Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
I see the Progressive Democrats are holding yet another meeting to wind up the party.
There has been a number of such meetings with the same agenda over the past several months.
I wonder would this never ending wind up have anything to do with the large amounts of taxpayer’s money still being paid to this ‘non existent’ party?
Letter in today’s Irish Examiner. It’s noteworthy that the author of this letter, one of the elite of Irish society, speaks of revolution.
My €25,000 pay hike is absurd in the circumstances
THE Bord Snip report makes interesting reading in respect of the recommendations for significant increases in out-of-pocket costs if you are a sick person attending a hospital or in need of medications.
It is particularly relevant in the context of a rise in my gross salary in May of €25,000 to €225,000 under the terms of the new contract for hospital doctors. The cost of implementation of the contract this year is reported to be €140 million.
It also seems absurd that this expenditure has been sanctioned by government and executed by Prof Brendan Drumm, CEO of the HSE, when the Government and he are witness to cuts in Crumlin Children’s Hospital and to totalitarian HSE managers in Naas who are currently forcing the most savage cuts in our public hospitals throughout the country without a care for the needs of patients or frontline staff trying to provide hospital services. While it would appear the terms of the contract must be legally fulfilled, one must question the morality of this in the context of the above facts.
Somehow I thought, given the financial crisis, a mechanism would be found by government to postpone or alter the financial terms of this contract through negotiation with consultant bodies or, if not, through Colm McCarthy’s public service report, whose terms of reference provided wriggle room for him at least to make some comment, if not recommendations, in this regard.
This thorny work, according to the report, is to be dealt with by the reconvened commission on pay for higher public servants.
I am increasingly despondent about the country’s political and health service governance. We are experiencing the worst financial crisis this country has ever seen, and yet Government, on the one hand, can allow a large increase in health expenditure on salaries for highly paid health service personnel and on the other, through its HSE arm, cut hospital and other health services to sick people. Its public service review body does not even refer to these facts, but at the same time makes recommendations to cut social welfare payments to those at the bottom of the ladder.
Is all of this not outrageous? I think we may have had attempts at kidnapping of executives in the HSE or government, or had a revolution, if this had happened in France!
Dr John Barton
Consultant Physician
Portiuncula Hospital
Ballinasloe
Co Galway
Letter in today’s Irish Independent.
Let me get this right. Brian Lenihan says we can’t continue to borrow €400m per week or we will go bankrupt. Yet our politicians are on holiday for 12 weeks by which time they’ll have borrowed an extra €4.8bn.
When Mr Lenihan works out which vested interest pays the most money to Fianna Fail, and therefore needs to be kept on side the most, it will be the end of January 2010 and we’ll have borrowed a further €6.8bn. All this money has to be repaid, with interest, plus an extra premium given our lower credit rating.
Every voter in Ireland has a duty of care to their children, grandchildren and parents to make their anger known to TDs, and in particular those in the Green Party who keep this Government in power, so that no TD gets a moment’s respite from that anger until they abandon their holidays, recall the Dail and take the steps required to start fixing this mess now.
The required cutbacks need to start from the top because the well-off, despite their moaning, haven’t paid their fair share yet. The Government is relying on the Irish public remaining as weak and ineffectually docile as usual, but there’s only so much hypocrisy people will take before the worm turns.
In 2009, every pillar of Irish society failed. We now know how the corruption we allowed flourish in politics, by re-electing TDs we knew were not fit for the job has seeped into every sector of society so that the financial, legal, professional and religious systems are as rotten as the political one. So who’s left holding the sky up in Ireland, and how long before the whole thing falls in?
Rather than recalling the centenary of the 1916 Rising; in 2016, we might be dealing with the fallout from the long overdue revolution that sweeps away the Irish political system.
Desmond FitzGerald
Canary Wharf, London
Former Fine Gael leader and Anglo Irish Bank director, Alan Dukes, is puzzled at the delay by the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE ) in his investigation into Anglo Irish Bank.
I find it rather odd that the Director of Corporate Enforcement announced in February that he was satisfied that there was a prima facie case for an investigation into the bank. Having announced it in February in sent people in, in April, to begin the inquiry and announced recently, that if things go well, in November he might be in a position to tell the DPP whether or not there’s a case. I don’t know why it’s taking so long.
Mr. Dukes is puzzled because he, in company with the great majority of Irish citizens, is unaware that he lives and works within an administrative system that is largely corrupt.
That system is specifically designed to protect white collar criminals, including politicians, from being made accountable. A whole range of useless agencies like tribunals, High Court inspectors, ODCE, Financial Regulator and Financial Ombudsman are set up to absorb public anger, prevent immediate action and eventually allow allegations to become historical and forgotten.
Let me state once again. Nobody in Anglo Irish Bank will ever be brought to account for their actions.
I received a letter today from the EU Committee on Petitions in response to my complaint regarding the criminalisation of those who sell Mass cards without the permission of a Catholic bishop.
Included in the new law is the presumption of guilt until proved innocent which runs contrary to Article 48 (1) of the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights which states:
“Everyone who has been charged shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.”
Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, The Petitions Committee has rejected my complaint. The letter outlines the reasons in bureaucratic language but, effectively, states that the matter doesn’t come within its remit.
I will continue to keep an eye on the implementation of this law so that I can re-apply to the Bishop of Cloyne for permission to sell Mass cards.
In recent times Irish bankers have been keeping very quiet while the Government makes arrangements to bail them out with billions of taxpayer’s money.
Now however, one of them, former chairman of AIB, Mr. Dermot Gleeson SC, has crept out from under his rock to tell Irish citizens that they are to blame for the financial catastrophe because they rejected the Lisbon Treaty and, to add insult to injury, has warned us all that we had better get it right in next October’s referendum.
Conor Ryan of the Irish Examiner writes an excellent analysis of the rest of Mr. Gleeson’s warped views.
WHEN you have chaired Ireland’s largest bank during a period of overheated property speculation only to watch as massive loan books crumble onto unwitting taxpayers, you must know who to blame – everybody.
Former chairman of AIB, Mr. Dermot Gleeson SC has been telling Irish citizens that they are to blame for the financial catastrophe because they voted No in the Lisbon Treaty and that they had better get it right next time.
Well, everybody but yourself that is.
Welcome to the world according to Dermot Gleeson – senior counsel and outgoing chairman of AIB.
Yesterday he treated the morning audience at the MacGill Summer School to a lengthy explanation on how it all went wrong.
Obviously being relieved of the burden of chairing the bank – which had doubled the size of its lending in recent years – has allowed Mr Gleeson to sit back and assess AIB’s embarrassing fall.
And here, for the first time, is a complete run-down of Gleeson’s Bad Guys – the people and factors who, he feels, created a situation where any banker could do little else but throw caution to the wind:
1. European regulations which imposed new accounting standards that only encouraged banks to be reckless.
2. Accountants. Don’t even start Mr Gleeson on accountants. According to him them and their “mark to market” valuing practices totally confused the price of heifers and houses alike.
3. Rating agencies who handed out healthy AAA ratings like a labelling machines at a Duracell factory to obviously unsustainable financial institutions.
4. Central banks. Their warnings of impending crashes could not be taken seriously because quarterly bulletins were otherwise gleefully optimistic. Interest rate policy is a grumble for another day.
5. Government policy. Public spending was excessive and stamp duty was never a long term option. Oh, and the litany of tax reliefs drove the construction boom which banks had to provide money for.
6. The Financial Regulator. It had access to the accounts of banks and should have saved lenders from themselves.
7. Monopoly power. GP fees were too high, energy prices were costly and social partnership was not competitive.
8. The feckless public. “When you are looking for the causes it is hard to exempt ourselves the public, I am not speaking from my capacity as a former chairman of a bank (of course, Mr Gleeson). The public played a role as well because many of us participated in the property bubble.”
9. The nation. ” We believed in things that weren’t actually true… And there is a sense that national pride and confidence boiled itself into over confidence.” You bold nation, you.
10. The media. The call by some commentators that people should vote no to Lisbon was evidence, Mr Gleeson felt, that the media had lost touch with reality.
And then, finally, we have the banks. They made mistakes and here, according to Mr Gleeson, are some of the reasons why.
1. Everybody the banks relied on to assess risks got it wrong. You name it, engineers, statisticians and PhD holders.
2. Risk assessors never exposed the problems in banking practices which markets needed to know.
3. “Sophisticated international consultants” who backed Anglo as a model for other banks and among their cheer leaders, financial journalists and brokers.
4. Anglo Irish Bank. “The presence of a competitor who appears to be striding ahead of you, certainly is taking customers from you, certainly is gaining market share and is being lauded and applauded not just by its own supporters but by [market analysts].” Clearly a bad example for impressionable bankers.
However, after pointing the finger at every other sector Mr Gleeson nobly conceded that following the crowd simply did not absolve his fellow senior bankers.
“The point I just made makes no excuse whatsoever for anyone who followed [Anglo’s] bad example. But it does make up a small part of the explanation,” he said.
And on this gracious note one can only assume had it all gone right, society would have been treated to an equally systematic singling out for praise.
Mr Gleeson’s speech certainly makes it hard to believe that a banker can take credit for anything.
The Tanaiste, Mary Coughlan, has warned a number of professions that the Government will not back down in its drive to increase competition in order to help save the economy (Irish Times).
Engineers, architects, the legal profession, dentists and others are, apparently, to be targeted by the Government because they have not yet felt the chill winds of economic reality. Ms. Coughlan has accused these professions of economic conceit.
So what action is the Tanaiste going to take against those guilty of economic conceit? Well, it seems that the Competition Authority has issued a number of reports over the past few years on the said professions and Ms. Coughlan is now going to submit a report – before the end of the year no less – outlining the progress achieved on the recommendations of those reports.
Asked about the McCarthy report on public service staffing expenditure Ms. Coughlan said she had instructed her department and think-tank Forfás to carry out an evaluation across all Government departments, assessing the impact of the report on employment and on the productive sector.
So, in summary, Ms. Coughlan is going to submit a report in response to a number of other reports and carry out an evaluation across all Government departments to assess the impact of the McCarthy report.
Who said that politicians are not showing vision and courageous leadership in this time of severe crisis?
The so called ‘great and good’ of Irish society (mostly those who have destroyed the country) are up in Donegal at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties issuing edicts of wisdom for the benefit of the masses.
Yesterday, the only pearl of wisdom they could come up with was that Ireland wasn’t in as bad a position as Iceland (RTE News, 8th report).
The REPS (Rural Environment Protection Scheme), scheme is designed to reward Farmers for carrying out their farming activities in an environmentally friendly manner and to bring about environmental improvement on existing farms (Department of Agriculture).
My understanding of this scheme is that farmers will be compensated/reimbursed for the extra costs in carrying out environmentally friendly projects on their farms. It’s not actually an income but a compensation to encourage environmental protection.
It seems, however, that farmers (and the Government) have been using it as an income. Here are some comments from a farmers protest last week in response to cuts in the scheme (RTE News, 4th report, 1st item).
By putting us out of the REP scheme we’re not going to get the money so the country is not going to receive the money.
It’s a bread and butter issue now, people don’t know where they’re going to get money to put food on the table and that’s the situation on the ground.
The school buses, the school books and the uniforms, they’re at their wits end. I’ve seen grown men crying where they have no income.
We’re not crying wolf this time I mean we’ve taken a 30% cut since last October. We don’t mind taking our fair share of the cuts; villages in rural Ireland will be decimated, this was putting money into local economies not just farmer’s pockets.
Letter in today’s Irish Examiner.
I agree with Fergus Finlay (July 14) that political contempt for Dáil Éireann could lead to effective dictatorship.
I strongly disagree, however, with his conclusion that respect for our national parliament can only be restored by politicians.
It is clear that a majority of citizens have lost confidence in the body politic and therefore it is the people themselves who should act to restore respect for Dáil Éireann by bypassing the political system altogether.
Anthony Sheridan