Author: Mark Coughlan

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.

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”.

Banking reports "published"…

The banking reports are out. Well, they’re out if you’re a journalist in the Leinster House lobby or member of a Government party who’s prepared to read them without removing them from the House before 415pm. Oh and don’t report on them until then either, they’re embargoed.

These public documents – written and researched at the cost of the taxpayer – will not be available to the Opposition or to the… errr… public… until they’re published online at 415 or so.

Great start to a process of openness and transparency. Give them to the political hacks but not the parliament and only let the hacks read them under the supervision of Government. Superb. Are you happy with this situation Mr Gormley?

Once they’re published online we’ll highlight interesting paragraphs in a following post.

Preliminary Report Into Ireland’s Banking Crisis 31 May 2010

Watch out Mr Tubridy

… Michael Lowry is after your job. For the last few weeks the Tipp TD has been running a competition (constituents-only!) for Oxegen tickets. Of course, his only motivation for doing so is because he “understands and appreciates the importance of music festivals, particularly to young people”. Did I say ‘constituents-only’ already?

He has now put the prize draw on Youtube… see below.

The last five seconds are golden.

Someone smells a general election. Someone smells a tribunal report. Someone wants to come up smelling of roses.

Deaths in Garda custody

Another person died in Garda custody yesterday. These stories are consistently let slide.

Below is a list of known deaths in custody since 1997 compiled over a few hours. I don’t think it to be absolute, though I cannot find reports of others after quite some time searching. Most have source links though some were found using Lexis Nexis. I found reports about 36 deaths. There has been two or three deaths each year on average, yet already this year four people have died in the care of the Gardai.

Notably all those who died were males. A disproportionate number seem to have died in one of three Dublin stations, Kilmainham, Tallaght or Store Street. This perhaps could be attributed to the size of these districts.

List below the fold. Split per year.

Continue reading “Deaths in Garda custody”