must be seen to be done, a bit like justice. Getting a report at the end of a process is not enough.
But then accountability seems to be a rather novel concept to most of our politicians.
Digest – Jan 31 2010
It is Sunday, right?
– HOME
The motortax.ie website cost €523,000 to maintain last year according to an official response given to Fine Gael senator, Paschal Donohue. An insane figure. Question: if it was Fine Gael in charge would they have just hired in cheap Russian freelancers and used the intellectual property of another organisation (then attempted to pretend they didn’t do anything of the sort) to keep the website running? Fair play to Senator Donohue for bringing the figures to light all the same.
Gerard O’Neill of Amarach Research on the idea of trickle down employment.
In Wicklow: Councilors seek inquiry into issuing of waste permit. Very interesting case that one. It’ll run and run.
One from each side of the specturm, both adding to national debate: Constanin Gurdgiev on the knowledge economy. Michael Taft memo to IBEC on Ireland’s wage levels.
John Burns’s piece in today’s Sunday Times on the blogger who paid out €100,000 for libeling someone is interesting, and not just for bloggers. The blog which is the subject of the story is so obscure that Google finds zero – repeat zero – inward links. This is despite it having been operational since May 2005 (contrast that with TheStory; we’ve only been going since October or so, yet there are over 800 inward link results to the front-page alone). Additionally, the writer’s profile has only been viewed 3,000 times since the blog opened – or less than once per day.
So it’s a little-known, to say the least, blog.
With that in mind I’m making the assumption that basis of the argument put forward by legal team for the people who felt they’d been libeled was “if you Google my client’s name, one of the first results is that blog post. That post is libelous”. If my assumption is correct (and it may not be!) then the case was on the potential future damage to an individual’s reputation if their name had been Googled, rather than the damage done by the publication of the post itself. That’s interesting. I’d love to know TJ McIntyre, Eoin O’Dell or Simon McGarr’s opinions on the matter.
Clifden, planning permission and property
UPDATED TO CLARIFY AND EXPLAIN FURTHER: In September I wrote about the close relationship between councillors, bank managers and people in the property business in Clifden, and the bizarre situation that emerged from that. It followed an article in The Sunday Times and blog post, both by Mark Tighe.
The basics; Declan Maher, manager of the local AIB branch and Kevin Barry, an accountant-turned-property-investor went into business together to form BMB Partnership/Marketing. Kevin Barry, acting for BMB, then applied to AIB Clifden for a $60m loan. Next, Maher, in his role as manager of the AIB branch, wrote to BMB – in which he was a partner – to “confirm to agree in principle” the transfer of funds.
Maher seemingly failed to declare any conflict of interest. Following the revelations in the Sunday Times AIB began investigating the matter.
The loan was sought to finance the purchase of lands in Florida which BMB had looked to acquire as part of a property investment syndicate. Other members of the syndicate included former Fianna Fáil councillor, Josie Conneely and mayor of Bundoran, Eammonn Barrett, a Fine Gael representative. Maher says the letter he wrote to BMB was only going to be used to show the person selling the lands that funding was available. He claims the loan would never have been completed through his office, that they would have used a different bank or AIB official.
More below the fold…
Continue reading “Clifden, planning permission and property”
More on Ahern, the book, and the tax exemption
At the bottom of page 9 in today’s Irish Times, in the “In Short” block, there is a brief update on the story around Bertie Ahern’s book and the tax exemption he has claimed on the earnings stemming from its publication.
FORMER TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern has not yet decided if he will avail of tax-free status under the artists’ exemption scheme on earnings from his autobiography, his spokeswoman has indicated.
His decision will be taken at the end of the tax year and will be based on the profits, “if any”, of Bertie Ahern: The Autobiography.
Taking the decision on how much money will or will not be made is bizarre. The issue is not how much tax Ahern would save personally, but that he is attempting to keep the monies from the State at all. It is in no way different if the amounts not entering the exchequer coffers total €1 or €100,000. This attempt to appear to be considering whether he or the State needs the money more – as if it’s right that it is his choice to make – is idiotic.
The very fact he claims he is mulling it over is a kick in the teeth to other taxpayers. Whether he makes a profit or loss on the book is beside the point. It’s an issue of right or wrong; does Mr Ahern believe he should claim the tax exemption or does he not? The amounts involved are wholly irrelevant.
Update: Ken Foxe of The Sunday Tribune writes about the same subject, in a wider context, on his blog.
Irish Times editorial on political corruption
There is an editorial in today’s Irish Times headed ‘Political corruption’. It comes following the recent report from Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), a body within the Council of Europe. The report once again notes Ireland’s opaque political funding system. GRECO have been saying the same thing for nearly a decade, nothing of significance has been done.
GRECO report into Ireland January 25 2010 – Theme One [PDF] Theme Two (Transparency of Party Funding) [PDF].
The political funding system in Ireland is monitored by the Standards in Public Office Commission. I have previously written about the poor standard of SIPO’s work here [See – “25% isn’t a bad standard, is it SIPO?“] – it’s partially down to a lack of funding from Government for the office, they have less than ten staff, I believe. Oh the irony, the office responsible for ensuring political funding meets a certain standard of transparency is under-funded thus operating below standard…
Elaine Byrne also had a piece part-related to the GRECO report also in the Times this week, you can read that here.
Lastly, in the early days of this blog I wrote an article headed “Want to bypass our donations system? No problem“, it is also on the subject of political donations.
Enterprise Ireland grants 2005 – 2008
I have received copies of all financial support given by Enterprise Ireland for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. It details tens of millions of euro worth of grants to companies throughout the country. The supports are broken down by county.
For now I have not ‘cleaned’ the data, ie I have not removed spaces and extra sentences that are not needed for the purposes of better presentation. The document is ‘as
is’ and is based on PDFs which have been imported into Google spreadsheets.
Enterprise Ireland grants 2005 – 2008
You can view each year of data by clicking the respective year at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
Two links to make you think
Myself and Gav are both up to our eyeballs at the moment. Here’s two quick items worth reading:
Firstly, Mark Tighe’s post on his blog following his story in the latest edition of the Sunday Times. He writes in more detail about the problems, obfuscations and delays he has incurred in attempting to obtain information on the night of the bank guarantee via FOI.
Our original request for these documents was made on October 3rd, 2008. Within four weeks Finance had replied with a big bundle of paperwork. Unfortunately the documents released were useless. They consisted of speeches made by Brian Lenihan after the guarantee was announced and a series of PQs answered in the Dail. They basically sent us a load of documents that were already in the public domain. A complete waste of paper.
I instantly sent in the €75 appeal cheque and asked the Department to stop taking the michael. We hadn’t asked for public documents created after the guarantee. We wanted the internal notes, memos, emails etc that would shed a little insight in to how the guarantee meetings of September 29/30 came about.
Hit the link above and read the rest.
Secondly, Edward McGarr of McGarr Solicitors seems to have noticed something interesting relating to the DCC/Fyffes/Jim Flavin decision. The post is too short to pull a quote from, you’ll have to head over there to find out anything more.