When is a joke not a joke and when A&E is sidelined

This week’s Wexford People leads with a comment that John Browne TD made at the Rally in support of Wexford General Hospital last Sunday night. As part of his address to 1,000 people, including myself who had gathered in Whites Hotel, Deputy Browne told us that his daughter who’s in a wheelchair and is 23 asked him to oppose cutting back opening hours at Wexford’s A&E because he claimed she needed it when drunk and that she didn’t want to stop drinking.
It’s a shame that the meeting’s purpose has been diverted by such a remark because people turned out on an autumn evening to listen to politicians, a consultant, nurses, EMT’s and staff set out their concerns about the future of Accident and Emergency at Wexford General Hospital. Our deputy, Brendan Howlin had worked hard to promote the meeting for some time and has tenaciously highlighted how the hospital is being run primarily by accountants rather than doctors. His website contains a petition and if you follow the supplied link you can sign the petition and add your name to the list of those opposed to any downgrading of our generla hospital.

Lets get to the point of the meeting, Dr Colm Quigley succinctly set out what the HSE network group are looking at in terms of re-configuration of services. He set out which services had been transferred to ensure a better service to the county and what he felt he needed to ensure acute services and A&E could continue to be delivered better at Wexford General. Nobody demurred from the theme of the meeting. If anything the meeting could have gone on for longer as the chairman brought down the curtain with a motion committing to re-meet when the network report is published. I had the chance at the end of the meeting to talk with Dr Quigley and ask if the ambulance service was capable of delivering a service to Co Wexford in the context of A&E moving to Waterford and as to whether the EMT’s were available to crew ambulances. His reply was one that gave me a sense of both the betrayal and frustration that is obvious in some consultants at middle size hospitals such as Sligo or Wexford at present.
I don’t accept John Browne’s explanation of the comments as joke, no more than I think Tommy Tiernan’s Anti-Jewish remarks at Electric Picnic were funny. Both Tiernan and Browne have effectively highjacked a serious issue for the purpose of self promotion. Families of politicians are effectively off limits in the context of political attacks, but how does one respond when a politician humiliates a member of his family as a means of self-promotion. As I listened to John speak, I could barely believe what I was hearing. What John said was gormless, crass and in bad taste. It is telling that he believes most 23 year olds interaction with A&E is to deal with excessive alcohol consumption. Last year I attended a conference where Senator Phil Prendergast set out how medical staff in A&E’s feel threatened by violence from people with excessive alcohol. It’s no laughing matter, I can tell you. He doesn’t need to explain himself to the people of Wexford however and most of important of all, he needs to apologise to his daughter

Are we all really in this together?

Can you believe it’s nearly a year since Brian Lenihan’s call to patriotic action? Fianna Fail’s instant mantra became “We’re all in this together”. Parotting this were the IBEC’s, the banks and the builders. The sums have been simplified to one of Social Welfare versus Pay versus The Rest must square off against tax revenues. The latest ESRI report says that the public service pay exceeds comparable private sector pay by over 20%. The government has indicated that a 5% pay cut for the public service will be introduced in the 2010 budget.
Public sector pay is being pruned to avoid tax increases. I accept that public sector pay is relatively high but private sector pay for many is at a low base. There’s many in the private sector who benefit from the minimum wage and few in the public sector. To me that is telling.
But before we charge headlong down the road of setting public against private sector lets ask ourselves why is public sector pay pay higher. For a start most public servants are unionised. Secondly and more importantly the key driver for wages in Ireland for me has been the need to get on the property ladder. In Wexford property prices were increasing at 1% per month about 3 years. There’s nothing to indicate that this figure was at the time exceptional on a national basis. One colleague who bought a house then still pays €1,300 per month (and will continue for another 27 years!) for a bed Semi D as part of the 100% mortgage scam that the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank turned a blind eye.
It is blatantly obvious that pay increased because people were buying houses irregardless, as to whether they were public or private sector. Buying housing was the national sport and lets be clear about it when some were fed up buying them here, Mick O’Leary provided cheap flights to where houses could be bought for even cheaper. If you think times are bad now, just wait till Ryanair cut flights to where the second or indeed third homes are and then tune in to Liveline!
But lets get back to the average couple who had just one house, and the way prices went it had to be 2 wage earners to afford a house. Most of these people could only afford houses miles from where they worked.
The long commute, the breakfast roll grabbed on the way to work at a service station, the sandwich dropped to the work station and the take away or €10 Tesco meal with the bottle of wine when they arrived home in time to watch “Fair City”. This was their life. Now the wine may be home brewed and the sandwich home made but the mortgage is still to be paid and to make matters worse interest rates will soon rise again. The fear of loosing the house through re-possession and unemployment strikes terror into the heart of many home owners.
But there’s more. Much to my surprise it seems that the real inequity according to the ESRI is at the bottom end of the pay scale. The real people to be cut are the lower grades of clerical staff like the CPSU members who went on strike earlier this year. One striker told me that she worked advising on social welfare entitlements and that some of her clients would get more than her. What now will she make of this threat to her income?
We’e not all in this together, some of us are more in it than others, and some of us are not in it all. 3 years ago we could boast 33,000 actual millionaires in this country. That didn’t include those so called ethical businessmen who sent their wives away to live abroad so that they could collect a rebate on a deal. Eamon Gilmore said the right thing today when he said that public sector pay should not be cut. The private sector relies on the public sector’s spending, would reducing spending power in the economy be in the interest of the private sector? I doubt it

Can you make Sense or Sensibility from Mary Coughlan?

Our Tanaiste has an extraordinary talent for grabbing the headlines. Her namesake who sings the blues must be mortified when she hears some of the things she comes out with? One Mary Coughlan sings the blues, another delivers them big time! Since her promotion by Brian Cowen she has rarely been out of the headlines because of her gaffes. If there was an Olympic medal for gaffes, this minister’s neck would have sores from the weight of metal hung from it. To be fair to her I’ve always suspected there’s a certain amount of bias against her because she is a woman on the part of the media. For all her incompetence, she didn’t ignore the FAS shambles as Mary Harney did, sanction e-voting as Noel Dempsey or Martin Cullen did or hide behind civil servants as Micheal Martin famously did or sanction PPARS or sell out the tax payer as Woodsy did as he was going out the door to some religious orders.

The constant focus on Mary’s gaffes once more underpin the truth of what Albert Reynolds once said, “You get over the big issues but it’s the little things that trip you up”. So I’ll excuse the slip of the tongue today in the Dail when she mixed up the election with the budget which sounded extraordinarily like “bullshit” when she actually got round to saying it. Likewise I won’t too worried about her not knowing that many years ago each EU country appointed one EU commissioner only because FF have no EU allies and have no role of any significance in EU decision making. I don’t fret when she uses expletives when out canvassing for a FF candidate nor when she mixes up Einstein with Darwin, she’s not a science graduate but a social science graduate and there’s a big difference. I start to wonder when I hear she will legislate to discriminate against gay people.

I get more worried when she wades in with suggestions that McCarthy’s Report makes no sense. She was speaking in the absence of the Taoiseach and representing the government. To make matters worse the most senior other Minister technically her junior, basically has just rubbished her view. It seems to me that her credibility is melting away and that she is this year’s Sarah Palin. Now Sarah didn’t get her hands on the levers of power, Mary on the other hand has been pulling hard for all she’s worth for some years and the more she pulls the more uncredible she gets. When McCarty proposes cuts and Coughlan says they male no sense, don’t minister tell me what you think tell me what will happen.
The FRC in The Rocks needs the money McCarthy will cut to survive, not Minister Coughlan’s inner thoughts. Parents with children with SNA’s need to know if their child will still benefit from this vital help, not whether the minister view of how much, much of the report, makes no sense. I could go on but I think you get my drift. When the Tanaiste starts to stop being a figure of fun and starts being a source of obfuscation, I start getting worried. I think the Tanaiste will be marginalised by her colleagues. She plays no role in Lisbon but admonishes the other parties. She is out of her depth, her humiliation at the hands of Dell management in the run up to job losses there earlier this year inspire no one that this is the Minister that will turn around the unemployment crisis. It’s the stuff of nightmares and the man responsible for this is Brian Cowen. What’s more I fear no one is asking the Taoiseach why he appointed her as Tanaiste when many were suggesting that Mary Hanafin or Brian Lenihan would be better in that role.
It’s a matter of being afraid, be very afraid!

Ireland Inc on the think about The Pope’s Children

David McWilliams has a knack of hitting on an idea. I find him interesting, he has the strong ability to dissect what he believes is happening and communicate that analysis clearly in the media. TK Whitaker must scratch his head in amazement. Since his arrival about 10 years ago on the scene he’s predicted the property boom and slump years ago on the Late Late Show. He’s analysed the societal changes since the boom and explains how Ireland has become more sectoral than ever before and how these sectors effectively exhibit a herd mentality in their lifestyles, expectations and behaviour. Understanding the zeitgeist helped make Fianna Fail what it is now. FF fine tuned its appeal at election time to Breakfast Roll Man.

Once more Fianna Fail have embraced McWilliams by drawing on the suggestion he made last year in his series “The Generation Game”. Let me declare an interest, a close friend of mine was featured in the series. McWilliams was interested in the aspect of the returned emigrant and the value added by the experience of working abroad to the Irish economy. He spent an afternoon filming the family as they went about their day. His series proposed that the government should utilise the Irish worldwide diaspora for the benefit of the Irish economy. McWilliams suggested that Ireland’s economic future could be secured by embracing its diaspora of second generation Irish abroad as Israel or India do and use our country as link between their dynamism and the market place as a means of providing future trade and jobs.

The Irish diaspora is staggering in size. In addition to more than 34 million Irish-Americans, not including five million who claim to be Scots Irish, there are also 3.8 million Irish-Canadians, 1.9 million Irish-Australians and 500,000 Argentinians of Irish heritage. Add to that 800,000 Irish-born people living overseas, the 3.1 million Irish citizens living outside the country and the 72,000 Irish passports issued in 2007 alone and the sheer scale of this diaspora is both impressive and daunting.

The forum has been described as an Irish Davos. Certainly some of those attending had interesting things to say but only a small number of the contributions were actually reported so I’m not so sure how much will eventually be implemented. I note however that the retired CEO of Intel stuck it into the government in relation to spending on education and how it has not kept pace with other countries. Fair play to him, the reality is that without research and development spend in Ireland, the much heralded knowledge economy is a dead duck. One of the things that the Fitzgerald government continued to do in the bleak 80’s was spend on education. More than that ESF grants kept many of us in 3rd level and this reality still benefits the economy as the intellectual capital is still available in the country.

McWilliams makes further suggestions about the re-introduction of the punt and reneging on foreign debt. As to how you’d bring back the punt I don’t know. One thing that’s kept us afloat in the last 12 months was the euro. Reneging on foreign debt would devastate public services as further loans would disappear. The diaspora might help us out in the medium term but in the short term reneging on debt would discourage anyone from investing in the economy no matter how strong their blood is. A final thought, how remarkable it was to see so few women at the confernce. A great shame that so few Irish wommen have made it to the top abroad. It seems that not just have Irish women a recession to deal with but that there's also a glass ceiling.

Lenihan “At The Races” as NAMA staggers to the starting post

So now we know how NAMA is proposed to work. A very telling error appeared on RTE’s Six One this evening as Brian Lenihan explained how NAMA would work. For about 45 seconds of the vital interview with Bryan Dobson in the top corner the term “At The Races” appeared when the picture cut to the Minister at Government Buildings. Very apt for the gamble of the century which Fianna Fail and The Greens are about to undertake on behalf of the banks.
The following figures are frightening and are the money behind the FF & Green gamble;


Potential total book value for transfer to NAMA 77bn
Interest Roll up Estimate 9bn
Balance excluding roll up 68bn
Approximate average Loan To Value ratio 77%
Assets value at origination 88bn
Potential decline in property prices approximate estimate 47%
Estimated current market value of underlying asset 47bn

The bung for the dubious honour of doing the business with FF’s banker and builder friends is €7Billion. That’s almost doubling spending at a stroke on the HSE without any plan how to spend. Long term economic value? Sounds like playing for short term political survival. Of course the seeds for this were sown in the bank guarantee scheme of almost a year ago. The bankers have won once more at the expense of those who need social welfare, an education or medical attention. Developers have now morphed into Borrowers,

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s attempt to soothe the anger ignores many worries behind the scene. Justice Frank Clarke decided last week that Zoe’s chances of survival were slim and that the economic recovery plan was unlikely to succeed. What are the chances of the empty houses in the market (overhang) being sold in the likely context of growing unemployment and increased interest rates in 2010? If rents are falling and the number of vacant houses rising, who’d buy a new house if repossessions climb? Who’ll have the money to buy a repossessed house? I don’t know where the bottom of the Irish market is although I accept that the minister may be right and that values may increase by 10% over 10 years don’t forget that about 20% of the NAMA land is outside the state and that some of these countries may already be out of recession so the increase in property prices will not be evenly spread but the rising foreign tide may give a false impression of the domestic Irish boat. A recent survey in Mullingar showed about 20% of Main St property vacant. There’s nothing to suggest that this observation is unique to Mullingar. Surely that should drive the rental cost of commercial space down? Then why is NAMA banking on an increase in rental? The great unknown is what happens to demand for housing if emigration takes off when European economies come out of recovery in terms of employment. Profitability often precedes an upturn in employment, if France, UK or Germany are out of recession, workers here will be attracted to those economies. I disagree with Brian Lenihan, I think we’ve yet to see where the bottom of the market is because we don’t know hat price houses will start to sell again at. Certainly some of the advertised prices in local papers in Wexford are still well beyond of what people can afford because of pay cuts, unemployment etc. I believe that the state will soon be left holding the baby while the bankers who Brian Lenihan tells us should be grateful to us will once again smile smugly into their G&T as they get away with the money.

Lisbon Too

About 2 week ago I blogged that I thought Lisbon was slipping away and that defeat was likely and that a general election would follow as indeed would a leadership contest in Fianna Fail. Given the recovery in public support for the Treaty that scenario now looks less likely although the Yes camp aren’t out of the woods yet. So where has it all changed? Well a number of things have happened. Firstly the left opposition to the treaty have once again been outflanked by the far right. Coir’s attention grabbing posters claiming that the minimum wage will drop to €1.84, along with the arrival in Ireland of the libertarian UKIP has gone down like a lead balloon. The constantly grating clever dick accent of Nigel Farage has not connected with, to quote Joe Higgins, “the ordinary working class man and woman”. The reality is that Farage cares very little about Ireland and what it does rather he’s more interested in raising his profile in Britain as he’s coincidently announced he’s to break the traditional moratorium on challenging the House of Common’s speaker because he, Bercow, is on the left of the Tory Party.

Now another home counties accent has re-joined the fray, the sinister Cockney tribesman Declan Ganley. Ganley is a man with his past in a closet. Famously he retired from politics after being heavily defeated in the European elections. Ganley queried the count and when he was granted a re-count after he claimed a wheelie bin full of his votes disappeared, the result saw his actual vote drop as Labour votes were found in his pile. Ganley claims to have been an adviser to a Baltic state where Ministers subsequently claimed they’d never heard of him! His company Rivada boasts on its board retired US generals. Rivada has extensive contracts with the US Military for communications systems. His party Libertas is a private company. In the European Elections he won just 1 of the 100 seats they’d targeted. He’s not the only US military contractor to oppose Lisbon, but he’s the most vocal. Youtube footage shows him hiding a US flag before an interview with a German channel. I suppose it’s a case of an old Tory hiding Old Glory!

Labour MEP Nessa Childers was canvassing with us since I last blogged on the issue. The response to the canvas is very positive in Wexford. Wexford voted no in June 2008 by a margin of about 7%. If the canvas is suggesting now more voters in a constituency like Wexford and if this swing is being reflected nationally then I believe that the treaty can now pass. Wexford is a typical bell weather constituency in this referendum. If there is a swing to Yes in Wexford and it is replicated all over the country then I believe that Lisbon will pass. However if Marx could declare that it was too early to pronounce on the French Revolution 70 years after the event, then I’m more than entitled to warn against what could happen between now and polling day.
Coir hijacked the internationalist James Connolly to suggest he'd have backed their narrow reactionary campaign. Coir are anti-woman and it shows an ignorance of history to suggest that Connolly was such.
The Yes campaign has sharpened its focus, the red herrings on QMV, self amending treaty, neutrality, abortion, conscription, workers rights etc that surfaced the last time have been nailed. The real fear is that public opposition to the government’s NAMA proposal will galvanise some voters to vote against their better interests as they’ve had enough of the shambles. That’s understandable but voters had that chance last June. There are some things more important than Cowen and Co and this one of them!

Political begging bowl out for the builders.

Where did it all go wrong for Tom Parlon and his begging bowl for hard up developers? Sometimes when he reflects on the last decade he must wonder what would have happened if instead of running for the PD’s he accepted the 2002 offer from Fine Gael and had run for them instead. When he surveys the political landscape from the luxury executive suite in Construction House he must surely wish he was now a Fine Gael spokesperson and on the verge of power.
By any reckoning Tom has an remarkable political record, IFA President, Minister for Public Works and DG of the Construction Industry Federation.
Despite these achievements he has always conveyed the impression that he’s taken a lot for granted and put his head down and pushed on regardless of what anyone cares. Barely a minister he turned up to review the IFA tractorcade protest against his own government. He arrogantly proclaimed Laois Offaly as “Parlon Country”, used his position as Minister to appear in commercial endorsements and clumsily prolonged the electricians strike by calling the striking workers “lunatics.

One of his funniest gaffes occurred when he was Junior Minister to Charlie McCreevy at the time of the decentralistion. Parlon leaked the news that FAS was to be decentralised to his hometown of Birr as evidence of his delivery to his native county. “Defending” his junior minister against opposition attacks McCreevy’s put down of Parlon portrayed the man, now charged with shepherding the embattled construction industry out of recession, as a hapless clown alerting his supporters of budget speculation from a public house on the night before the budget.
About the same time he was one of the right wing hawks who was opposed to any intervention by the state in property; According to Tom in 2003; “any measure giving the State the power to control the value of private assets would have major negative ramifications for thousands of property owners". He added at the time that any notion that privately-held land would be transferred to the State because people are perceived to have "committed the sin of trying to make profit" was "ideology somewhere left of Stalin
So why is Tom now supporting NAMA? Particularly as this week Tom says that NAMA is not a builders bail out! He’s of the view that in time the country will see the builder and developer as more sinned against than sinning, to put it mildly. But its not the first time that Tom has played two sides of the same argument, When he was IFA boss he made sure that farmers were compensated more than adequately by government road building programmes. Costs escalated and cowboy companies like GAMA thrived and indeed prospered while Tom was a minister.
Tom is effectively a hired gun, he’ll lobby for whoever pays him most for whatever it takes. Everyone has there price, Tom’s is top of the range at shooting himself in the foot when shooting from the hip! Could the country afford him back in office? I hope not!

Taxing questions for future generations

Today the Commission on Taxation has reported after 18 months. Both Brians as Finance Minister have put off decisions on revenue citing the report. It goes hand in hand with the McCarthy report, McCarthy was recommending what would be cut and the commission on what would changed in terms of revenue. Most age earners expected this report to set out tax equity but nobody told the commission that what McCarthy was taking with one hand that the state would redress in terms of revenue.

What is significant is that the trade union rep on the commission refused to endorse it. Many reliefs for PAYE workers will end if the report’s proposals go through. Its suggested that tax credits for union membership and waste charges will go. There’s no wealth tax, tax exiles remain outside the net while carbon taxes, water charges and a property charge will come in. The commission plan to tax social welfare and child benefit. There’s no mention of the pension levy. Workers (many in low pay) in the civil service will see the report as a further pay cut dressed up as a type of equity. The Irish taxation system penalises those on low income, they benefit least from changes in the tax system. Carbon taxes will increase how much people pay for fuel. Those on low income pay more of the income on fuel than the likes of me. They call it fuel poverty because these people cannot afford to insulate their houses yet if they could, they’d save even more. As Deputy Mayor I launched the WARM project in Wexford to insulate houses of elderly people. Could there not be a better return if a national insulation project was rolled out simultaneously with the carbon tax, a tax that I fear will drive Northern motorists out of Southern forecourts.
I don’t object to a property tax if it’s collected by the local authority on all property. A flat charge of €900 per house is mind boggling but I suspect that this plan will not go through and the old reliables of those on low to moderate incomes will shoulder the burden of the collapse in property based revenue measures. Another to bite the dust is the plan to categorise agricultural buildings as commercial from the point of rates. Expect the Bed and Breakfast sector to protest against the proposed rating of these premises. Increasing the landfill levy in addition to removing PAYE tax credits for service charges will see bin charges rise when in the last year they’ve dropped. Expect back yard burning to increase and perhaps well boring too!
So what would I do? Well I’d suggest ending tax shelters, pursuing those who have taken their money outside the jurisdiction, I’d introduce a top tier of tax on incomes over €100K. Do we actually now need tax relief for nursing homes as according to Minister Eamon Ryan hotels in the NAMA basket of properties should be redeveloped as nursing homes. But to tax child benefit? Last years row over Over 70’s medical cards will be like a tea party by comparison.
The report is still predicated on the McCreevy plan to have a low effected tax rate but to deliver top rate services, but it’s an impossible circle to square. We can only re-distribute what we raise, my difficulty is that those who need it more seem to get it less from the report.

UKIP’s dirty work in Ireland pulling the Legge.

Soon you can look forward to getting a letter from something called UKIP asking you to vote No to Lisbon. Someone who wants you to vote No is one of their MEP’s William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, MEP.
William wants to restrict the right of EU citizens to go and work in Britain. Since independence over 1 million Irish have found a better life in the UK than this republic could offer. Willie doesn’t have to worry about moving abroad to eke out a living as he’s the 10th person to hold the title and he owns a pile somewhere in Yorkshire and even if that goes belly up he’s connected to Barbara Cartland and the Late Princess Diana so there’s a few bob there to tide himself over the downturn just as there was for his 9 predecessors to the title since 1710.
Necessity is the mother of invention and who’d have imagined that a relative of the Princess Diana who had more blue blood than her ex husband, would now be standing shoulder to shoulder with Sinn Fein in opposing the Lisbon Treaty? What would Lord Mountbatten or the Republican icon Bobby Sands make of that? More to the point what would Sinn Fein voters make of it too? As far as I can make out SF still opposes the introduction of the Euro and prefers the pound sterling despite the sneering at the protestant community in the north that they were more loyal to the half crown than the crown? How far can you wrap yourself up in nonsense and who in the end, do you please? If Europe’s Far Right Lite see Lisbon off talking blarney with an English brogue where does that leave Sinn Fein or the Socialist Party?

2 contrasting policies in 2 different jurisdictions see SF arguing for an All-Ireland economy yet opposing moves to a single currency. What perplexes me is why will the Republican Movement stand shoulder to shoulder beside some of the most unsavoury element of European politics just to oppose continental bureaucrats? The logic of the community is that Britain should join the Euro and be at the centre.
Nigel Farage isn’t the person to lead them there. Former public schoolboy Nigel was a money man, not of course that we need another money man to tell us how our economy should be run. Nigel is a keen supporter of the Better Of Out (BOO) campaign an anti EU grouping of British MP’s that includes Lord Tebbit, Ian Paisley, Author and former Wicklow resident Frederick Forsyth and a number of right wing Northern Unionist and Tory MP’s. Some of these people like Christopher Chope oppose the minimum wage while claiming expenses from the British taxpayers to cover furniture vital to the UK economy like their sofa, or Bob Spink UKIP and former Tory MP who wrote in 2001; “What bit of sending them back do you not understand, Mr Blair?” or Ann Winterton MP who lost her front bench post for cracking racist jokes! These are the intellectual powerhouses lining up on the No side, our problem in this country is that they’ve gained a credence they don’t deserve because those leading the Yes campaign are so discredited.

Later this week Nigel will be in Dublin to debate Lisbon with David Begg. He’ll sit alongside Mary Lou McDonald. Nigel boasts he’s not anti-Irish but pro-British. What interests me about the UKIP intervention is who is paying for the mailshot? Have they registered with SIPO and who’s paying for their campaign? We’ve had Coir YD getting dollars in the past, Libertas with their own funny money and now the party that thinks all Ireland is part of the UK according to their Banner is spending more than a few half crowns getting its snout in. Shades of Yeats’ greasy till about this lot. Failte go h-Eireann agus Slán abhaile.