An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
Unfortunate phrasing from the official Labour party spokesperson on Willie Penrose taking ill in the Dail today
“Mr Penrose was in the Dail chamber when he suddenly began feeling unwell. An ambulance was called and he was taken to hospital for a check-out.”
I do hope he wasn’t checking out! A check up surely? 
ok ok I can’t resist it.
The BBC is a disgrace.
Forcing Brand out because The Daily Mail and The Sun complained, ONE WEEK AFTER the original broadcast. I listened to it. It’s stupid and crude but funny in places. Just like Brand and Ross.
Sach’s agent only complained AFTER the Mail on Sunday told her about the call.
When is the BBC going to get over David Kelly? The report was RIGHT. How ’bout some steel in your spine?? Being pushed around by Alistair Campbell is one thing. But the Mail????
Oh please.
An upside of the crisis: the sheer entertainment value and joy of watching truly excellent commentators.
My Top 5
David McWilliams
Brendan Keenan
Shane Ross
George Lee
Colm McCarthy
Keenan is on top form today arguing against government investment in the recapitalisation of banks:
“The mess is one of too much debt. To fix that, credit will have to be curtailed. People will have to save more and consume less. That is bad for economic growth and unpleasant for individuals. It is, however, unavoidable. Governments or voters who think re-capitalising banks is a way of avoiding these harsh truths are seriously deluded. It is merely a way of averting something worse.
For at least these two reasons, I would like to think that the Irish guarantees can keep the system functioning until panic subsides, banks which need fresh capital can raise it themselves, and any that can’t sell themselves off or close themselves down.
It seems unlikely, though. In a way, one is surprised the guarantee trick has worked even this long. But, if we do eventually have to dig out all those billions, just don’t be fooled by the banks’ bleatings that it is all for the best, or Government blandishments that it will somehow take away the pain.“
Link to the IT
JOE BEHAN’S resignation was a shock all right. A Fianna Fáil deputy resigning on a point of principle rather than a corruption charge should be a welcome development. What a pity Behan picked such a bad principle.
If only he’d resigned because the Budget was conceived on the back of an envelope by a trio of politicians who clearly can’t add. Instead, he and his rebellious colleagues have stirred themselves into political outrage so that millionaire pensioners can remain automatically entitled to medical cards. Some principle.
Despite the wailing in the past week, there is no grammatical mandate that the term “pensioner” be preceded by the emotive “vulnerable”. Many pensioners are vulnerable, but a significant minority are not. Does Mary O’Rourke, for instance, look vulnerable to you? About as vulnerable as my mother-in-law, a woman with high heels and a spine of steel who co-ordinates her accessories before I set her upon customer service agents who’ve wronged me.
Or my mother, setting off on a casual 20-mile cycle on a Sunday afternoon clutching a stick to fend off terriers. Try calling these women vulnerable, but only with the car window down while you accelerate past at high speed.
The banking bailout has the potential to bankrupt the entire State, and yet it went through with barely a whimper. Pulling the right to free doctor’s visits from the privately pensioned resulted in the angry hordes descending upon Leinster House. There’s a lesson for the Government – put Ireland Inc into hock if you want, but don’t mess with the individual.
Could we cast our minds back to the budget of 2000 when Charlie McCreevy pulled the automatic medical card for over-70s from his bag of pre-election tricks? Remember the loud cheers from the Fianna Fáil back benches and howls of outrage from every other quarter? The opposition was furious, and not just because McCreevy had secured the next election.
Medical cards are given to those on very low incomes; so low that politicians and doctors constantly plead with the Government to raise the threshold. It’s bad enough that those on low incomes worry about doctors’ fees, but chronic poverty means they are likely to suffer poor health. Their happily retired counterparts in the upper middle classes can afford to see a doctor, and thanks to a lifetime of good nutrition will need to see him less often. McCreevy’s stunt meant a poor but not poor enough 69-year-old couldn’t get the card while a wealthy 70-year-old could.
It was wrong then and it’s wrong today.
To make matters worse, the Government negotiated the “deal” with the Irish Medical Organisation in which doctors won a payment of €640 per non-means-tested over-70 patient, while they only got €160 for a means-tested pensioner. They got more money for the patient statistically likely to be healthy. What a pity no one saw fit to resign over that rape of the public finances.
Back in 2001, James Reilly, then head of the IMO and now Fine Gael’s health spokesman, criticised the move as “handing out free medical cards to people who can afford golf club fees”. As late as 2005, the Labour Party said that “the Government’s electoral ploy in extending medical cards to over-70s regardless of the consequences has been disastrous in cost and equality terms”.
I know oppositions are supposed to oppose, but a little consistency wouldn’t go astray.
The Government should be criticised for putting as little thought into removing the cards as they did into awarding them. In 2000 McCreevy failed to anticipate the full cost of the scheme and this time Harney initially set income levels so low that anyone on a State pension would fail the means-test.
If Fianna Fáil were half as cute as they’d like us to think they are, they should have announced a very high income limit in the Budget. That would have made the scheme simple to understand, impossible to oppose and yet set out exactly the principle at stake: that those who can afford it should pay for themselves. Their mistake was that this year’s Budget has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with panic.
The Opposition tried to argue that well-off pensioners had abandoned their Voluntary Health Insurance membership once they became entitled to the new card. Unfortunately the facts got in the way of this claim. The VHI confirmed that the numbers of over-70s with private insurance had actually increased since the cards were introduced. In 2001, the VHI had 88,989 customers over the age of 70, while today it has 121,776 customers. Considering the past 10 years have seen a massive transfer of wealth from younger to older generations through the property market, it’s hardly surprising they’re queuing up for private insurance.
Meanwhile, angry callers to radio shows argue that those people who saved for a private pension are now being “penalised” for their efforts. That’s not penalising anyone. That’s the welfare state working exactly as it should.
If you’re in the VHI, you aren’t being penalised: you’re reaping the rewards of your hard work and careful planning.
The only people being penalised are the ones who, through bad luck or poor management, are dependent on a public system of waiting lists and crowded out-patients departments. Does anyone resign when a patient dies on a waiting list? Of course not.
Dead men don’t vote.
Announcement: My column in The Sunday Times is concluding this week! I start in The Irish Times this Wednesday (22nd). For the moment they are cool with me publishing the columns on the blog, so though I am posting very rarely I’ll still be checking in on at least a weekly basis. I am delighted to be joining the IT. I suppose this does mean I’m officially part of the establishment, but as soon as I start sounding like it, I hope you lot will slap me around the place. It also means that as part of a daily paper I’ll have more flexibility on column topics, so its exciting times ahead. The next phase begins……
Perhaps my inner masochist is revealing itself, but I rather enjoyed the budget speech. What about the call for patriotism at the end? I actually cheered. What a smashing way to end the lashing. Yes, Minister! That’s what we’ve been missing all these years. With a mediocre soccer team and a losing streak in the Eurovision, patriotism has been sadly lacking. If hard times are what we need to bind us together then so be it. We can take the pain! I don’t mind cutbacks. Just tell me how this humble housewife can do her part to save the country.
What can I say? I was reared in the 80’s and it left a lasting impression. I never quite managed to develop a sense of entitlement. I bought the clothes, the shoes and the facials. I ate out a lot and paid other people to look after my children. But always with the uneasy feeling that someone would phone up and say “ There’s been a mistake and we’ve just discovered you’ve been using the guest towels. Here – use this old sack instead”.
Now that I’ve finally been caught out, it’s all quite a relief and I rather relish the prospect of a Blitz Spirit. So Minister, I’m in.
The problem is that there appears to be some confusion as to how the housewives of Ireland should act best for the sake of the country. The government needs unity on this issue, so Brian Lenihan needs to have a quick chat with the Greens, especially Trevor Sargeant. A couple of weeks ago Sargeant said that we belong to a useless generation. Actually he said, “We probably are the most useless generation ever to have strode the face of the earth”. This is “because of many people’s inability to do practical tasks such as mending a broken tyre.”
I blushed reading it because the bicycle bought in a rush of environmental consciousness and enthusiasm for physical fitness is out in the shed with a flat tyre. I could mend a puncture easily when I was ten, but I’m not sure how to go about it now. Could it really involve a basin of water and old spoons? I dropped into our local garage and hopefully asked the mechanics if they’d have a crack it but they looked at me as if I was bonkers. I’m not mad; I’ve simply become accustomed to outsourcing certain tasks.
Sargeant says I must change my ways and he urged us “to adopt a World War two-lifestyle and approach to consumption in the current climate”. On the one hand, that approach appeals to me. I took up the hems on my son’s schools trousers myself. I’ve got a kitchen garden going and hens are my next purchase. I don’t mind having a crack at painting the kitchen myself. Didn’t I paint my own bedroom several times when I was a teenager? The problem is that if I DIM (Do It Myself) I may be responsible for bringing the economy crashing down.
When I discussed the issue with UCD Economist Moore McDowell on The Last Word recently, he warned of the grave threat posed to the economy if we all followed Sargeant’s advice. Capitalism appears to have outlasted communism by about twenty years. This relative success is due to the theory of comparative advantage and specialisation, first proposed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. The theory and practice of Comparative Advantage is that people and countries should identify what they’re good at, what earns them most money and then stick to it. They should specialise in those products and buy from others what goods or services they decide to abandon. The idea is that everyone will make more money at the end of the proverbial day. When a country decides what product they’ll trade, they need to take into account issues like opportunity cost – the cost of choosing one thing over another.
If you’re a Senior Counsel with a kitchen that needs painting, you could take the day off work to do it. But you could have earned ten grand down at the Four Courts whereas you could pay a painter a couple of hundred euro to do the kitchen. Not only does it pay you to pay someone else to do the job, but you’re boosting the economy by spreading your money around. Now the painter can buy stuff and the money trickles down the line making us all richer.
The opportunity cost for women is particularly high. When I was sitting at home congratulating myself as I sewed – badly – the hem on my son’s trousers, I would literally have been better employed paying someone else to do that job, while I scribbled out a column.
The bottom line is that Trevor Sargeant is both perfectly right and fundamentally wrong. We are a useless generation. We outsource basic jobs so frequently that certain skills once common will become increasingly scarce.
However by doing so we are actually helping the economy. Consumption might be our spiritual downfall but also our economic salvation. This is why Lenihan needs to tell Sargeant to zip it and make sure that us citizens don’t get confused by his budget message. The government needs to make cutbacks, but it’s vital that households don’t. If the country is to have a chance, the outsourcing must go on. Cleaning, decorating, repairing and baking are all tasks that came naturally to the 1950’s housewife. But we were poor and miserable in the 1950’s. If we don’t want to be poor again, the bad housewife can be the country’s great hope.
This might seem counterintuitive and you’re probably still in a post-Budget anger phase visualising all the cutbacks you’ll make around the house this winter. Stop and look at it this way. The budget wasn’t so bad at all.
For the past ten years the government flung money indiscriminately at people who could do without it. SSIA interest, automatic under-6’s child benefit bonus, over-70’s medical cards and inequitable tax allowances for high earners were all handed over as populist election winners. The money was crudely distributed and is being more crudely recouped, but I can’t help feeling it’s a case of easy come; easy go. What Fianna Fail giveth, Fianna Fail taketh away.
The trick to our future is to get over the snatching back of what we never should have gotten in the first place. Some people are poor, but if you’re reading this paper, I’d bet that you’re not. However, if you start acting poor then we’re really done for. The Blitz Spirit is all very well, but ultimately streets were bombed into rubble. If we don’t want to see our economy reduced to rubble, then we need to keep spending. Useless citizens of Ireland unite. Your economy needs you.
n 1999 Jim Mitchell was chairman of the Public Accounts Committee when it conducted an important and uncommonly efficient inquiry into the wholesale avoidance of Deposit Interest Retention Tax (Dirt) by Irish banks.
For years, half the country were stashing their savings in deposit accounts that were supposedly “non-resident” and therefore exempt from tax on the interest. Senior banking and revenue executives were summoned by the committee to explain why they allowed this fiction to continue, at an eventual cost of €100m to the state.
The hearings were broadcast on TG4 and on the internet. It was a cheap, fast inquiry and was followed by a speedy, hard-hitting report. Nobody ever dreamt that Irish parliamentarians could be this efficient.
One day, in the middle of a side meeting, Mitchell received a phone call. He turned his back on his colleagues as he spoke briefly with his doctor. It was bad news. His cancer was back and, because a number of his siblings had died from the same disease, they both knew his chances of beating it were non-existent. He’d received a death sentence. Mitchell didn’t flinch, hung up, and returned immediately to his work. His colleagues had no idea what had just happened. It was brave, selfless and an act of heroism: public service over private troubles.
I couldn’t help thinking of him after I’d flung the Sunday Independent across the room last Sunday morning. Eoghan Harris, appointed to the Seanad by Bertie Ahern, informed us that senator Jim Walsh, the government whip, had called him in west Cork to wish him well and assure him his vote wasn’t needed to get the banks’ bailout bill passed in the upper house. Harris declared himself “glad to be able to avoid the cabin fever around Leinster House”. He decided to go for a walk instead.
Senator, I am sorry you are ill and I wish you well, too. But you are writing newspaper columns about long walks, hearty meals and the pleasures of staying up all night to watch the American presidential election debates. You are not supposed to be “glad” you don’t have to show up when the most important piece of legislation in decades is being debated. Your opinions on the American elections may be fascinating, but as a highly paid legislator, your opinions on the bailout should be on the record of the Seanad and not in a newspaper.
If your absence is truly unavoidable due to illness, an expression of regret rather than relief would be appropriate.
One week earlier Anne Harris complained in the same newspaper that Fine Gael’s decision to deny voting pairs to government TDs, as a protest against the taoiseach’s refusal to hold a full debate on the economy, was “hysterical” and “playing politics”. Why is it war on presenteeism from the Sunday Independent? What do they want — TDs and senators to text in their votes as if they were watching a reality TV show?
We pay our public representatives pretty well. Have our expectations sunk so low that even showing up is asking too much?
Fortunately, the taoiseach is taking the matter more seriously and gave Kerry North TD Tom McEllistrim and Donegal North East’s Jim McDaid a dressing-down in front of their colleagues over their absence from the same debate. Rightly so. McEllistrim had been canvassing in his constituency. I’ve no idea what McDaid’s excuse was.
I’m still shaking my head at the antics of Fine Gael’s James Bannon. He failed to show for the Dail’s opening week because he forgot the holidays were over. He forgot? So what is the penalty? A fine? Standing in the corner of the Dail with a dunce’s cap on?
Usually, politics is an irrelevant side-show where politicians, no matter how sincere or hardworking, make little difference. But in the past fortnight, politics was back in the spotlight and democracies around the world needed politicians to step up, rather than back, from the crisis we face. We don’t need politicians when everything is going well. When everything goes wrong, as it has now, turning up is a minimum requirement.
I think Fine Gael’s refusal to provide pairs unless absolutely necessary was the right move. For one glorious week we had an opposition. I’m only sorry they implemented the harsh regime for such a brief time. I’d prefer if Ahern stopped swanning around New York and got into the Dail to give us the benefit of his 10 years’ experience as taoiseach. Frustratingly, though, Fine Gael insists on being gentlemanly and points out that it’s traditional for former taoisigh to get a free pass from the Dail.
Oh, come on. Ahern showed up to pay tribute to Seamus Brennan last week, but was not around for the vote on the bailout. These are not priorities that comfort frightened citizens. Brennan was a good man and deserves tributes, but we deserve the contribution of a former taoiseach to a debate on the bailout. He’s the one who told us last year that people who made gloomy forecasts on the economy should commit suicide. I am extremely interested in his reflections on the current crisis.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the likes of McEllistrim are right. Consider again Jim Mitchell. What was his reward for putting dying aside while he worked late nights and weekends on the committee? He lost his seat in the next general election, in June 2002, and was dead by December. Who’d have blamed him if he’d decided not to run? Due to constituency boundary changes, he knew his chances of being elected were poor but Fine Gael was desperate for candidates and he agreed to run.
Maybe McEllistrim knows too well that many voters couldn’t care less what happens in Leinster House. Perhaps he was smart to stay in Kerry minding his seat rather than making a pointless contribution to a debate in the Dail. But what is he minding his seat for? Hand shaking door-to-door was supposed to be the means, but apparently has become the end too.
So maybe the results of Dail and Seanad votes are foregone conclusions. Maybe the standard of Oireachtas debate isn’t exactly soaring. And yes, I know it’s frustrating to move amendments that will inevitably be voted down by the government. But so what? That’s the system. The alternative is to count up the votes on each side after an election and send every TD, bar the cabinet, home to write letters about potholes.
Otherwise, Dail votes are mere symbolism and parliamentary debates are a game of charades. What about bearing witness, asking questions and demanding accountability? Say it ain’t so, Eoghan; say it ain’t so.
I used to play poker. Sometimes you weren’t quite sure if you had the winning hand, but you’d go “all-in” and hope your opponent couldn’t see your heart leaping in your chest. Win or lose, it was quite a rush. Last week Brian Lenihan went all-in and our hearts are still thumping as we wait to see how the finance minister’s hand plays out. It’s terrifying and thrilling and I have a headache from trying to figure it all out.
There are bright sides: the arguments over Grey’s Anatomy versus Champions League have ended in our house. We’re watching one show — the news. Every night brings a fresh twist on the credit crunch: the outrage in Brussels over our guarantee to the banks, the mind-boggling “nouveau Europhilia” at Downing Street. My pre-packaged opinions are useless. There is only one line to which I cling, and it comes from a New York broker: “Anyone who thinks they know what’s going to happen next is deluding themselves.”
Last week I wrote that we shouldn’t trust Lenihan. This week it appears we have no choice. There are still plenty of reasons not to trust him. This is Fianna Fail we’re talking about, so builders and bankers get first dibs on the lifeboats. The taxpayers are the mugs in steerage who’ll be left clinging to driftwood. On the other hand, he is a Lenihan. His clan is full of desperately decent people, if unfortunately misguided on the subject of loyalty. All we can do is pray that, this time, the legendary fealty of the Lenihans will be directed towards us and not Fianna Fail.
Of course it would be better if it wasn’t up to prayer. It would also be more reassuring to have a section in the Credit Institutions (Financial Support) Bill 2008 stating that the banks’ chief executives will get 40 lashes for every ¤100m of state guarantees.
Lenihan says he will ensure there is oversight and accountability, but insisted that the Dail give him a free hand. You know what we’ve done? We’ve given him what Congress refused to give Hank Paulson — unlimited authority.
When Congress said no to Paulson, I recalled Conor Lenihan telling me that his father once observed it was a shame that history often fails to credit the great decisions to do nothing. Sometimes, doing nothing is the right option. Is this one of those times? Should we have let the “scum” (as Paul Gogarty, a Green TD, called them) go down? They tell us we can’t because as The Brother said when news of the bailout broke: “The banks have us by the short and curlies.” On the other hand, The Uncle arrived for coffee grinning from ear to ear: “Isn’t it great? We have them by the short and curlies.” They’re both right. The banks have us over a barrel and we have to bail them out, but this is also a chance for, if not revolution, then at least reform.
We’re all in shock at each new development, but we need to snap out of it.
If we don’t seize the initiative, the creeps will pull us deeper into the mire and we’ll be paying for it for another 10 years.
The author Naomi Klein calls it The Shock Doctrine. Every now and then a country faces a calamity, either a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina; a terrorist attack like 9/11; or a financial shock such as the one we’re experiencing now.
While the public reels and tries to absorb the shock, the establishment is ready. It smashes the “Break in Case of Emergency” glass and pulls out pre-prepared policies which the public accepts because it is too busy trying to save itself.
In New Orleans, poor black communities fled their homes after Katrina and they are now being rebuilt as condominiums for the rich. In Washington, the Patriot Act was rushed into legislation after 9/11 and it introduced the corporatisation of national security. Every disaster in our health service strengthens the case for Mary Harney to build private hospitals on public sites. Every crisis is really just another opportunity for the right wing to protect the super-rich at the expense of the permanent poor.
So now, with people terrified that we’re about to go back to 1983, the bankers who over-leveraged their debt are seizing not just the public’s money but the state’s entire reputation, just to protect and advance themselves. We’re witnessing the wholesale dumping of private debt onto the public purse. The smug millionaires who extolled the purity of the market are exposed as being wholly without ideology. Government intervention, so long despised as an unnecessary and outrageous constraint on the wisdom of the glorious market, is co-opted as the new tactic in the pursuit of profit. Klein calls it Disaster Capitalism.
Only a disaster could allow a bill to be put through the Dail in the middle of the night which gives one minister, Brian Lenihan, extraordinary power to guarantee our banks to the tune of hundreds of billions and get absolutely nothing in return. The banks could literally take the money and run, and where would we be left then? With an enormous deficit and public services slashed for the next decade.
In the meantime, we want desperately to believe in strong leadership. It could be the making of Lenihan.
Here is the lesson for us: the banks knew what they wanted and they got it. We must get over our shock and do the same. The public has to be just as clear in its demands. There must be no equivocation on executive pay; any bank that avails itself of the guarantee should be banned from rewarding its reckless CEOs with bonuses. Their wages must be slashed before bank charges are increased. We must have government representation on risk-management committees so the banks can’t dupe us out of more money.
Since it was Lenihan to whom the Dail handed all this power, the finance minister must be the one who has to stand up to the CEOs. As the saying goes, he’s only as strong as the backbone we give him. We’re now far too middle-class to march on the Dail and demand our pound of flesh, but we do have phones, e-mail and pens. We need to remind him that the interests of Fianna Fail and the nation, so often confused, are not the same thing after all.
Lenihan’s hand was forced last week by the banks and now it behoves us to do the forcing. He’s gone all-in — with our money. If we allow him to let the banks continue to get away with their behaviour, we deserve everything that’s coming. Act now, for last week was only the beginning. My heart is thumping. How about yours?
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