An ineffable judgement ...
... which is effing incredible.

The Irish Times, in September 2006, had a story by its Public Affairs Correspondent, Colm Keena. The story disclosed that the Mahon tribunal were investigating payments made to Bertie Ahern. Ahern, it was alleged, as Minister for Finance in 1993 had received considerable sums: these are now listed in various articles, including a consolidating one from the tribunal website itself.

The Irish Times identified David McKenna, chief executive of Marlborough International, as one of the contributors.

The tribunal went ape, believing that the article stemmed from a leak of a confidential letter it had sent to McKenna. The tribunal went to the High Court, to force the Irish Times and Keena to reveal the source of the leak. The paper refused, on the grounds of good journalistic practice. To further protect its sources, the Editor ordered all the documentation to be destoyed.

The Supreme Court endorsed the appeal by the Editor and Keena, saying that any restriction on freedom of expression had to be justified by an "over-riding requirement in the public interest". Game set and match to the Irish Times?
Alas, no!

The Supreme Court has now ruled ruled that the Irish Times, despite winning the case, must bear the expenses incurred by the tribunal in bringing the action.

That's over €600,000.

The full story is here.
Sphere: Related Content

The case of the bearded bar-tender

The most significant story in the Irish press today was Ed Moloney's piece on the main comment page of the Irish Times.

Malcolm suggests it will be something of a surprise if it does not emerge in the wider media over the next day or two. That it isn't hot news already, of course, may be because of the Times's daft policy of keeping as much as possible back from non-subscribers to its e-edition.
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Moloney has an analysis of Sinn Féin's long term electoral strategy:

Two parts of Sinn Féin's electoral strategy were well known and never a secret. One was to overtake the SDLP to become the largest party in the North. Another was to become large enough in the South to qualify for partnership in government with Fianna Fáil. If both strategies had been successful then Sinn Féin could have been in office on both sides of the border at the same time.

So far, no surprise.

But according to well-placed sources this would not have been the end of Sinn Féin's strategy. The third part was to seek Gerry Adams's elevation to the presidency - and while it was kept secret outside Sinn Féin's inner councils it was apparently known to both the Irish and British governments during their tortuous dealings with Sinn Féin leading to the new Stormont government.

That suggests to Malcolm that:

• Someone, perhaps in or of Dublin ("well-placed sources"), has chosen to whisper in Moloney's ear. Malcolm cannot recall Moloney's present whereabouts: he was in NYC not so long back.
• If there is any substance in this, the Irish and/or the British are (again, no surprise, especially on Moloney's own track-record) clearly still privy to SF's inner circle.
  
• And/or, those same "well-placed sources" have decided it's time to do for Beardie.

Your distance, of course, may vary.

Moloney spells out the maths: to be nominated for the presidency, Gerry would need signatures from twenty members of the Oireachtas (that's members of the Seanad and the Dáil, for the benefit of the illiterati). Had SF scored a dozen TDs, and pulled a couple of Seanad spots, they would be "within shouting distance":

Nor, thanks to a lucrative IRA investment portfolio, would Sinn Féin have had any difficulty finding the financial resources to fight the campaign. But Sinn Féin's Dáil tally of just four TDs in May, along with the perception that the party may have peaked in the South, killed off the idea.

Malcolm instantly picks on how Moloney fingers the money men here. He is clearly saying the Armaliters, not the democratic balloteers, are holding the cheque books for the joint-stock company. Interesting, if only repeating the obvious, that.

Which leaves one unspoken matter hanging in the air.

The presidential poll is next up for grabs in 2011. Meanwhile, if the present Dáil runs its full term (and, provided the economics hold up, it won't go quite that far) then Bertie Ahern has a job (tribunals permitting) until 2o12.

The cute wee hoor has already been there in post for a full decade, and in the Dáil for three times that time. At some point, he must get fed-up; and look for a quieter life, especially as he hits the big six-oh.

At the same point, Fianna Fáil will need credible candidates for two job vacancies: An Taoiseach and Uachtarán na hÉireann. Particularly so, if Brian Cowan does not want to sit in the shadows for ever.

So, Malcolm wonders, can anyone think of a suitable short-term tenant, perhaps someone with recent accommodation problems, and looking for a retirement home, for a rather fine property in the Phoenix Park (see right)?
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At the moment, Gerry Adams (and SF in the South) can have few political friends, and not a lot of debts to call in. Moloney is putting the boot in, quite neatly, on somebody's behalf.

Malcolm, who learned the skills of coarse rugby too well, knows "thrice armed is he who gets his retaliation in first".

And, once again, Malcolm recalls Dewey Finn's line (with appropriate gesture) in School of Rock: "Read between the lines." Sphere: Related Content

Public appearances

An objection comes by Email to Redfellow Hovel, from Our American Cousin [the estimable OAC], complaining about recent changes in the public face of Malcolm Redfellow revivus. By the way, OAC's mention of how Labor Day came about is worth the effort, and was previously unknown to Malcolm.

Yes, Malcolm has been messing with the decor: for one who was previously a major purchaser of Dulux Magnolia emulsion, this is not a good sign. The trouble is that, since the ousting of the elves, there has been minimal techno-nous around the Hovel. So, he is trying again.

The Obama delusion (and clean hands)

In passing, Malcolm also noted OAC's rubbishing of the liberal hope lavished on Obama. Malcolm does not want to intrude on a domestic quarrel, but accepts the point. Neither of the Democratic Party front-runners, big-hitters and wallet-clutchers has the making for a radical change in direction. Now, Malcolm is too old in the tooth to expect a popular revolution, or even a Roosevelt-liberalism. It would be nice, though, to see a new President capable and honest enough to break with the cronyism and cartel-politics of the past. Malcolm suspects (hopes, begs, even prays) that the Big Issues of this minute (Iraq, especially) could well be warmed-over pizza by Labor Day, 2008.

The Economist this week (free access this weekend, if one suffers the pop-up ad) takes a rake along the same row of weeds, specifically on the topic of Democrats and health care:

How do you devise a health-care plan that is sensible and centrist, yet also stands out from the rest? That is the question faced by all the Democratic candidates for the presidency. Health care is second only to the war in Iraq among voters' concerns, so everyone with an eye on the White House wants a winning answer.

The three front-runners—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—have all promised to control costs and provide coverage for the 47m Americans without health insurance. All three have eschewed radical change. Instead, they are jostling over the centre ground: how to tweak America's predominantly private health-care system.

The Economist evaluation seems to put

• John Edwards first:

Not unlike reforms already under way in Massachusetts and California, Mr Edwards's scheme promises an overhaul of insurance markets, subsidies to help poorer people pay their premiums and a legal requirement that everyone should buy health insurance.

• Hills in second place:

Mrs Clinton offers a litany of well-known, but sensible, savings, such as shifting to electronic records, concentrating more on preventive medicine, improving the management of chronic diseases, and creating a “best practices institute” to set guidelines for optimal care. In all, she claims, $120 billion a year could be wrung out of the health system, money that could be used to pay for broader coverage.

• but Obama playing catch-up:

The Obama path to universal coverage is a paler version of Mr Edwards's. It promises insurance-market reform, including the creation of a National Health Insurance Exchange...

Like Mr Edwards's, the Obama plan would levy a tax on firms that do not provide health cover. It would also demand an infusion of federal cash, to be paid for, yes, by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Mr Obama's aides claim the price tag would be around $65 billion a year, though other health experts think it would be higher.

The big difference is that Mr Obama, unlike Mr Edwards, would not force people to buy health insurance. Only children would have to be covered. That soft-pedalling may please the unions, some of which dislike the idea of compelling workers to buy insurance. But it makes his plan both less efficient and less effective.

Beyond assuring decent health-care for its citizens (surely a baseline requirement of any democratic government), it ought to be a major campaign issue to clean up government. Which is why Malcolm is wondering whether such a change can come from the Democrats. The main item in this week's Economist American coverage is an appraisal of John McCain. It is, in the main, a negation of McCain's chances of being nominated, but it provides this provocative thought:

Mr McCain's last big problem is his long-standing record as a reformer. The only thing that this pugnacious man likes attacking more than Democratic vested interests is Republican vested interests. Mr McCain has used his prominent position, as a perpetual presidential candidate and chairman of three Senate committees, to savage big chunks of the Republican establishment: conservative influence-peddlers such as the televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (whom he has labelled evil); Republican interest-groups such as big defence companies; and a campaign-finance system skewed to benefit incumbents, many of them Republicans.

The article points out that McCain was instrumental in the deserved humiliation of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay.

In short, McCain has been as effective an opposition as anyone. His pro-war politics and conservatism may stick in the craw, but at least on one issue his instincts are commendable. When the mark of a coming saviour is the size of his or her war-chest, can we expect such frankness from the Democrats?

The shortest honeymoon on record?
Martyn Turner illustrates that today's Irish Times has obviously decided its urinary position is not from under canvas. Apart from almost a whole broadsheet page profiling Conor Maguire, the Senior Counsel representing the people's Bertie at the Mahon tribunal (and so spot-lighting that little local difficulty), there is a handful of articles all pouring something onto the Ahern "victory".

Kathy Sheridan gets pride of place on the front of the Review section: "The people have spoken ... but what have they said?" A lot of the froth is derived from Ivan Yates's focus-group politics:

It was Yates who pinpointed Breakfast Roll Man as the election winner, the one who turned to Fianna Fáil when the chips were down. Breakfast Roll Man, according to Yates, is aged 20-45, a blue-collar worker in a factory or a building site, "a self-employed electrician or Del Boy ... and the one thing he has learned is to look after himself. He likes Sky Sports, likes to drink — and now drinks pints and wine at home, likes that his wife/mot/partner can go shopping and not wreck his head if she spends too much. And he wants the kids to do better than him."

The bush has been well and truly beaten about before Sheridan gets to the point, based in part on the Times own exit poll:

Health was by far the dominant issue at 45 per cent, crime next at 25 per cent, and managing the economy at 23 per cent. Bush-fire issues such as the cost-of-living (18 per cent), education (15 per cent), environment (13 per cent) and housing (10 per cent) played second fiddle.

If that's the major premise in this syllogism, the minor is lurking unease, with a surprising synthesis:

Nearly 300,000 people work in the construction sector, about 12 per cent of the workforce. About eight days before polling, says Yates, an independent construction consultant, Jerome Casey, forecast a house price drop of 5 per cent this year and 10 per cent in 2008. Breakfast Roll Man saw it coming with his own eyes...
For the record, Yates is predicting a "landslide" for Fine Gael in 2011 or 2012.

Reinforcement comes from the (non-subscription) front page's lead:

Leading bank says growth will drop to 3%
Rising interest rates and debt cited as factors.

Redundancies are up by 8%, year on year: more are due as Dell (the second largest employer in the Republic, and representing 4% of all exports) slims down, as does Eircom and the food sector.

And the Times hasn't finished there. On the Opinion&Analysis page, Michael Casey, "former chief economist of the Central Bank and board member of the International Monetary Fund" is wheeled out to announce:

When it came to economics and fiscal matters, the electorate was sold a pup.

It was ever thus.

Nor should we neglect the benighted English in this traipsing round the political dung-hill.

And a reptilian crap-merchant

The Tories have not had a good week (heh, heh). The grammar schools thing will not go away (it's not a Clause Four moment, but will it be Cameron's EEC issue?):

senior Conservatives warned that the row was making the party look chaotic and potentially elitist and was damaging relations with activists. Even Mr Cameron's staunchest supporters are baffled by the way an apparently uncontroversial speech on a long-standing Tory policy could spark a 17-day row, infighting and a frontbench resignation.

And now there's a new director of communications (or some similar big-sounding title).

Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, ... was an appointment which took both Westminster and Fleet Street by surprise. And it was quickly hailed as being an inspired move, or a high-risk appointment, in almost equal measure.

Max Clifford, who has not spoken to Coulson since a much-publicised spat several years ago, said that he would find the move from newspaper journalism to public relations to be an enormous challenge, requiring skills which even the best tabloid editors may not possess. "Winning friends and influencing people is going to be harder than he thinks," predicted Clifford. "Especially as he will be working for Cameron, who is a PR man desperately trying to re-invent himself as a politician."

Lest we forget: Coulson left the News of the World in the wake of the royal-bugger [mobile phone messages, dearie, not what you're thinking] business, in which one journalist was jugged for four months, and all the rest knew nuffin'.

Sphere: Related Content

How many shades of green?

Malcolm was amused and repelled by the story of the Arklow jobbies. It gets worse. And, bless their little cotton socks, Sinn Féin tried to make it an election issue.

It seems that Dublin City Council (in Malcolm's day, it used to be the "Corporation") export their "human waste" to be spread across the countryside. This practice is illegal in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. More northern Irish county councils (Cavan, Meath, Offaly and Roscommon) are also forbidding it. So, the muck-merchants move on, and over 8,000 tons were added to the County Wicklow landscape last year.

Here's how to do it: take your crap, add lime (which is supposed to kill the bacteria, but doesn't — e.coli persists at fifteen times the permitted level), mix with liquid leached from landfill (lots of lovely heavy metals), spray over farmland. There are three companies involved in this practice:

• Land Organics of Kilkenny. Last year, this firm was denied permission to build a "waste-recovery facility" for 20,000 tonnes a year of "human sludge" near Portlaoise. The crap of Portlaoise amounts to about a tenth of that. Then, this April, the Galway village of Eyrecourt got the sludge spraying treatment, to considerable local disquiet.
  
• SEDE Ireland, Ltd., of Tallaght. This is part of the Proxiserve Group (based in the southern suburbs of Paris), which in turn is a subsidiary of Veolia Eau, a Paris-based multinational.
  
• Quinns of Baltinglass, a decent family firm which began in seeds and fertiliser (indeed!) and has branched into a pub and a supermarket.
  

Nor can Malcolm neglect Louis Moriarty. Mr Moriarty traded as Dublin Waste, which was a pseudonym for Swalcliffe Ltd (though why a fine and ancient Oxfordshire village should be invoked defies reason):

Louis Moriarty, a staunch Fianna Failer, has been involved in a number of court actions over illegal dumping by his former business, Swalcliffe Ltd, trading as Dublin Waste.

Malcolm will worry at that in a moment. Meanwhile, let's stick with the court action against Swalcliffe for illegal dumping:

Wicklow County Council prosecuted Swalcliffe and the Moriartys last year [2002] to recover the cost of cleaning up a twoacre site at Coolnamadra, Donard, near the Glen of Imaal.

The council found that the Moriarty's company had illegally dumped about 8,000 tonnes of waste, including bloodstained bandages, scalpels and laboratory waste.

The council estimates that it will cost €20 million to clean the site but Swalcliffe's accounts for the year to April 30, 2002 say that "the estimated cost of remediating" the land and associated costs is €1.65 million...

In 2001, Wicklow Co Council discovered two major illegal dumps and commenced investigations along with the Gardai. Court proceedings were also issued against Swalcliffe Ltd.

The company was fined a total of IR£7,500 and ordered to pay IR£8,000 in costs for illegal dumping.
A hearing in Dublin District Court was told there were discrepancies of up to 8,500 tonnes per month between the amount of waste that Dublin Waste said it was disposing of and the amount received from it by two dumps approved by the Environmental Protection Authority.

But Mr Moriarty has friends in high places: it's that "staunch Fianna Failer" thing. While the case against Swalcliffe was in process, Moriarty solicited his T.D. for help with obtaining a waste permit:

The Taoiseach was lobbied three years ago by the businessman with whom he was photographed in Kerry earlier this week.

Louis Moriarty, whose €20 million hotel development in Sneem Bertie Ahern visited on Tuesday, is at the centre of a series of investigations into illegal dumping.

Mr Ahern's constituency office also contacted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the activities of Mr Moriarty who is a constituent of Mr Ahern and who lives on Griffith Avenue close to Mr Ahern's home.

There is more, much more on this at village.ie, including the rocky road from Griffith Avenue to Sneem.

Moriarty quickly rid himself of Swalcliffe. It was sold to Greenstar for €5M, which apparently went to finance the €20M Sneem hotel in Mr Moriarty's native Kerry, which was later graced by a visit and photo-op by Taoiseach Ahern. Thereby hangs another tale:

Greenstar is 88 per cent owned by National Toll Roads, the multi-million-euro company owned and controlled by Tom Roche and his family.

Ah, yes, sooner or later we get back to the late Tom Roche:

A legendary figure in Irish business ... a Fianna Fail mover and shaker of the Haughey era ... started off making blocks and selling coal from the back of a truck with a £250 investment from his mother. His connections with Charles Haughey enabled him to establish a cement monopoly in the Irish state.

CRH (Cement Roadstone Holdings) control the concession, NTR, which milks the Dublin toll roads and bridges. The money from NTR has financed the move into waste disposal, that is Greenstar, and thereby into electricity generation from waste.

Malcolm pauses to reflect upon the record of CRH:

Two men charged last week with illegal dumping and pollution on Cement Roadstone Holdings (CRH) sites have been described by An Taisce as “fall guys” for the company’s poor environmental record.

John Healy from Blessington and his son Francis were charged with illegal dumping in relation to incidents in January 1997 and December 2001 when they are accused of disposing “lorryloads of waste without a waste licence”. A second charge was brought for dumping “in a manner that caused or was likely to cause pollution”.

Frank Corcoran, chairman of An Taisce, said the decision by James Hamilton, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), not to bring criminal charges against CRH, the owners of the land, is clearly contrary to European Union environmental law...

The two men charged last week are directors of Blessington Plant Hire, which was contracted by CRH to dredge pools used to clean gravel extracted from the Wicklow quarry. They are also directors of Blue Bins, a sewage and refuse disposal company. The plant hire company had unlimited access to CRH sites for several years.

During the course of the investigation, environmental investigators from Wicklow county council discovered eight separate illegal dumping sites by overflying the 600-acre site with thermal-imaging equipment that spots the higher temperatures of decomposing waste. Three of the sites were described as having “substantial” amounts of waste and three more as in need of remediation.

Half the estimated 100,000 tonnes of dumped material found by investigators was domestic and the rest was construction and demolition waste. Wicklow council has ordered CRH to remove the waste, but the Environmental Protection Agency must issue a licence.

Which brings us back to the topic of the day: coalition partners for Fianna Fáil. As "Dewey Finn" said "Read between the lines":

Green Party leader Trevor Sargent, who looks set to head a total of six Green TDs in the Dáil, said that once his party had clarified and focused on the issues in hand, they would "definitely" be discussing with other parties the possibility of forming a stable government.

However, Mr Sargent insisted that Green Party policies needed to be discussed before any such arrangement was reached.

He said banning corporate donations would be high on his party's agenda if it was to enter into a government with Fianna Fáil. His party's decision would depend on how serious other parties were about forming a stable government.

Mind where you tread! Sphere: Related Content