Mark Coughlan – Page 9

Fine Gael and O'Flynn

The defence used by The Very Different Party to Fianna Fáil for tapping up a Nama 10 developer for donations is not inspiring.

The main opposition party has long criticised Fianna Fail’s record of raising money from property tycoons, citing a “cosy relationship” between the government party and developers.

Mr O’Flynn is company chairman and managing director of Cork-based O’Flynn Construction, which recently transferred debts approaching €1bn to the National Asset Management Agency.

The party’s finance spokesman Michael Noonan last night said the exclusive fundraiser at the K Club last week was above board, but would not comment further.

“Our fundraising is in compliance with the rules,” he told the Irish Independent.

Mr O’Flynn ‘sponsored’ the 18th hole for the fundraiser for an undisclosed sum. If done through his company the figure will need to be published in the annual accounts. Fine Gael will only have to disclose a figure if the profit from the sponsorship is above the ridiculously high declaration limit of €5037. However, they’ll not be required to provide documentary proof that the gross income minus the expenses for the day resulted in individual or collective breaches or non-breaches of the declarations. Of course, this all means that there will, almost guaranteed, be no breaches of the declaration limit on the day. Thus the undisclosed sum will likely remain undisclosed.

Hell, political parties aren’t even required to publish accounts, despite SIPO and the Council of Europe Group Against Corruption saying it should be a basic standard for more than a decade. So we’ll no little about what sums passed between the party and those in attendance on the day.

In recent years the opposition has taken the moral high ground on ‘legal corruption’ and accountability issues, citing the Galway tent consistently as an example of how Fianna Fáil has been ethically compromised. Yet they rarely if ever attempt to hold themselves above the standard of the “board”.

The SIPO rules were written and implemented under Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael and Labour say they need to be reformed; what’s stopping Labour and Fine Gael from holding themselves to the standards now that they wish to implemented if they get into power? Why not take the initiative and publish accounts, expenses and all donations above a lower minimum limit, as an excercise in transparency?

Politics over democracy, innit?

The Greens have their own standards for accepting donations. Praise deserved. Pity they don’t see fit to publish donations below the minimum declaration limits. All parties accept that the lower limits are too high, as far as I know. So what’s the problem?…

On that topic, I’m still waiting to see the transparency-related reforms detailed in the programme for government. Any news on that lobbyists’ register, Minister Gormley?

Digest – 18 July 2010

Oh, indeed.

HOME

Alexia Golez on innovation, or lack thereof, in Ireland.

Slugger on the coping stone incident in which a police officer was injured during the Ardoyne riots. Related; JC Skinner on why ‘Orangefest’ is wrong. BBC Northern Ireland political editor, Mark Davenport, ‘groundhog day revisited’.

Short recommended read of the week; Colm McCarthy on the the post-guarantee events at Anglo. What frustrating week, documents released, media tells us what everyone said, documents become secondary. Sue-pwerb. Debate has ended up as a Noonan-said-but-Fianna Fáiler-said waste of time. utterly stupid. No debate about why all this information is only emerging now, after several further chunks going the banks’ way.

Also, Karl Whelan ‘serious questions about post-guarantee Anglo policy‘.

Two new geolocation systems for Ireland launched.

New political parties are like buses. Unkie Dave on Direct Democracy and Green Party ‘splinter group’ Fís Nua.

Puckstown Lane on Seanie Fitzpatrick’s loans.

WORLD

Long form recommended reads of the week; Michael Yon continues to write about his time spent in Thailand during the red-shirt protests earlier this year. His ‘Even As The World Watched’ series focuses on media coverage of the situation, with an on-the-ground perspective. Parts one two three and four have been published so far, all image-heavy. Interesting reading and viewing.

John Naughten on one of golf’s more interesting characters, the Royal & Ancient Rabbit.

Ezra Klein understands the [massive] importance of rushes, archive and historical records.

Building your own editorial brand; by Deborah Bonello on videoreporter.com

If you’re in the least bit entrepreneurial and want to be known for your work rather than just the media you work for, then the web is huge opportunity for you. Yes, you may have to work for free to build up a volume of content, but it’s a much better way to spend your time than sitting in a newspaper office as an ‘intern’ waiting for someone to throw you a bone.

You get to decide your stories, and how to tell them, and you’ll learn a mountain about how to do it better along the way. Start innovating and get out there – it’s a much cooler way to get noticed, not only by existing media owners (mexicoreporter.com got me a job at the Los Angeles Times and my current employer, the FT), but perhaps even by your own, possibly paying, audience.

Now get out there and get on with it.

Feature-length recommended read of the week: A brief history of visualisation.

OTHER

Documentary; ‘638 ways to kill Castro‘. Channel 4 has put its 4 On Demand service on Youtube. Smart; go where the audience goes. Three adverts then the content. Lots of great stuff on that channel.

Richard Feyman explains, in the most amazing way, how eyes and light work.

The Game

Interesting that Paddy Kelly talks about to property developers and bankers referring to ‘the game’ today.

In The Wire they also refer to ‘The Game’, except there it’s to do with an addiction to drugs.

…

“I’ll take ‘bot three or fo’ hunned… million…”

“All in the game, yo. All in the game.”

And in The Game, the king stay the king. “And the rest of the mothafuckas on the team, they got his back, and they run so deep that the king really ain’t gotta do shit”.

"To inform… strategies… over the coming years"

The Health Information and Quality Authority has found “significant and serious shortcomings” in the standard of foster care provided by the HSE. That issue cannot be understated given the number of deaths of children in HSE care in recent years. Also this week the story rolled on about dental care being cut back from medical care holders to save money.

Additionally, management of Merlin Park Hospital in Galway revealed plans to suspend all elective surgeries for budgetary reasons; “the proposal would see the cancellation of hip replacements as well as spine, shoulder, hand, foot and ankle surgery” according to the Times. Merlin Park is just the most recent hospital to curtail services to save money.

All that follows weeks of coverage about severe understaffing in A&E units throughout the country due to a mis-advised HSE policy relating to junior doctors’ rotations.

So it’s most interesting to see on the ETenders website that the HSE is seeking tenders for a nationwide “Employee Engagement Survey Consultancy”. Wonder how many surgeries or dental visits you could get for that. The brief says “the results of this consultancy assignment will be used to inform the organisation strategies in these areas over the coming years.”

Isn’t that what the top brass, through the use of a chain of command, are supposed to do?

Missing following Morris

Gerard Cunningham, author of ‘Chaos and Conspiracy; The Framing of the McBrearty Family’, is on the ball as usual; see his latest post about developments following the Morris Tribunal.

[…] Missing are “Gardaí from all ranks involved in investigative interviewing”, “civil liberties groups” and “a psychologist and a psychiatrist who may be able to assist in the formulation of policy towards those subject to various relevant vulnerabilities or disabilities.”

One of my favourite blogs, I recommend subscribing.

Digest – July 12 2010

Words go here.

HOME

Anthony’s attic archives; nothing changed, nothing gained.

Abigail Reiley on life covering gory, and not so gory, crimes and trials.

P O’Neill is so feckin’ sharp. Read that this week. On Brian Cowen, quotes from Seamus Heaney and public service performance.

[Go read the post for context, t’is only a short one] More seriously, at which speech did he announce that his task force on transforming the public service had hit the ground running so well that it had already had its first meeting?

Both of them.

Charles O’Mahony of Human Rights in Ireland on cuts to disability services.

Friend of the blog and owner of global property portfolio, Frank Fahey, talks nonsense about property and Nama on Newstalk.

Suzy Byrne on the week the Seanad earned its keep.

Are you listening, local authorities? How to make local government data transparent, from the Guardian Data blog.

Ronan Lyons; ‘visualising the employment crisis, who has been worst hit?’

Wow. Bad call from HSBC. Come Here to Me! spots a corn-flake spitting inducing advertisment featuring the statue of Jim Larkin.

Seamus Coffey; The Two Irish Economies.

Constantin Gurdgiev kicks seven shades out of the Mortgages Arrears Group Report.

Apart from the report being about 18 months too late, I missed any actual solutions or actions that would help addressing these priorities. Instead, the report contains 44 pages of rather general, if lofty, talk about the need to do things, discuss things and agree to things. A handful of meaningful recommendations it contains actually set out nothing more than the best practices that all lenders should pursue regardless of the Working Group effort.

WORLD Continue reading “Digest – July 12 2010”

That Fás 'slush fund'

Fás is back on the news pages today, this time it’s about a “slush fund” which the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation is accused of ‘sponsoring’ between 2002 and 2008. The fund, also known as the Competency Development Programme, was a sort of grant scheme for organisations who were to use the money to up-skill staff. There are serious questions being raised about how it was administered and monitored.

The latest company which benefited from the CDP to come under the microscope is Foras Training. Today’s Irish Independent…

A COMPUTER-TRAINING company that falsified the number of people on its courses was paid almost €1.3m by the state agency FAS.

The midlands-based company — which was named in the Dail yesterday as Foras Training — claimed for people whom it had not trained.

It also had only one properly registered trainer out of 25 for courses that it delivered on behalf of FAS. The company printed its own training certificates, instead of registering them with a certifying body.

Furthermore, as Roisin Shortall noted at the Public Accounts Committee yesterday, bodies associated with social partnership benefited enormously from the CDP. Many of these bodies would have had representatives on the board of Fás. The Irish Times covers the committee meeting here.

A number of months ago myself and Gav began looking as Fás from a number of different angles. During that process we obtained documents relating to the CDP. These gave us list of companies and the figure for funding they received each year. Interestingly a large number of those in the CDP were local authorities. Why a semi-state body would be funding a state body to train civil servants, I struggle to understand.

I’ve put together a spreadsheet with the names of organisations who received funding, see below. The figures are not included as of yet because the spreadsheet was auto-extrapolated from PDFs of scanned pages; the software used to do this seems to have been confused by some fonts involved so the numbers would not be reliable if I were to publish them now. I’ll manually insert these into the spreadsheet in the coming week and post again then. I will say that the first thing I noticed was that the annual totals increased massively from just €500,000 in 2003 to more than €50 million a few years later, then fell by almost 50% afterwards. Strange, during a period of pretty much full employment.

Companies; Fás Competency Development Programme 2003-2008

Whatever about the annual totals or reasoning behind the fluctuations, that just half of the organisations in receipt of finding were being monitored for how they spent the money or who was being trained, according to the C&AG, is scary. That’s a helluva lotta money slushing about…

The main beneficiaries, at first look at the spreadsheets, were IBEC, ICTU, Mandate and ISME. It appears the Unions and ‘representative’ bodies between them took a large slice of the whole pie. There are also few companies with intriguing directors listed. I may get around to these in the next blog post, but I’ll have to pick a few legal brains first

ST: 'Fas in new cronyism row over lease'

Very busy. Will add context later. Our piece from this week’s Sunday Times. Related documents here.

FAS, the state training agency, is renting a warehouse from the former tax partner of a consultancy firm which has been “consistently successful” in tendering for work from the agency.

Unit 9 at Tolka Valley business park in Finglas, north Dublin, has been rented since 2000 from Terry Oliver, formerly of OSK, an accounting and business consultancy. Internal audits have concluded that Greg Craig, the former head of corporate affairs at Fas, had a conflict of interest in awarding contracts to OSK because of his close personal relationship with Oliver.

Craig was suspended as the audit was compiled, and has since returned to the state training agency as head of health and safety.

According to documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information act, the Finglas warehouse was to be used to train apprentice plumbers and electricians. It appears no-one has ever been trained there and instead it has been used for storage or left empty due to concerns about it meeting planning standards. The rent is more than €40,000 per annum. Fas was given legal advice in November 2000 that it should ensure the building was fit-for-purpose and met the required standards before signing the lease. It is not clear if this happened.

Before the lease was signed, emails between Fas staff and solicitors noted that the then manager of finance and administration at the Finglas training centre, Patrick Kivlehan, wanted to see the lease signed off “as expeditiously as possible”. Kivlehan is now head of internal audit at Fas.
In 2003, local management attempted to cancel the lease as the building was surplus to requirement. Oliver disputed the cancellation. Local management was later overruled. In 2005 the lease was extended to run until November 2011.

In February 2007 Richard Keegan, a Fas Building Services specialist, was asked to assess the site’s suitability for training apprentices. He found it didn’t have a “fundamental requirement” to hold courses for trainee plumbers and apprentices working with electronics. Keegan also noted in an email to management that the unit was not fire-safety compliant and would require planning permission before it could be used. He said the local Fas centre had “closed down the building in the past” because it “didn’t meet basic health and safety standards”. Email records show that last October, local Fas management again attempted to get out of the lease. “We looked into negotiating an agreement with the landlord but there was not a successful outcome,” wrote Robert Nicholson, a local manager. Legal advice was that the lease was “watertight”.

Nicholson said that altering the building would not be cost effective, nor would sub-letting, as the market for that type of site was too weak and “significant work” would be required to bring it up to the required standard for a tenant. It is believed Fas has paid nearly €400,000 in rent to Oliver, since the lease began. Thousands more has been spent on maintenance costs. Oliver refused to answer questions about the building, claiming it was a matter for Fas. The training agency confirmed that the warehouse is being examined as part of an ongoing internal audit. Internal auditors in Fas have already concluded that there was a “conflict of interest” arising from the fact Oliver and Craig were friends. Oliver, who retired recently from OSK, provided the Fas executive with personal financial advice.

OSK was found to have done a considerable amount of consultancy work for Fas in the early part of the decade, the majority of which related to corporate affairs. “OSK has been consistently successful when applying for work from corporate affairs, whether directly, via advertising agencies, or via Fas procurement,” an internal report concluded.

Digest – July 4 2010

Usual Sunday round-up. Love it or leave it, love. Home is weak again, I must be tuned out? Let me know.

HOME

Irish man in London has free burritos for a year. Decides to bring a random woman out for a free burrito each week then blog about it. Makes for a great blog.

Gerry Adams; ‘where you live and how it effects you‘.

Iain Nash on the Stag Hunting Bill and missed policy-and-politics-related points.

David Manning: The false reality of news journalism. Thought-provoker.

WORLD

Andrew Sullivan; ‘getting shit done‘. The uselessly short attention span of the media, and damage it causes. If I were to recommend one link to click in this post, it’d that’un…

ConservativeHome notes Tony Blair is to be given a medal for his support of ‘liberty’. Jesus.

Tech Interlude: Stephen Fry on the iPhone 4.

Sociological Images: the personification of nations;

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

Glenn Greenwald on the manipulation of the word ‘terrorist’. One wo/man’s freedom fighter; Tzipi Lizni rails against palestinian terrorists in an interview with The New York Times, then says…

NYT: Your parents were among the country’s [Israel’s] founders.

Livni: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

News report from the New York Times, December 30 1947…

IRGUN BOMB KILLS 11 ARABS, 2 BRITONS

A bomb thrown by the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi from a speeding taxi today killed eleven Arabs and two British policemen and wounded at least thirty-two Arabs by the Jerusalem Damascus Gate, the same place where a similar bombing took place sixteen days ago.

Again, Glenn Greenwald; on journalism the difference between serving and afflicting the powerful.

Greenslade; the amazing media story being the McChrystal interview.

Dilbert dude, Scott Adams; ‘self-programming‘.

Rob Crilly: whose agenda is it anyway? Media coverage of Pakistan. Links.

Remember the video that went viral of Oakland police shooting dead Oscar Grant on the BART line? The deliberations have begun after a three-week trial. Best coverage piece here.

Ezra Klein on the machinations of the Nevada senate race being dominated by ‘jobs job jobs’ (or lack thereof). Prehaps insightful to Irish boys and gurls.

OTHER

Lefties will love this one. Video; crisis of capital. Loving the animation.

Last minutes with Oden; beautiful, touching, short film about a man and his dying dog.

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

Sunday Times piece on Fás

We’ve a story in today’s Sunday Times about an interesting building that Fás has been renting from a Mr Terry Oliver. It’s behind a paywall, so no link, unfortunately. It took several months to compile through a series of FOI requests which were funded from you lot, the people who do be readin’ this here blog.

The Sunday Times piece opens…

FAS, the state training agency, is renting a warehouse from the former tax partner of a consultancy firm which has been “consistently successful” in tendering for work from the agency.

Unit 9 at Tolka Valley business park in Finglas, north Dublin, has been rented since 2000 from Terry Oliver, formerly of OSK, an accounting and business consultancy. Internal audits have concluded that Greg Craig, the former head of corporate affairs at Fás, had a conflict of interest in awarding contracts to OSK because of his close personal relationship with Oliver.

I will post it in full on Monday.

For those of you who bought a copy of the paper and therefore have the context, here’s the documents…

—
1) November 2000 – Solicitors refer to finance and admin manager asking that the lease be concluded “as expeditiously as possible”, before the lease was signed off.

2) Fire safety compliance questioned if building altered. Work was later done on the building.

3) Mr Oliver disputes cancellation of lease in reply to letter from training centre.

4) March 2003 – Manager of training centre writes to Mr Oliver to confirm they will seek to cancel the lease.

5) Email from Richard Keegan who assessed the site and found it was not fire safety compliant; did not have a fundamental requirement for running applicable courses; had been closed in the past as it didn’t meet basic health and safety regulations; does not have ventilation for gas welding… “not to mention all the other regulations it has been in breach of in the past”.

6) June 2007 – Concerns raised about the effectiveness of running a plumbing course in a building with no gas facilities.

7) Manager of training centre says that sub-letting or amending the site would not be cost-effective, notes site would require significant work to make it suitable for a prospective tenant.

8) October 2009 – Letter from local manager tells of how they had attempted to get out of the lease recently once more, notes the lease was “watertight”.

9) Example cheque for monthly rent.

10) Example invoice.

Copy of inquiry sent to Fás Press office last Tuesday. Please note that most of the questions listed could be answered from the 300+ pages of documents we obtained under FOI for this story, we were looking to get useful quotes.

—

This type of work is utterly uneconomical for two freelance journalists to undertake. Even without including costs for our time spent working on the story, we’d still make a loss simply on expenses incurred. All money received from the Sunday Times goes back into the FOI fund.

I’ll post some additional information later in the week.

Knackered, until next time.