Author: Mark Coughlan

Comedic interlude courtesy of Bill “Still a Fine Gael Councillor” Tormey,

Open letter to George Lee – Bill Tormey

Highlights include the misspelling of An Taoiseach’s name, use of the word “prat”, and this trio eyebrow-twisting paragraphs:

I never regarded you as a heavy economic commentator because I never read you in the Irish Times or other broadsheet. I rarely watch TV news. I read newspapers by the tonne. Sad B……d amn’t I?

Fine Gael would be much better with you in the Lindon [sic] Johnson position inside the tent. I wish you all the best with RTE and challenge you to publish your prescriptions for Ireland in peer reviewed academic journals.

You could start your renewed career by chairing a tv series on how to save Ireland. Your point about export driven recovery is prescient. We must get services going but selling services at home as well as overseas is crucial.

Not forgetting this…

Well Mr Lee, like you I was drawn to politics to try to change society and make things fairer. John Kennedy, Supermac, Harold Wilson, Sean Lemass, John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Lindon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Donogh O’Malley, Pierre Trudeau, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Francois Mitterand, Pope John 23rd , Indira Ghandi, Jomo Kenyatta, Michael Okpara, Justin Keating, Brendan Corish, Declan Costello, Garrett Fitzgerald, Ruairi Quinn, Dick Spring, Peter Barry, Fergus Finlay, Pat Magner, Nelson Mandela, Michael Gorbachev, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, Ted Kennedy were all significant influences on me. James Reston, Dick Walsh, Olivia O’Leary and many other journalists also played key roles in my formation. However, I have never been a mere fan, more a critical admirer of each.

Supermac? Harold Mcmillan? Or the guy who does the chippers?

Anyway, enjoy. Don’t you go saying we never have no craic n’or nuttin’ on TheStory.

… him?

Suppose it’s hard to ignore it, but I don’t want to give the George Lee (or ‘glee’, as it’s being refered to on Twitter) thing too much attention. It’s a big story politically, not so important nationally.

Unfortunately it has come on the same day Simon Carswell’s journalism put a dent in the Nama spin-machine. That story would have led the news agenda for a few days had it not been for Mr Lee. 

Props to Matt Cooper and The Last Word team on Today FM for staying focused, for the most part, on the really important story; they even managed to get Brian Lenihan on the show today. I think it might the first time since the week the finance minister announced/admitted (?) he had a serious health issue that he has spoken live on air. You can listen to the minister ducking and diving, spinning and weaving, at this link.

George Lee ending his political ‘career’ will be a blow to Fine Gael. However, with an election not likely for another two years it probably won’t seriously impact the lives of anyone other than political junkies and Fine Gael members (and RTÉ News managers) in any real terms. 

The political correspondents who’ve been selling the “Fianna Fáil is dead” line in post-mortem-ish pre-mortem articles since the local elections will begin revising their opinions.

Enda Kenny will come under more scrutiny.

We’ll see if Eamon Gilmore actually believes Labour can lead the next government from his reaction to the sniping at Kenny.

The Fine Gael communications strategists will look to roll Kenny out for a do-or-die big-stage interview in a few weeks or months time.

It’ll work or it won’t.

Kenny will lead the party into the next election, or he won’t.

Someone will win the election. Someone will be Taoiseach.

Either way, Nama will still be around in two years time, and for a while longer yet to come.

Shane Coleman reports on the closing of a controversial tax relief in today’s Tribune.

Section 4 of the Finance Bill, published last week, ends the benefit-in-kind tax exemption on employer- provided art objects introduced by [Bertie] Ahern, as a late amendment to the 1994 Finance Act, despite opposition from the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners.

This tax exemption became a major issue over a decade ago when the Sunday Tribune revealed the measure had benefited businessman Ken Rohan and that it was applied retrospectively for the previous 12 years, effectively neutralising any efforts to pursue Rohan for back taxes.

Ken Rohan, a multi-millionaire property developer, was tapped for donations to Fianna Fáil while Bertie Ahern was finance minister between 1992 and ’94. He owned a mansion in Wicklow known as Charville House. The mansion was built in 1797 and is described by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage as “one of the most memorable country houses in Wicklow”. As you might imagine, it’s worth a few quid.

Over a number of years Rohan decorated the gaff with many pieces of period furniture, antiques and artworks using money from his company Airspace Investments. The items were therefore owned by Airspace but Rohan was benefiting personally from them. The Revenue Commissioners thus defined them as being a benefit-in-kind of Rohan’s employment by Airspace and sent him a tax bill for 12 percent of the items value and two years of their use. This amounted to €150,000 per annum. Rohan disputed the bill. He knew that Revenue knew if they got payment for two years they could seek payment for the other ten years which he had personally enjoyed and used items bought by Airspace. Continue reading “The closure of one man's tax relief”

In September last year the Review Body on Higher Remuneration in the Public Sector said ‘performance-related’ bonuses should be suspended and pay cuts made on basic salary, Government continuously cited their report in relation to pay cuts. The Review Body did not recommend the ‘bonuses’ be included as salary. The Government, in the Budget, agreed. They stated cuts were to be made in the method detailed in the report – i.e. bonuses suspended and salaries cut. See Martin Wall’s report post-Budget report in The Irish Times here for more.

Then the Government, following lobbying, suddenly decided to change how the cuts would be implemented, but only for a small sector of the public service. That sector includes assistant secretaries and deputy secretaries in the the Civil Service, senior personnel in the Army and An Garda, and positions like Ombudsman and Director of Corporate Enforcement. Each would have been taking home somewhere between €130,000 and €200,000 including bonuses. Harry McGee wrote an explanatory article on the topic in early January. Since then the numbers included have expanded. On the latest count almost 600 people fall into the group (the public sector would have tens of thousands of staff, obviously).

Instead of suspending bonuses and cutting basic salaries it was decided that for this elite group alone the bonuses would be counted as part of their salaries. This, the Government said, was because the vast majority of them received ‘performance-related’ bonuses no matter how they performed, thus the bonuses were, in practical terms, part of their salaries.

The eventual outcome; the group did not have their take home pay slashed due to the suspension of bonuses and further cutting of basic salary, as recommended by the Review Body and supported in the Budget by Government. Now bonuses are being are included in their pre-Budget salary totals and this figure is being cut by between 8 and 12. Therfore their basic pay cut is something around 3 or 4 percent. A clerical officer will be cut 5 percent, there are no bonuses, performance-related or otherwise available at these lower grades. Persepective: A clerical officer’s annual salary would have equaled something close to an assistant secretary’s ‘performance-related’ bonus.

The Government’s change is quite clearly a U-turn. It’s quite clearly disgraceful. It’s quite clearly immoral.

Despite just how clear it is, this week the Tanáiste Mary Coughlan claimed “the review body on higher level pay indicated that the bonus was indicatively part of their salary” in the Dáil.

Considering her Fianna Fáil colleague, Martin Mansergh, had already read the facts into the Dail record when putting the Budget legislation through the House:

The Government has accepted the review body’s recommendation that there be no increases in the pay of the higher public service groups, including any adjustments that might otherwise arise under national agreements, before the end of 2012. It has also accepted the recommendation that performance related award schemes in the public service should be suspended.

… and that this view could only be accepted by anyone of sane mind upon reading the report, any logical person would have to conclude that the Tánaiste has either lied to the Dáil and/or is far out of her depth.

Or is not of sane mind.

This post was scheduled to go up at 6pm tonight but it’s on Liveline now, so…

This article from the Limerick Post is worth reading. It tells us a company whose owners owe massive amounts of money to Anglo Irish Bank will be providing legal advice to NAMA.

LIMERICK solicitors Dermot G O’Donovan, three of whose partners are directors of the Fordmount Group, now in receivership, have been appointed by NAMA to provide legal services.

Fordmount is believed to owe in excess of €100m to Anglo Irish Bank.

NAMA will appoint more than 50 firms to sit on a panel of legal advisors. Being on the panel does not necessarily mean a company will be called to provide advice. Indeed the reason NAMA would claim such a large number of advisors is required is – for want of better wording – to dilute any conflicts of interest. Still, if claims of conflicts of interest are raised, it’s worth taking a look at them.

The story is also perhaps illustrative of just how interconnected the various elite facets of Irish society have become in the last ten or so years.

Thanks to the people on Twitter who highlighted the story this morning.

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.

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”