11.30.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 12:54 pm by Sarah
I must say I did enjoy McDowell’s taunt to Sinn Fein yesterday that they needn’t go knocking on the door of the White House for a St. Patrick’s Day invitation if they refuse to take the word of Ms Rice. However, one can’t help noticing that that comment made all the news bulletins yesterday while Enda Kenny’s contribution was ignored, despite the fact that Enda got the better of him later on..From the ever reasonable Michael O’Regan in the IT
“More of the same was expected when Enda Kenny demanded an explanation for the “catastrophic” state of neurosurgery services around the country. According to experts, key services to brain injury victims are on the verge of collapse, and are worse now than they were 30 years ago.
Deputy Kenny outlined a frightening litany of neglect, from bed and staff shortages to equipment used in surgery that regularly breaks down.
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that neurosurgical services cannot be supported by clapped out machinery and long waiting lists. You don’t even have to be a famously intelligent barrister to know that the situation, as outlined by Enda, is a disgrace.
The Tánaiste listened with a sour expression – maybe because he would shortly have to stand up and talk his way around this debacle, and he wasn’t in the comforting confines of the Four Courts either.
Enda wound up to a withering finish. “I’d like to ask you, Tánaiste, to tell the House, tell the Dáil,” he began. “No. On second thoughts, don’t tell the Dáil, because you treat this House with derision and contempt anyway.
“Tell the camera, because you love the camera . . . and tell through the lens to the people of this country waiting for neurosurgery treatment, what you and your Government have done in the last 10 years to deal with this problem.”
Tánaiste McDowell was taken aback by nice Enda’s anger. The best he could manage in response was a feeble “obviously the deputy got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
Then he reverted to Bertie’s standard trick and read out a long list of statistics to highlight all the great measures introduced by the Government to improve the health system. But he couldn’t get his head around the neurosurgery question, so he ignored it. The Opposition was disgusted, and let him know.
Tánaiste McDowell didn’t take it well. “I think you are making a collective disgrace of yourselves, and if you don’t want to hear the answers, I won’t go any further,” he pouted. A spot of Violet Elizabeth-style scweaming loomed large.
As Michael sulked and considered his options, Enda increased the pressure. Did the Tánaiste really expect the 426 people on the waiting list for brain surgery at Beaumont hospital to listen to that “rubbish” he had just spouted and think it alright? Taking refuge in statistics never worries Bertie. But Michael, to his credit, appeared embarrassed.
“The deputy seems to be engaging in amateur theatricals here” wailed the acting head of Government. “Again, the shouting starts,” he huffed.
“Answer the question!” returned the chorus.
“No. That’s the end of it,” sniffed Michael, stung. He sat down and stayed quiet.
If he had a ball he would have gone home with it. And there it was. His perfect Reverse Violet. None of the usual scweams, just a sullen silence.
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte was amazed. “I didn’t know there was any question that the Tánaiste couldn’t answer,” he marvelled. “And now he’s gone into a sulk.”
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11.29.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 11:53 am by Sarah
First, for Conor, who gets me.
Cycle: Day 4 which is strange because I really should only be due today. I think that would also explain my over-involvement in the Denis posts. I got really wound up about that. I think my cycle has speeded up so that I ovulate more. This body of mine wants to be pregnant again. I find myself feeling jealous of pregnant women on the street and looking at babies too much. The mind will resist though. Being pregnant is fine. And I adore the babies when they are little, but I have proved singularly incapable of coping with rampaging toddlers. I would love another child but only when I can cope again. I need to get a job, get out of the house and rejoin the human race for a while to restore my mental balance. If I ever had that.
Mood: Calm and optimistic. I hope to achieve many household tasks today
Children: both in creche. Hurrah!
Wearing: a favourite top. Black and white horizontal stripes (think Gondolier). Soft and warm. Easily washed. Years old. Looks respectable. The too big jeans are still on, but belt holding things up. Shoes are a triumph. The flat soft leather Nine West casuals that are as comfortable as runners but aren’t runners. HE HATES runners. He’s probably right.
Hair: Not bad. Got it cut and coloured last week so we are still at the shiny and manageable stage. I am wearing a hair band so its off my face which I know can be a little infantile, but also fresh looking.
Legs: Despite my earlier optimism that taking the anti-histamine would relieve post-wax allergy, I am SO DEPRESSED because in the end it didn’t work. I have only one remaining theory. For the past few months I always seem to end up getting the wax when I am in full throes of PMT so perhaps there is a hormonal explanation. I will give the wax ONE more go when I not endocronicologically (alright, I made up the that word, I am sure it must exist) challenged. If it doesn’t work that’s it, its Gillette Lady shave for me.
Now, to business. I cleaned the sitting room over-mantelpiece mirror earlier. This task used to be performed, in my childhood anyway, using newspapers because it didn’t leave fluff or streaks and left the glass really shiny. But this morning it just streaked so badly, I had to use a cloth. I wonder have the ingredients of newspaper paper changed?
I listened to Dermot Ahern on Morning Ireland today saying that HE had conducted enquiries with American officials which satisfied him that planes in Shannon were not involved in rendition. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight. This is the same Dermot Ahern who was sent to London to interview who was it? Gilmartin? The Murphy guy? And said there was no evidence that Ray Burke had been bribed. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. He hardly has credibility on the enquiry front, does he?
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11.28.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 1:17 pm by Sarah
Meath Gaelic footballer Graham Geraghty is to seek a Fine Gael nomination to run in the new three-seater Meath West constituency at a convention on Monday, December 11th.
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11.26.06
Posted in Feminism, International Politics at 1:40 pm by Sarah
The conventional wisdom says that Denis O’Brien Is a tax-avoiding, politician-bribing, overweight, over-rich bastard with dodgy hair. So when 12 ordinary citizens awarded him €750,000 in damages against the Mirror Group last Thursday, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I never thought he’d get a fair hearing.
By awarding such a large sum of money to a billionaire with a big wad stashed under his mattress, the jury sent a clear message. It wanted to punish a newspaper for printing blatantly defamatory lies and then refusing to apologise. A newspaper that was keeping its fingers crossed that the Joe Soaps on the jury would be sufficiently poisoned by a decade-long nightmare during which O’Brien’s reputation has been almost destroyed.
Fortunately, I was wrong. There are Irish people who believe that just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re a crook.
Media caterwauling over the size of the award is in full swing, but the jury’s logic was flawless. To make an impact, the award had to hurt. The Mirror admitted that its original story — claiming O’Brien had bribed Ray Burke to the tune of €30,000 in order to get the licence for 98FM — was wrong. But that didn’t stop its senior counsel dragging the businessman through a litany of unproven allegations that have consumed so much time and about € 100m in costs at the Moriarty tribunal.
Far from damaging him further, all it demonstrated to the jury was that the Mirror hadn’t learnt its lesson. A graceful apology would have been cheaper than using O’Brien as a punch bag.
Everyone brings their own agenda to the O’Brien story. Mine is straightforward: in 1994 O’Brien gave me a job with Esat Telecom. Working for Denis was a crazy experience: his management style swung from tantrum-throwing rows to party-throwing love-ins.
One day you were about to be fired for not addressing a letter correctly, the next he was sending a doctor and a flask of chicken soup round to your house because he’d heard you were sick. It was nerve-wracking, fantastic craic, and a superb education in business management.
With banks threatening to pull the plug, aggressive sales targets to be met, and civil servants to keep happy, it was a high- pressured and crazy environment.
Eventually I couldn’t stick the pressure any more, and when the mobile phone licence was won, I went to work for Esat Digifone, in which O’Brien had no executive role. So no, I didn’t get to cash in.
Instead, I may have to pay the costs in relation to evidence I was required to give to the tribunal. But I don’t begrudge a penny to those who did become millionaires out of Esat when BT bought the business. They worked hard and it paid off.
It’s depressing that some people remain convinced that O’Brien is rich because he was “handed” a licence at the knock-down price of IR£15m. Either he bribed Michael Lowry, the then communications minister, to get it, or he got lucky. I admit I am biased, but I am absolutely convinced Esat won that licence fair and square.
To the “got lucky” brigade I say: many entrepreneurs got rich in the dotcom fever of the 1990s; not many have repeated their success. O’Brien has built companies in both the radio and telecommunications industries all around the world. You can’t dismiss repeated success as luck.
Others complain that having been “given” a licence to print money, O’Brien hot-footed it to Portugal to avoid capital gains tax when he sold off Esat, but this country has lots of tax exiles — Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit and JP McManus among them.
Every accountant in Ireland will advise their clients to get involved in schemes to avoid tax. But only O’Brien seems to be singled out for abuse.
Personally, I think he should pay tax here, but you can’t blame him for feeling disloyal to an exchequer that is funding the inquisition at Dublin Castle. The final bill for that exercise will be a multiple of O’Brien’s tax liability.
As for winning the licence on the basis of a bribe, for that to be true would require a conspiracy worthy of an Oliver Stone movie. Two dozen civil servants have given sworn testimony that Lowry had absolutely nothing to do with the decision to award
Esat Digifone the mobile-phone licence. Michael Andersen, a consultant used by the department, has said that not only was Esat’s bid the best in the competition, it was the best he’d ever seen. Yet the conspiracy theorists insist on propagating bizarre scenarios in which Lowry was of assistance to Esat.
A favourite story goes that the original plan to auction off the mobile-phone licence was going to be disastrous because Esat couldn’t afford the expected price of IR£40m-IR£50m.
A few weeks before the bids were due in, the terms of the competition were changed. Only a fee of IR£15m had to be paid, which gave Esat a chance to compete with big international players such as AT&T, which was also after the licence.
So did Lowry cap the fee in order to help Esat? No. The European Union had just ruled in relation to a row about competition for a second mobile-phone licence in Italy. The EU said it wasn’t fair that the winner had to pay an enormous fee, decided by auction, for its licence, while the incumbent state operator had a free licence. In the interests of fair competition, the state operator would have to pay the same fee as the new entrant.
You can imagine the cursing in Telecom Eireann when that ruling came in. It meant that if the winner of the second mobile- phone licence in Ireland had to pay IR£50m, then Telecom’s mobile wing, Eircell, would have to pay IR£50m too. So the competition was changed from an auction to a capped fee. But that wasn’t to help Esat, it was to help Telecom Eireann.
However, the story that Lowry capped the fee to help O’Brien is sexier and easier to understand than some boring explanation to do with EU competition law, so that’s the one you’ll read about.
I asked O’Brien recently why he continued the legal battle to clear his name. “You’ve all that money; would you not just go home and forget about it?” He didn’t hesitate: “No,” he said. “You have to fight them. You can’t let them get away with this.”
Now that a High Court jury has vindicated him, I have no doubt O’Brien will be spurred on in his fight.
But I fear the court of public opinion will not give him a victory as clear-cut as the one he won last week.
Update: this column was called “courageous” and “excellent” on Marian Finucane’s show this morning. Listen here and fast forward to 1hr22. 
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11.23.06
Posted in Feminism at 6:56 pm by Sarah
From ireland.com.
O’Brien wins record damages in libel case
The highest award ever recorded in the history of libel cases in Ireland has been given to businessman Denis O’Brien after he won damages of €750,000 in his case against the Mirror Group of Newspapers over articles published in the Irish Mirrorin 1998.
The articles, published over three pages, alleged Mr O’Brien had paid £30,000 to Ray Burke for the purpose of securing a licence to broadcast for the 98FM radio station. The Mirror had admitted the article in question was untrue and defamatory of Mr O’Brien and the case was before the court only to assess the amount of damages to be paid.
However, Mr O’Brien had previously been awarded a sum of €250,000 over the case but the award had been overturned by the Supreme Court which found that amount to be “disproportionately high”. Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne ordered immediate payment of the €250,000 but put a stay on the rest of the award, pending a possible appeal. Mr O’Brien had taken his case against the Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd, the then editor in chief of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan and the then editior of the Irish Mirror Neil Leslie arising from an article published on June 10th, 1998.
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11.22.06
Posted in Feminism, Sunday Times Columns at 9:43 pm by Sarah
Is life too short to push soup through a sieve? I did it today, following instructions from the brother-in-law, for a new chilli soup recipe. I think its a blender job next time.
The draft exclusion is working a treat.
Got the legs waxed. I complained to therapist about my reaction to the wax recently. She said – take an anti-histamine when you go home.Brilliant!!! Took one. So far, all seems well. However, she said that my practice of chopping and changing therapists is not doing my legs any good because different therapists pull the wax off in different directions and the hair grows back then in funny directions. So you should stick to the one person. I wonder if that’s true?
I got round to reading the Sunday papers. I liked Vincent Browne’s SBPost column on Baby Ann.
He says
“Five members of the Supreme Court decreed on Monday last week that a two-and-a-half-year-old child, who had bonded closely with would-be adoptive parents who, everyone agreed, were loving, supportive and devoted to the child, had to be removed from the society of her loving would-be adoptive parents and placed in the custody of her natural parents.
The reason for this was that there was no ‘‘compelling reason” to deprive the child of constitutional right to be reared and educated by her natural parents, who had married since the child had first been placed for adoption…..
The judges said the Constitution gave such prominence to the family and the rights of the family that only when there were ‘‘compelling reasons” – and the threshold for this was very high”
He then goes onto recall another case
“On January 23, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a judgment in a case known as the Lobe case. Unlike the baby Ann case, the judges in the Lobe case were in disagreement.
The judges in the majority were Ronan Keane, Susan Denham, Hugh Geoghegan, Adrian Hardiman and John Murray. The judges in the minority were Catherine McGuinness and Nial Fennelly.
Three of the judges in the majority in this Lobe case – Murray, Hardiman and Geoghegan – decreed in the baby Ann case last Monday that baby Ann deserved to be in the company of her natural parents.
Almost irrespective.
In the Lobe case, the judges were asked to decide whether an Irish citizen child – that is, a child who was Irish and had full entitlement to Irish citizenship – could be deprived of the company of her natural parents, who were facing deportation.
There had been a case about this 13 years previously, the Fajujonu case. In that case, the Supreme Court held that only in the most exceptional of circumstances could the parents of Irish citizen children be deported. But in the Lobe case, Murray, Hardiman and Geoghegan decided that there would not have to be such exceptional circumstances and the deportation could go ahead to protect the integrity of the asylum system.
The entitlement of the Irish citizen child to the company and custody of his/her natural parents didn’t matter. The ‘‘family”, of which this child was a part, had none of the entitlements that the Constitution provided. The mother and father of a young Irish infant could be railroaded out of the country and too bad about the child – they did not quite put it like that, but that is what it amounted to.
Now isn’t it amazing that the judges who thought it alright to separate the Lobe child from her natural parents should think it was impermissible to separate baby Ann from her natural parents, even though Ann regards another couple as her father and mother?
In the Lobe case, the child was black, but with all the constitutional entitlements that baby Ann has, because that black child was an Irish citizen.
So why should the rights of the Lobe child be any different from the rights of baby Ann?
If it was impermissible to separate baby Ann from her natural parents, why was it permissible to separate the Lobe child from her natural parents?
Or, conversely, if it was impermissible to separate baby Ann from her natural parents, why it was alright to separate the Lobe child from her natural parents? Odd that.”
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 1:07 pm by Sarah
Alright, so I’ve turned into my father and I seek out drafts relentlessly.
1. Installation of roller blind (good blackout quality) on kitchen window. Its white and discreet so does not wreck nice window. And wow!!
2. Put draft excluder under front door. Well rolled up blanket. Proper draft excluder to be acquired. But UNBELIEVABLE difference. There was a gale force wind coming under that door.
By christmas I’ll have this house sealed. And we’ll die from oxygen deprivation or something.
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11.20.06
Posted in Feminism at 1:33 pm by Sarah
John Waters reads the Supreme Court judgement and highlights some issues ignored by the meeja last week but I think were maybe published in one Sunday paper (can’t remember which one).
“Many disturbing details emerged in the judgments which were left unreported or glossed over in media attempts to use the case as a battering ram against the Constitution. Several of the judges noted the shameful treatment of the parents by some of those organising this botched adoption. Amazingly, it emerges that some of the HSE social workers involved were already acquainted with the couple seeking to adopt.
Does this not amount to a clear conflict of interest? Mr Justice Hardiman pointedly observed: “It was always unfortunate, and became more unfortunate as time and events moved on, that the proposed adopters were not, as I presume they normally would be, strangers to the parents’ social worker. When this fact is viewed in association with some of the language used, an element of alarm on the part of the mother is in my view understandable, not simply on the basis of the emotions which might be attributed to her, but on a wholly objective basis. Equally, she felt that she was being stalled and I cannot find that that feeling was objectively unreasonable either.”
Much media coverage sought to portray the parents as taking advantage of a technicality within the Constitution and enhancing their rights by virtue of what, it was implied, was a bogus marriage. Reading the judgments, the issues that emerge are the parents’ subjection to enormous pressures, unwarranted delays, denial of information about their rights and emotional blackmail as part of the effort to dissuade them from reclaiming their daughter after they decided to do so in September 2005.
The trial judge, Mr Justice MacMenamin, in all material contexts accepted the evidence of social workers rather than the parents.
Mr Justice Geoghegan drily observed: “I think that where there was a conflict of evidence of that kind the evidence must be regarded as inconclusive.” I beg readers to seek out the judgments on the internet (the Court Services website makes this as difficult as possible, so just Google for “baby Ann Supreme Court judgments”). What emerges, with much else, is that, in pursuit of a pseudo-progressive agenda, the media vacated its duty to report the facts.”
I suppose his point is that when the mother sought to take the baby back after one year, that the social workers ganged up on her and persuaded her against it because they knew the adoptive parents and were trying to protect them. The notes in the natural mother’s case file from that point on were apparently very negative towards her. I must do as he suggests and read the rest of the case notes. See the problem with Waters is that because he is so unreasonable people don’t take him seriously. But sometimes he DOES have a point. Maybe the meeja read the judgements, picked out the bits they liked, that’s what we read and thus form our opinions but meanwhile huge chunks which balance the story a bit have been left out.
However, I think everyone is agreed on one thing – the system for adoption is ridiculous. Two consents, the second a year into the child’s life is just cruelty on the prospective adoptive parents. I’ve said it before, adoption is NOT child stealing. If you decide to give up a child, you may regret it, but we all do things we regret. Fixing your mistakes shouldn’t come at the price of inflicting enormous pain on otherwise innnocent people, ie adoptive parents and the child.
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11.19.06
Posted in Feminism at 4:29 pm by Sarah
Having gone to bed early, I didn’t get to see the first episode of The Pope’s Children on RTE. But there was no way I was missing the second. Any programme attacked in double-page spreads by almost every broadsheet newspaper had to be worth a look.
I knew David McWilliams had made an impact when I produced an organic rice biscuit for one of the children when visiting friends last Sunday. The six adults all shrieked in laughter. “Organic! That’s so HiCo,” hooted one, a reference to the Hibernian Cosmopolitan stereotype coined by McWilliams. While I didn’t let my sense of humour fail totally, I did go on the defensive. “But there are no additives. And they eat Jaffa Cakes at home all the time,” I said. Privately I resolved to become the anti-HiCo — no one was going to label me.
Everyone else seemed to have an organic rice biscuit moment last week too. A nation reared itself up in collective indignation at McWilliams’ claim that we are creatures of mass hysteria. Well, the nation didn’t rear up; the media did.
Anyone I met thought The Pope’s Children provided an amusing insight into a society that has undergone a profound revolution in the last 10 years. Commentators, however, were divided only on the precise nature of McWilliams’s crime. Either he’d gotten it completely wrong, or everything he said was absolutely right but others had been saying it for years.
I tuned in eagerly last Monday. My husband and I alternated between sniggers and gasps. The sniggering came as we recognised the stereotypes McWilliams described. There’s the Kell’s Angels, well-educated, well-travelled, long-distance commuters. Then we have DIY Declan, the high priest of DIY found in Woodies every Sunday, and Robopaddy, the Irishman who owns 15 properties in English cities or on Bulgaria’s coastline having borrowed on the value of his Dublin home.
McWillams points out our foibles with an engaging wit which makes his stating of the obvious look all too easy.
Our gasps were when McWilliams used well-proven economic theories to explain how the Celtic tiger is following a standard pattern of behaviour which may end in disaster.
By the end I was hugely relieved. I’d missed the boat in the mid-1990s by not buying property in Dublin. According to McWilliams, the property boom is bound to collapse and I can get back in again in 10 years’ time.
Of course, if I was a journalist living in Dublin who’d just paid an enormous sum for my house, I might see things differently. If my newspaper’s well-being was dependent on advertising earnt from the weekly property supplement, I might be worried about the effect a property crash would have on my job. If I was being wined and dined by bankers, developers and auctioneers, all insisting this bubble will never burst, I might start to believe it. Hey, I might even write a few thousand words attacking McWilliams. I worked too long in PR and know too many journalists with rental properties to believe all comment is made from a neutral position.
The bottom line is this: McWilliams must be wrong. He has to be wrong. Too much depends on him being wrong.
I am not saying that everything McWilliams says is right. Indeed, Vincent Browne points out that a property crash may not be disastrous once unemployment levels stay low. Browne observes that the value of your house is irrelevant once you can make the mortgage repayments.
I’d contend that a crash in property values will trigger a general recession in which people lose their jobs. A lot of our spending is based on the liberation of equity from those homes now mortgaged to the hilt.
The point is that all theories are open to analysis and debate. But when you see such uniformity of vilification, then you know someone hasn’t said something inaccurate — they’ve said something dangerous.
The clearest sign is when the comment shifts from the merits of the argument to the flaws in the presenter’s personality. When a consensus on the daftness of McWilliams’ economic observations had bedded down, we moved swiftly to personal attack. Eddie Hobbs suffered the same experience when he exposed our crazy spending habits and the vested interests of retailing in his Rip-Off Republic series. When they’d finished tearing up his theories they moved onto his involvement with Tony Taylor’s investment group. The accepted history was that Hobbs was a whistle blower. The spin put out last summer was that he was one of the guilty himself.
The same strategy applied to McWilliams. Not only was he wrong, but when he was right, he’d only ripped off what someone else said. We heard again that “he didn’t invent the term Celtic tiger”. But McWilliams has never claimed he did. It was erroneously attributed to him because in 1994 he predicted that Ireland’s economy would “grow like an Asian tiger” — Asian tiger being a recognised economic phenomenon indicating rapid growth.
Interestingly, The Daily Telegraph quoted McWilliams and lampooned him for suggesting such a ridiculous notion. He turned out to be right then. I bet he’s right now too.
McWilliams’ stereotypes, such as HiCos, are being compared to the famous Bobos, the Bohemian bourgeoisie identified by David Brooks, a popular American economist he frequently quotes. The practice of categorising people by lifestyle is a long-established habit of strategic-marketing managers. Bobos are simply the descendants of the 1980s’ Yuppies. HiCos are the Irish Bobos.
And there’s the rub. The commentariat has taken offence because McWilliams has highlighted the rather obvious fact Ireland is not much different to anywhere else. We all conform to established patterns. We laugh because we know HiCos and DIY Declans. But none of us likes to think those labels apply to us.
When it comes to property we are in the fifth stage of a pattern identified in 1945 by the renowned economist Charles Kindleberger. It’s the bubble phase. Six is the stage of distress. Seven is shut-the-door panic.
The merit of McWilliams’ thesis is its very lack of originality. So why the collective denial? Whether McWilliams is right or wrong, he has annoyed the establishment so effectively you have to think he’s doing something right.
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11.17.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 8:48 pm by Sarah
starts now.
I got over involved in that Denis post. I really need to let go. So no posting til Sunday. The three year old has been in the bath (well the big sink – he’s refusing the bath these days) for nearly an hour. I wish he’d get out. I have no authority.
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