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Post by kerrygold on Nov 3, 2010 9:29:48 GMT
By David McWilliams David McWilliams: Pray for new beginning to help Pope's Children Wednesday November 03 2010 A couple of weeks ago this column suggested that it would be a workable idea to freeze mortgage payments for a couple of years to provide some stimulus to the economy. As is usual in our country, any suggestion of easing the burden on Irish mortgage holders is greeted with howls of derision from many sides. Similar howls were heard a few years ago when an economist called for restraint. When considering new ideas, it is worth bearing in mind the mentality of the herd. In the boom, the herd's view of the economy could be aptly described as "expansionist". Back then, the crowd contended that we could expand to a degree not seen before, because "this time it is different". Well, it wasn't different. The herd was wrong. Today, the same people who argued for infinite expansion and borrowing in the boom are now telling us that we can't countenance any debt deferral for people who can't pay. So the herd in Ireland has swung from wildly expansionist to crudely reductionist in three years. Many people are against the idea of a mortgage amnesty. Their argument generally runs along the lines of: "I didn't buy a house in the boom, so why should I have to pay for someone else's bad decision?" Others argue that an amnesty rewards "bad behaviour" and would lead to moral hazard. Maybe we should be less concerned by "moral hazard" and more worried about "real hazard". Real hazard is when people -- our neighbours, our friends, our families -- begin to lose hope in the future. On Monday there was another clear example of this when the very admirable (and desperately needed) www.newbeginning.ie was launched. New Beginning is a group of solicitors, barristers, economists and businessmen who have seen the gross inequality played out daily in the High Court where people are appearing in front of judges without any representation -- because they can't afford it. Bad enough that these misfortunates are losing their homes, which they can no longer afford, but down in our courts they are being harassed by legal teams paid for by the banks -- and, of course, the banks use your money as it is your money that has bailed out these delinquent banks. New Beginnning should be lauded for their excellent work in defending people who have committed no greater sin than to believe their government. Remember the litany of politicians, so-called economists, and other "experts" from 2006 and 2007 telling us that "the fundamentals are strong". These "fundamentalists" were the lads that brought you such fantasies as the "soft landing". The victims of this terrible advice can be seen daily in the High Court. In contrast, the people who dispensed that advice are shielded from the consequences of their actions. It is worth reminding the people who hate the idea of helping those in dire straits what doing nothing could mean for the economy. At last count there were about 36,000 people in the country who have not been able to make a mortgage payment in three months. This figure hides the number of people who are paying smaller amounts. It is easily possible that twice that number are in real trouble with their mortgages and are at risk of losing their homes. So let's say we do nothing to help them. It is fairly safe to assume that the majority of people in difficulty are under 40. In 2007, I wrote a book called 'The Generation Game' that focused on what would happen to this generation when the crash came. Most have young families. These people were Ireland's "favourable demographic situation" that we heard would keep the property bubble inflated. These are the Pope's Children. If we do nothing, they are going to turn into our lost generation. Their children, born into the kind of poverty that comes with large unpayable debts, will be disadvantaged for years. Simple analysis says that we had the party during the boom, now we have to suffer the hangover. In economics this is not hangover but an overhang or, more specifically, a debt overhang. Some economists argue that we need to go through a type of cleansing period to learn the lesson and, therefore, people paying back debt and increasing their savings now is the only way forward. They argue that the savings in the banks will be borrowed by companies that want to invest. Therefore, the money which is now paid in mortgages will find its way out into the economy via funds for investment. I would go along with that view if the banks weren't bust and incapable of providing credit to the economy. But the banks are the bottleneck and therefore, some other way of keeping credit going needs to be conceived. The people who are shouting "unfair" and "moral hazard" are cutting off their nose to spite their face. By sacrificing their neighbours on the altar of "I told you so" they are ensuring their own demise, and more importantly, the demise of what is left of Ireland's economy and, possibly, our social cohesion. OF course, there is another way. New Beginning is a start. They intend to challenge some mortgages because banks did not take their duty of care seriously. It seems obvious to me that they are right, but Ireland's contract law is as Victorian as our bankruptcy law, so perhaps we'd better wait and see. What is really needed is a mortgage amnesty. I will not call it "debt forgiveness" because that implies a sin, and there are no sinners among the unfortunates in the High Court. People made a mistake when they bought during the boom. They presumed that their well-paid jobs would last and that house prices would rise forever. They got caught up. By not helping them, we are all making a huge mistake that will prove costly. I didn't go mad in the boom, but I can see how my family's prospects are related to my neighbour's. Arguably, those of us who were vilified back then for predicting the crash should be the ones with the biggest motivation to see those who ridiculed us back then punished now. But societies don't have to work that way. When you look at history, you see that booms and crashes are always followed by a change in the way people look at the society and the economy. Roosevelt's communitarian New Deal which followed the individualistic Roaring Twenties came with federal welfare, housing and work programmes, bank deposit insurance, prices and incomes policies, minimum wage legislation and mass debt amnesties. Ultimately, the US itself came off the gold standard and defaulted on its sovereign debts. These moves were anathema to many who believed that the people who got caught in the share and property crash of 1929 had only themselves to blame. However, the point is that by 1932 the world had changed and when the world changes so too do attitudes. Who can doubt that our world has changed? Who can doubt that our attitudes will change too? David Mc Williams hosts Ireland's first economics festival from November 11. Details at: www.kilkenomics.com - David McWilliams Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Nov 5, 2010 9:00:12 GMT
Friday, November 5, 2010
Céad míle faulty? Irish people aren’t friendly after all, wrote Matt Gross recently in a New York Times travel article. But is he right? During a trip around Ireland last week, ROSITA BOLAND put our céad míle fáilte to the test – with surprising results
IRELAND OF THE welcomes. That’s what New York Times journalist Matt Gross came looking for when he spent a week in Ireland recently, driving round in a hire car by himself. He also came looking for music, scenery, culture, and new experiences. Those he got. He found astonishing views, empty rural roads, peace, music that excited him – a band called the Calvinists in Bantry’s Schooner bar – quaint placenames, and ambitiously written menus that rarely delivered on taste.
What he did not find, as he wrote in the New York Times recently, was friendliness: people to chat with casually in bars and cafes, conversations that lasted longer than the time it took to place a food or drink order, or anyone who showed much interest in him as a tourist with an American accent at all, one way or the other.
“I carried myself in an open manner, I dressed not like a tourist, but like my regular New York self, which I hoped would peg me less as an outsider than as an unusual outsider, an object of curiosity. I wasn’t expecting a hero’s welcome, just a little interest . . . Instead, I was the odd foreigner nobody spoke to . . . As I drank yet another rapturously smooth Guinness, it seemed impossible to chat up anyone, so tightly knit were these groups of cool friends. I felt lonely and desperate and I knew everybody could sense it . . .
“Often I wondered whether I’d been misled about Ireland. This was, I’d gleaned from books and movies, a nation of loquacious gabbers, silver-tongued schmoozers, ostentatiously oratorical pub-dwellers, but were they as mythical – and dismissibly stereotypical – as leprechauns?”
I am frequently on the road throughout the country, whether for work, research, or visiting people. When I read Gross’s story, I thought about my own travelling experiences. Three days before, I had been covering a story all day in Connemara and had not had time to eat. I ran into Steam Coffee House in Clifden and ordered a take-out salad. The dilemma was how to eat it – the cafe had run out of plastic cutlery. They cheerfully gave me a proper fork, waving off offers to return it later (which I did). It was a small detail, but it made a difference to my day.
I frequently eat alone on the road, but that’s often by choice: after a day working, I just want to read, unwind, and talk to nobody. Unlike Gross, I’m not on holidays in Ireland. But I guess the real difference in our experiences is perhaps that if I do want to talk to strangers, I never have a problem striking up a conversation anywhere. Maybe it’s shared points of reference. At the end of the day working in Claddahgduff and Clifden, I wound up staying up until 2am in the Station House Hotel, talking to people I’d hadn’t know before that afternoon. It was one of the best and most memorable nights I’ve had all year.
A few days after I read Matt Gross’s story online, I was driving from Dublin to Cahersiveen in Co Kerry. Going through Farahy, a scattering of houses and a church at a crossroads in Co Cork, I spotted a sign pointing to the site of Bowen’s Court, the now-ruined home of writer Elizabeth Bowen. Several times previously, I’d passed this sign and never stopped, but always intended to. The Last September is my favourite novel of hers. I was making good time. It was daylight. I diverted.
The sign directed me through open white gates into a field with a narrow track for a road. I followed the unpaved potholed path, first with curiosity and then with rising concern. My axel hit a stone hard and then another. There was nowhere to turn, and no ruined house in sight. Either side of the track lay recently ploughed muddy fields.
I panicked. Instead of remaining calm like a sensible person and slowly reversing back the way I had come, I drove into the muddy field and tried to turn around. Very quickly, the car got totally stuck.
Did I feel stupid? I felt extremely, extravagantly stupid. I cursed and gnashed my teeth and smote my brow and then set off, ankle-deep in sticky mud, in pouring rain, to look for help.
I did not doubt for one nanosecond that someone would help me. I assumed without even thinking about it that I would find help. I needed someone to push my car out of the mud, ergo I was utterly confident I would find that help, in the form of a person or persons. Why? Because we’re like that. We’re famously friendly to strangers, let alone our own.
First I knocked on nearby doors, but there was nobody home. Then I figured my strategy would be to hail a jeep or four-wheel-drive, preferably with more than one person in it, so that their vehicle wouldn’t get stuck while going back into the field to help rescue my car. I chose a safe place in the road with good sightlines. Several four-wheel-drive vehicles passed. None stopped.
MANY YEARS AGO, I spent three months hitch-hiking around the coast of Ireland, and wrote a book about that experience, Sea Legs. I was very successful at making cars stop. Or perhaps people were more used to giving lifts in those days when far fewer people had cars. Rarely did I spent so long waiting at the side of the road for a vehicle to stop as I did last week in Farahy. Was it because I was muddy? Visibly wet? An unpredictable freak in 2010 to be hailing a car at all? Or was it because people were deliberately choosing to ignore me, and my signal that tried to flag their vehicle down?
Eventually, a jeep pulled over. There were two occupants, a youngish couple. I explained my situation, and gestured to my car, clearly visible in the adjoining field. Could they help? The woman in the passenger seat looked at me once silently, and then straight ahead at the road. The man – in an Irish accent – asked if I had a phone. I said I did, while wondering foolishly why he would want to know that.
“Why don’t you call the guards then?” he suggested tartly, rolled up the window, and drove off.
Call the guards? Call the guards? I was deep in rural Ireland, far from a shop or pub, let alone a Garda station. Why on earth would I even consider calling guards? It had never occurred to me. I had assumed passers-by would help me, in a informal code of decent behaviour: I did not consider my car getting stuck in a field was a matter for officialdom.
What would Matt Gross have made of this situation, I found myself wondering? Would he have automatically looked for help from passers-by as I did, seeking to tap into that famous Irish Welcome, or would he have simply called his car rental insurance number right off? At the side of the road that afternoon, I suddenly felt mortified and embarrassed nobody was helping me: mortified by my assumption of friendliness and goodwill from Irish strangers that I had always instinctively counted on before. It was a horrible feeling.
There was one house on whose door I had not knocked. Arthur Hennessy, retired for seven years, answered it. He and his wife Brenda insisted on driving their non four-wheel-drive car back into the field. Brenda and I pushed while Arthur drove my car out. In the process, they were both covered in mud. Afterwards, Brenda insisted I come into their house and have tea, while Arthur washed my car and fussed over my muddy boots.
I am immensely grateful to Arthur and Brenda Hennessy of Farahy, Kildorrery, Co Cork. Not only because they literally got me out of a hole, but because they restored my so-recently broken faith in something I had previously always taken for granted – the kindness and approachability of Irish strangers.
But like Matt Gross, the first-time American tourist from New York who found us failing in our welcome lately, I won’t be taking our Irish hospitality for granted again.
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Post by kerrygold on Nov 10, 2010 18:54:56 GMT
Dr. John Feehan: UCD.
Among the greatest challenges faced by humanity in our time is that of doubling food production in order to feed a population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Two-thirds of these people will be in dense conurbations to which they have moved because they can no longer find enough to support them in the countryside. These people will not have the land resources to feed themselves, and will depend increasingly not on food produced in the urban hinterland or indeed elsewhere in their own country, but on imported food.
The options available to meet the challenge do not include taking more land into cultivation, because there is no more land: the good land is already in production. Most of what is left is desert, mountain or city: and indeed, in 2006 the International Food Policy Research Institute reported that 40 per cent of what is farmed today is seriously degraded. We cannot afford to lose any more farmland: in 50 years time we will need every hectare of agricultural land we have.
Areas of the world that are critical to feeding today’s 7 billion will no longer be able to supply their current grain surpluses to meet the need of burgeoning nations that can no longer feed themselves, as rising temperatures put pressure on the world’s great cereal-growing areas and water tables continue to fall as a result of the overpumping of aquifers – in effect, the mining of fossil water that cannot be replaced.
This is a challenge that will take all of our ingenuity and skill, all the more so because it has to be met without further loss of biodiversity and without compromising environmental integrity.
Here in Ireland we are in a privileged position. We will have ample supplies of water into the foreseeable future, and the marginal land allowed to slip out of productive agriculture constitutes a productive land bank that can be reclaimed. We will see farmed once more land on the margins that was taken into production in earlier times and abandoned as the tide of intensification concentrated on the ‘best’ land. This includes the extensive acres on the hills taken from the wild as the population rose to its pre-Famine peak of eight million people to be fed from local resources: reclaimed at a cost in human labour we can hardly comprehend in our mechanized society.
This land cannot be made productive however by applying the oil-dependent intensive techniques of the last 60 years, which will have become obsolete half a century hence. In a future in which the high price of oil will have made the extensive use of fertilizer uneconomic, we will need to develop – or recover – an agriculture that is based on inherent fertility.
This will require an understanding not only of the principles of the applied science of agro-ecology, but of how those principles are to be applied in the unique circumstances of each place. In its newfound adherence to the principles of self-sufficiency this new agriculture will be a return to the older knowledge of the past, but the greater understanding and control which the advance of science and technology have given us will mean that it is enhanced by the best of appropriate technology.
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Post by OnTheForty on Nov 11, 2010 15:48:43 GMT
The Irish Times - Monday, November 8, 2010 If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait until the mortgage defaults hit home
THE BIG PICTURE: Ireland is effectively insolvent – the next crisis will be mass home mortgage default, writes MORGAN KELLY
SAD NEWS just in from Our Lady of the Eurozone Hospital: After a sudden worsening in her condition, the Irish Patient, formerly known as the Irish Republic, has been moved into intensive care and put on artificial ventilation. While a hospital spokesman, Jean-Claude Trichet, tried to sound upbeat, there is no prospect that the Patient will recover.
It will be remembered that, after a lengthy period of poverty following her acrimonious divorce from her English partner, in the 1990s Ireland succeeded in turning her life around, educating herself, and holding down a steady job. Although her increasingly riotous lifestyle over the last decade had raised some concerns, the Irish Patient’s fate was sealed by a botched emergency intervention on September 29th, 2008 followed by repeated misdiagnoses of the ensuing complications.
With the Irish Patient now clinically dead, her grieving European relatives face the melancholy task of deciding when to remove her from life support, and how to deal with the extraordinary debts she ran up in the last months of her life . . .
WHEN I wrote in The Irish Times last May showing how the bank guarantee would lead to national insolvency, I did not expect the financial collapse to be anywhere near as swift or as deep as has now occurred. During September, the Irish Republic quietly ceased to exist as an autonomous fiscal entity, and became a ward of the European Central Bank.
It is a testament to the cool and resolute handling of the crisis over the last six months by the Government and Central Bank that markets now put Irish sovereign debt in the same risk group as Ukraine and Pakistan, two notches above the junk level of Argentina, Greece and Venezuela.
September marked Ireland’s point of no return in the banking crisis. During that month, €55 billion of bank bonds (held mainly by UK, German, and French banks) matured and were repaid, mostly by borrowing from the European Central Bank.
Until September, Ireland had the legal option of terminating the bank guarantee on the grounds that three of the guaranteed banks had withheld material information about their solvency, in direct breach of the 1971 Central Bank Act. The way would then have been open to pass legislation along the lines of the UK’s Bank Resolution Regime, to turn the roughly €75 billion of outstanding bank debt into shares in those banks, and so end the banking crisis at a stroke.
With the €55 billion repaid, the possibility of resolving the bank crisis by sharing costs with the bondholders is now water under the bridge. Instead of the unpleasant showdown with the European Central Bank that a bank resolution would have entailed, everyone is a winner. Or everyone who matters, at least.
The German and French banks whose solvency is the overriding concern of the ECB get their money back. Senior Irish policymakers get to roll over and have their tummies tickled by their European overlords and be told what good sports they have been. And best of all, apart from some token departures of executives too old and rich to care less, the senior management of the banks that caused this crisis continue to enjoy their richly earned rewards. The only difficulty is that the Government’s open-ended commitment to cover the bank losses far exceeds the fiscal capacity of the Irish State.
The Government has admitted that Anglo is going to cost the taxpayer €29 to €34 billion. It has also invested €16 billion in the other banks, but expects to get some or all of that investment back eventually.
So, the taxpayer cost of the bailout is about €30 billion for Anglo and some fraction of €16 billion for the rest. Unfortunately, these numbers are not consistent with each other, and it only takes a second to see why.
Between them, AIB and Bank of Ireland had the same exposure to developers as Anglo and, to the extent that they were scrambling to catch up with Anglo, probably lent to even worse turkeys than it did. AIB and Bank of Ireland did start with more capital to absorb losses than Anglo, but also face substantial mortgage losses, which it does not. It follows that AIB and Bank of Ireland together will cost the taxpayer at least as much as Anglo.
Once we accept, as the Government does, that Anglo will cost the taxpayer about €30 billion, we must accept that AIB and Bank of Ireland will cost at least €30 billion extra.
In my article of last May, when I published my optimistic estimate of a €50 billion bailout bill, I posted a spreadsheet on the irisheconomy.ie website, giving my realistic estimates of taxpayer losses. My realistic estimate for Anglo was €34 billion, the same as the Government’s current estimate.
When you apply the same assumptions about lending losses to the other banks, you end up with a likely taxpayer bill of €16 billion for Bank of Ireland (deducting the €3 billion they have since received from investors) and €26 billion for AIB: nearly as bad as Anglo.
Indeed, the true scandal in Irish banking is not what happened at Anglo and Nationwide (which, as specialised development lenders, would have suffered horrific losses even had they not been run by crooks or morons) but the breakdown of governance at AIB that allowed it to pursue the same suicidal path.
Once again we are having to sit through the same dreary and mendacious charade with AIB that we endured with Anglo: “AIB only needs €3.5 billion, sorry we meant to say €6.5 billion, sorry . . .” and so on until it is fully nationalised next year, and the true extent of its folly revealed.
This €70 billion bill for the banks dwarfs the €15 billion in spending cuts now agonised over, and reduces the necessary cuts in Government spending to an exercise in futility. What is the point of rearranging the spending deckchairs, when the iceberg of bank losses is going to sink us anyway?
What is driving our bond yields to record levels is not the Government deficit, but the bank bailout. Without the banks, our national debt could be stabilised in four years at a level not much worse than where France, with its triple A rating in the bond markets, is now.
As a taxpayer, what does a bailout bill of €70 billion mean? It means that every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to three years will go to repay Anglo’s losses, every cent for the following two years will go on AIB, and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. In other words, the Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means of repaying them.
For a country or company, insolvency is the equivalent of death for a person, and is usually swiftly followed by the legal process of bankruptcy, the equivalent of a funeral.
Two things have delayed Ireland’s funeral. First, in anticipation of being booted out of bond markets, the Government built up a large pile of cash a few months ago, so that it can keep going until the New Year before it runs out of money. Although insolvent, Ireland is still liquid, for now.
Secondly, not wanting another Greek-style mess, the ECB has intervened to fund the Irish banks. Not only have Irish banks had to repay their maturing bonds, but they have been haemorrhaging funds in the inter-bank market, and the ECB has quietly stepped in with emergency funding to keep them going until it can make up its mind what to do.
Since September, a permanent team of ECB “observers” has taken up residence in the Department of Finance. Although of many nationalities, they are known there, dismayingly but inevitably, as “The Germans”.
So, thanks to the discreet intervention of the ECB, the first stage of the crisis has closed with a whimper rather than a bang. Developer loans sank the banks which, thanks to the bank guarantee, sank the Irish State, leaving it as a ward of the ECB.
The next act of the crisis will rehearse the same themes of bad loans and foreign debt, only this time as tragedy rather than farce. This time the bad loans will be mortgages, and the foreign creditor who cannot be repaid is the ECB. In consequence, the second act promises to be a good deal more traumatic than the first.
Where the first round of the banking crisis centred on a few dozen large developers, the next round will involve hundreds of thousands of families with mortgages. Between negotiated repayment reductions and defaults, at least 100,000 mortgages (one in eight) are already under water, and things have barely started.
Banks have been relying on two dams to block the torrent of defaults – house prices and social stigma – but both have started to crumble alarmingly.
People are going to extraordinary lengths – not paying other bills and borrowing heavily from their parents – to meet mortgage repayments, both out of fear of losing their homes and to avoid the stigma of admitting that they are broke. In a society like ours, where a person’s moral worth is judged – by themselves as much as by others – by the car they drive and the house they own, the idea of admitting that you cannot afford your mortgage is unspeakably shameful.
That will change. The perception growing among borrowers is that while they played by the rules, the banks certainly did not, cynically persuading them into mortgages that they had no hope of affording. Facing a choice between obligations to the banks and to their families – mortgage or food – growing numbers are choosing the latter.
In the last year, America has seen a rising number of “strategic defaults”. People choose to stop repaying their mortgages, realising they can live rent-free in their house for several years before eviction, and then rent a better house for less than the interest on their current mortgage. The prospect of being sued by banks is not credible – the State of Florida allows banks full recourse to the assets of delinquent borrowers just like here, but it has the highest default rate in the US – because there is no point pursuing someone who has no assets.
If one family defaults on its mortgage, they are pariahs: if 200,000 default they are a powerful political constituency. There is no shame in admitting that you too were mauled by the Celtic Tiger after being conned into taking out an unaffordable mortgage, when everyone around you is admitting the same.
The gathering mortgage crisis puts Ireland on the cusp of a social conflict on the scale of the Land War, but with one crucial difference. Whereas the Land War faced tenant farmers against a relative handful of mostly foreign landlords, the looming Mortgage War will pit recent house buyers against the majority of families who feel they worked hard and made sacrifices to pay off their mortgages, or else decided not to buy during the bubble, and who think those with mortgages should be made to pay them off. Any relief to struggling mortgage-holders will come not out of bank profits – there is no longer any such thing – but from the pockets of other taxpayers.
The other crumbling dam against mass mortgage default is house prices. House prices are driven by the size of mortgages that banks give out. That is why, even though Irish banks face long-run funding costs of at least 8 per cent (if they could find anyone to lend to them), they are still giving out mortgages at 5 per cent, to maintain an artificial floor on house prices. Without this trickle of new mortgages, prices would collapse and mass defaults ensue.
However, once Irish banks pass under direct ECB control next year, they will be forced to stop lending in order to shrink their balance sheets back to a level that can be funded from customer deposits. With no new mortgage lending, the housing market will be driven by cash transactions, and prices will collapse accordingly.
While the current priority of Irish banks is to conceal their mortgage losses, which requires them to go easy on borrowers, their new priority will be to get the ECB’s money back by whatever means necessary. The resulting wave of foreclosures will cause prices to collapse further.
Along with mass mortgage defaults, sorting out our bill with the ECB will define the second stage of the banking crisis. For now it is easier for the ECB to drip feed funding to the Irish State and banks rather than admit publicly that we are bankrupt, and trigger a crisis that could engulf other euro-zone states. Our economy is tiny, and it is easiest, for now, to kick the can up the road and see how things work out.
By next year Ireland will have run out of cash, and the terms of a formal bailout will have to be agreed. Our bill will be totted up and presented to us, along with terms for repayment. On these terms hangs our future as a nation. We can only hope that, in return for being such good sports about the whole bondholder business and repaying European banks whose idea of a sound investment was lending billions to Gleeson, Fitzpatrick and Fingleton, the Government can negotiate a low rate of interest.
With a sufficiently low interest rate on what we owe to Europe, a combination of economic growth and inflation will eventually erode away the debt, just as it did in the 1980s: we get to survive.
How low is sufficiently low? Economists have a simple rule to calculate this. If the interest rate on a country’s debt is lower than the sum of its growth rate and inflation rate, the ratio of debt to national income will shrink through time. After a massive credit bubble and with a shaky international economy, our growth prospects for the next decade are poor, and prices are likely to be static or falling. An interest rate beyond 2 per cent is likely to sink us.
This means that if we are forced to repay the ECB at the 5 per cent interest rate imposed on Greece, our debt will rise faster than our means of servicing it, and we will inevitably face a State bankruptcy that will destroy what few shreds of our international reputation still remain.
Why would the ECB impose such a punitive interest rate on us? The answer is that we are too small to matter: the ECB’s real concerns lie with Spain and Italy. Making an example of Ireland is an easy way to show that bailouts are not a soft option, and so frighten them into keeping their deficits under control.
Given the risk of national bankruptcy it entailed, what led the Government into this abject and unconditional surrender to the bank bondholders? I have been told that the Government’s reasoning runs as follows: “Europe will bail us out, just like they bailed out the Greeks. And does anyone expect the Greeks to repay?”
The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious. Despite a decade of Anglo-Fáil rule, with its mantra that there are no such things as duties, only entitlements, few Irish institutions have collapsed to the third-world levels of their Greek counterparts, least of all our tax system.
And unlike the Greeks, we lacked the tact and common sense to keep our grubby dealing to ourselves. Europeans had to endure a decade of Irish politicians strutting around and telling them how they needed to emulate our crony capitalism if they wanted to be as rich as we are. As far as other Europeans are concerned, the Irish Government is aiming to add injury to insult by getting their taxpayers to help the “Richest Nation in Europe” continue to enjoy its lavish lifestyle.
My stating the simple fact that the Government has driven Ireland over the brink of insolvency should not be taken as a tacit endorsement of the Opposition. The stark lesson of the last 30 years is that, while Fianna Fáil’s record of economic management has been decidedly mixed, that of the various Fine Gael coalitions has been uniformly dismal.
As ordinary people start to realise that this thing is not only happening, it is happening to them, we can see anxiety giving way to the first upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America. Within five years, both Civil War parties are likely to have been brushed aside by a hard right, anti-Europe, anti-Traveller party that, inconceivable as it now seems, will leave us nostalgic for the, usually, harmless buffoonery of Biffo, Inda, and their chums.
You have read enough articles by economists by now to know that it is customary at this stage for me to propose, in 30 words or fewer, a simple policy that will solve all our problems. Unfortunately, this is where I have to hold up my hands and confess that I have no solutions, simple or otherwise.
Ireland faced a painful choice between imposing a resolution on banks that were too big to save or becoming insolvent, and, for whatever reason, chose the latter. Sovereign nations get to make policy choices, and we are no longer a sovereign nation in any meaningful sense of that term.
From here on, for better or worse, we can only rely on the kindness of strangers.
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Post by Seoirse Ui Duic on Nov 16, 2010 9:19:29 GMT
Smith hails Munster passion in hint at post-World Cup move By Hugh Farrelly Tuesday November 16 2010
ALL BLACKS star Conrad Smith says he would be interested in joining Munster if he decides to pursue his career in Europe after next year's World Cup.
Rated as one of the finest centres in the world game, Smith is happy playing in New Zealand for the time being but, having experienced the Thomond Park atmosphere when Munster ran the All Blacks to 16-18 in 2008, he says the Irish province are the type of team that would bring the best out of him.
"I wouldn't rule it out," said Smith, who has played for the All Blacks with Munster duo Doug Howlett and Sam Tuitupou.
"I got a taste of Munster when we came over the last time and I was impressed; the passion they have for rugby is pretty strong, it was cool. I'm a player that is fuelled by passion. I'm not particularly big or fast, I need to really believe in who I'm playing for.
"I need to play where I'm passionate about and I grew up wanting to play for the Hurricanes and the All Blacks and I feel that if I played for a random team over there (Europe) the same drive wouldn't be there. For now, I'm happy playing in New Zealand but it is pretty appealing."
Munster take on Australia in Thomond Park tonight, with Howlett and Tuitupou both included in a side captained by James Coughlan. The No 8 is seeking to emulate Dolphin club-mate Terry Kingston, who led Munster to victory over the then world champion Australians at Musgrave Park in 1992.
Meanwhile, Ireland's preparations for next Saturday's Test with Smith's All Blacks suffered a setback yesterday when Munster second-row Donnacha Ryan was cited for an alleged stamp during Saturday's 20-10 victory over Samoa at Lansdowne Road.
Ryan will appear before an independent Six Nations disciplinary committee in London today, as will Ti'i Paulo, the Samoan hooker cited for two alleged dangerous tackles in last week's defeat to Connacht.
- Hugh Farrelly
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Post by glengael on Nov 16, 2010 12:32:54 GMT
Tuesday, November 16,
How fair is the Fair Deal?
Counting the cost: under the new system, the patient contributes 80 per cent of their income towards the cost of their nursing home care, plus a charge of five per cent of the value of their assets (above certain thresholds) per year. The State then pays the shortfall.
By CAROLINE MADDEN
PERSONAL FINANCE: The Fair Deal scheme is working,particularly for middle-class nursing home residents, but for those on a State pension, it is proving more problematic and things will get a great deal worse if it is hit in the Budget
JUST OVER ONE year ago, the delays, deferrals and legislative difficulties that had beset the Fair Deal nursing home support scheme were finally overcome and the new system was implemented. It was introduced not before time. Last week, the Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly published Who Cares? , a report into the rights to nursing home care. It concluded that access to nursing home care over four decades had been marked by “confusion, uncertainty, misinformation, inconsistency and inequity”.
The damning report found that the State had deprived thousands of old people of their legal entitlement to nursing home care over four decades and said that successive governments had repeatedly failed to amend the law to clarify entitlements to nursing home care, forcing vulnerable elderly people to seek care in private homes, often at huge cost to themselves and their families.
In response to the report, the Minister for Health, Mary Harney, said she had recognised “there was a serious problem of inequity and brought forward the Fair Deal.” She said 13,000 families were benefiting from it “and they don’t have to sell their homes or remortgage their homes to pay for nursing home care.”
Fair Deal has certainly solved some of the problems that faced elderly people in need of long-term residential care but it has not proved a panacea. And if the swingeing public expenditure cuts coming down the tracks hit the Fair Deal budget, then those seeking nursing home care could find themselves worse off than ever.
Under the new system, the patient contributes 80 per cent of their income towards the cost of their nursing home care, plus a charge of five per cent of the value of their assets (above certain thresholds) per year.
The State then pays the shortfall. So, for example, if the cost of a person’s care is €1,000 per week and their contribution is assessed to be €300, the HSE pays the weekly balance of €700.
If the individual’s assets include land and property, then the five per cent contribution based on these assets can be deferred and paid out of their estate after they die.
The thinking behind the scheme was that older people would no longer be forced to sell their home during their lifetime, while their relatives would not have to subsidise care costs. It was also hoped that replacing the existing means-tested subvention system – which was introduced in 1993 and was widely viewed as unclear, unfair and inconsistent – would create a level playing field.
So how is the Fair Deal working in practice since its launch in October 2009? According to Mairead Hayes, chief executive of the Irish Senior Citizens Parliament, it appears to be going smoothly for middle-class people. “We’re definitely not getting the panic phone calls we used to,” she says.
Close to 16,000 applications for financial support have been received by the HSE, and by the end of September over 11,000 had been processed. Only 200 applications have been turned down.
The HSE said that these were declined for two main reasons: either it was determined that the applicant didn’t need long-term residential care, or their assessed contribution was found to exceed the cost of care and therefore no State support was payable.
However, Hayes says that issues are arising for people whose only source of income is the State pension, which is currently €230 a week. Under the rules of the scheme, 80 per cent of their income – or €184 – goes towards the cost of nursing home care, leaving just €46 in weekly spending money.
This is a pretty meagre subsistence rate by any standard, but particularly when one considers that the Fair Deal contract does not cover all of the essentials of daily life. The scheme provides for nursing and personal care, basic aids and appliances, bed and board and laundry services.
Unfortunately in many cases, “extras” such as hairdressing, incontinence wear, occupational therapy and physiotherapy sessions are not covered by the scheme and have to be paid for separately. Most older people have a medical card, which should cover some of these additional services, but other costs such as clothing, newspapers, prescription charges (capped at €10 a month for medical card holders) and so on still have to be met out of this tiny allowance.
A far bigger problem, however, is the threat of budget cuts. In 2010, €979 million was allocated for the Fair Deal scheme, and it appears that this will be sufficient to process all applications received this year. However the minister has indicated that up to €1 billion will be cut from the HSE’s budget next year. If funding for the Fair Deal scheme is hit, then we are likely to see the return of waiting lists for nursing home places. If this happens, the clock will be turned back to a pre-1993 situation, warns Eamon Timmins, head of advocacy at Age Action Ireland.
Timmins explains that before the Fair Deal scheme was implemented, people in need of nursing home care had three choices: they could wait for a public bed to become available; they could pay for a place in a private nursing home; or they could apply for a subvention, which was like a grant towards the cost of a nursing home bed. If waiting lists start to reappear, people will be limited to two choices: go privately or wait. “They won’t have the middle ground of subventions and will be worse off,” he says.
Tadhg Daly, chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland (NHI), says that while the scheme has “most definitely changed the landscape”, the jury is still out from the operators’ point of view. In particular, private nursing home operators are unhappy with the rates negotiated with the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) for providing care through the Fair Deal scheme. The average rate negotiated in the private sector is €831 a week. This compares with an average published cost of about €1,300 in public nursing homes.
The private nursing home sector has found itself under increasing pressure this year due to the implementation of new quality standards. According to the NHI, its members have spent an average of almost €78,000 per nursing home in order to comply with these standards. On top of that, staff costs, commercial rates and energy costs continue to rise.
Negotiations are ongoing between nursing home providers and the NTPF for next year’s fees. “Negotiating rates downwards is not an option,” Daly says. “The operating costs for providers is increasing.” It seems inevitable that nursing home rates will be pushed upwards, which will stretch the Fair Deal budget further. In order to compensate for this, and for any budget cuts that should arise, the Government may decide to follow the recommendations of An Bord Snip Nua and take a larger slice of peoples’ assets, particularly given that the value of assets has plummeted since the Fair Deal was unveiled back in 2006.
So what, if anything, can be done? Hayes says that the funds required to cater for older people in need of nursing home care should be provided, but she stresses the importance of continuing to provide care in the community where possible as this will “eventually lessen the bill”.
“The more homecare packages, day-care centres and facilities that can be provided in the community, the less need there will be [for long-term residential care],” she says.
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 2, 2010 9:29:28 GMT
By Martina Devlin
Thursday December 02 2010
THIS is a tale of two Irelands -- a tale of an aristocracy and the huddled masses. Despite proclaiming ourselves a republic, we live in an unequal society with kingpins among us. They are not patricians, except in their inflated sense of entitlement -- they are our own people.
This upper crust claims to have our best interests at heart. Yet as they sail the storm- battered ship of state, they continue to insist on first-class privileges.
Last week's four-year plan highlighted an 11.5pc cut in the minimum wage, while people are braced for the bleakest Budget in decades next week. This week we learn that Dermot Ahern, a senior government figure spanning the boom and bust, will walk away from the disaster he helped to cause with a pension of €129,000 a year for life.
By any measure, it is an extravagant annuity: almost four times the average industrial wage. But it is particularly astonishing for two reasons: it has been awarded during a time of national austerity, and to a key decision-maker in three successive administrations whose combined ineptitude has levelled the country.
Ahern says he didn't enter politics for money -- but he is certainly exiting with it. There is also a tax-free lump sump, which brings his package above the €300,000 mark.
Nobody begrudges him a severance deal but why must it be so princely? I thought he was a servant of the people, not one of the elite. Yet he is being treated like an aristocrat, while the rank and file finance his feather-bedded retirement.
Meanwhile his fellow citizens are losing their jobs and their homes, small businesses are going to the wall, young people are forced into emigration, public services are slashed, standards of living are eroded.
And where are our politicians? Still inhabiting Planet Profligate. No doubt some started out in public life with a commitment to fairness, but it has been warped by the world of excess awaiting them in Leinster House.
They are beggaring us, even as they accept lordly pensions as if by divine right. There is bankruptcy -- and then there is moral bankruptcy.
Here we have a tale of two Irelands, indeed: an Ireland in which our leaders exhort us to shoulder the burden of their mistakes, meanwhile behaving as if it's every man for himself.
What we're seeing with Ahern -- and will shortly witness in relation to other politicians who retire rather than face the wrath of the electorate -- is institutionalised selfishness on a Darwinian level. So much for Ireland being a community rather than a jungle.
The minister's unjust -- though legal, God help us -- pension and severance package serves as yet another demonstration of the them-and-us culture that has sunk politicians so low in the public's esteem. Theirs is the power to address it. They sit on their hands.
Dermot Ahern has the comfort of a pension worth some tens of thousands of euro more than the generous salary he could expect as a backbench TD (his alternative fate). Yet his Government has just announced it will reduce tax relief for people who provide for their own pensions. Two Irelands, indeed.
Irish citizens are expected to repay a back-breaking level of debt for bank bailouts, fixing the public finances and meeting IMF and EU payment schedules. As a taxpayer, Ahern will meet his share.
But as a member of cabinet, he was responsible for some of the most foolhardy and damaging decisions made by any Irish government. Along with his colleagues, he presided over a gargantuan economic collapse and a ham-fisted recovery strategy.
Yet there is no accountability -- just as no accountability exists anywhere in Irish life.
I did the State some service? Not nearly enough, minister.
Surely a proportion of the bountiful pensions paid to ministers and senior civil servants should be contingent on performance (ex-Financial Regulator Patrick Neary and former Central Bank governor John Hurley spring to mind); part awarded automatically, part containing a performance-related element.
We need to start pruning payments, because other TDs and ministers are likely to step down rather than stomach humiliation at the polls or long years in opposition. The State is facing significant bills from members of the Oireachtas.
Pensions will vary from one politician to the next, but most will be eye-watering. Don't forget Jim McDaid is also retiring from the fray with a €94,000 annual pension, plus lump sum, plus severance package.
And while pensions for private sector workers rise and fall -- subject to stock market fluctuations, of which there have been quite a few -- politicians' allowances will not alter. They can expect a guaranteed sum.
Meanwhile, we hear about billions here and billions there, as this crisis lurches from one emergency to the next, but a billion has been a difficult concept for most of us to grapple with. Not for much longer. When €6bn is crow-barred out of the Budget, and we discover what tax increases and abridged services mean for our way of life, we will all have some understanding of those stratospheric figures.
This tale of two Irelands is a shocking one of betrayal, gross incompetence, lack of accountability, waste and greed on epic levels.
Our leaders have created a polarised society and Dermot Ahern's retirement package is just one more affront to our sense of fairness. It offends on every level of equality and justice.
As an extra twist, how ironic to see it awarded to the Justice Minister.
- Martina Devlin
Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Dec 5, 2010 13:26:27 GMT
As long as the oil and gas keep flowing Russia has the money to deliver a world-class soccer tournament in 2018. But the hosts have their work cut out for them, writes World Cup veteran Emmet Malone.
IRISH TIMES 4TH December
THE LAST I SAW of the Luzhniki Stadium, where the final of the 2018 World Cup will be held, was a few hours after Manchester United had beaten Chelsea on penalties to win the 2008 Champions League final. Sitting on a media bus at about 4am, waiting to return to my Moscow hotel, I watched as what seemed like thousands of the soldiers who had provided security for the game marched by in formation. Most of the Fifa executive committee members who took part in Thursday’s ballots to decide which countries would host the next two World Cups were probably looking on from the nearby VIP vehicles. They will have travelled home knowing that, wherever else they might fall down over the next seven and a half years, lack of manpower will not be an issue.
Like the South Africans this year, the Russians will doubtless deal with security by throwing bodies – lots of them – at the problem. Other difficulties, however, will have to be tackled long before then, and they may prove more difficult to solve.
Accommodation will have to be a priority. The influx of supporters of just two English clubs for that Champions League final caused hotel prices to rocket. When a colleague asked how much mine was costing, I suggested it might be prudent not to mention the figure in print. Journalists talk, though, and a day later the number was thrown at me in a radio interview, as an example of the sort of lunacy that was going on “out there”, by a sceptical presenter who had no idea I was the lunatic involved.
At least there were hotel rooms to be had in Moscow. A quick internet search this week failed to produce a single one in Saransk for a midweek night when there isn’t a World Cup in town, and the situation in several other host cities might best be described at this early stage as unpromising.
Supporters who travel for the tournament will also have to make some difficult choices in terms of where to base themselves. South Africa is big, but it is on nothing like the scale of Russia, with its nine time zones. The lone Irish supporter I met who attended something like 32 games in 31 days this summer will have his work cut out to repeat the feat in 2018.
In an attempt to address the issue, the Russians have divided their bid cities into geographical clusters, but getting, for example, from Kaliningrad – Königsberg to nostalgic Germans – to the other city in the northern cluster, St Petersburg, takes a handy 26 hours by train.
If your team is based in the southern cluster, on the other hand, and you decide to hole up in, say, Krasnodar, you should probably bring something to read. Lonely Planet’s website lists three things to do in the city of 700,000 people, and the third one is seeing a statue.
Long before they get there, of course, any Irish fans intending to travel will have the delight of dealing with the embassy staff in Dublin, where a tiny bit of the old Soviet Union is, it seems, being kept alive.
For some of those who made it past the Orwell Road bureaucracy and travelled for Ireland’s ill-fated European Championship qualifier in September 2002, things turned nastier when they arrived in Moscow, where some of them were attacked by local thugs and others were shaken down by police who demanded cash for alleged infringements of one type or another.
Racism, xenophobia even, appears to be a significant issue in Russia, whose football supporters can turn violent. On a recent trip home the Irish international Aiden McGeady, who moved during the summer from Celtic to Spartak Moscow, told of getting on the team bus after an away game against Anzhi, in Dagestan, and being startled by what he saw.
“The boys were just putting their bags up against the windows to protect themselves. There were things hitting off the bus: stones, whatever [the fans outside] could get their hands on. This is normal, apparently, the players told me. When I was taking a corner during the game,” he added, “I looked up and there was a big riot going on. The police got involved; I don’t know what happened. I just saw the Anzhi supporters running up, tearing up seats and throwing them at the Spartak supporters. It’s intense down in that region, apparently.”
Asked if this was reminiscent of the famously ill tempered Old Firm derbies he had taken part in back in Glasgow, he laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s a different world out there.”
For all of that, the Russian authorities handled the Champions League well, and they won’t set out to spend €8 billion, mainly on stadiums and transport, in order to host a month-long PR disaster.
Their bid for the tournament was impressive, and the computer-generated images of the sparkling venues that will be built in cities like Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Yaroslavl look wonderful, certainly suggesting that the football end of things will be done well.
On these sorts of occasions, though, the bigwigs in Fifa see themselves less as the cosseted leadership of a sports organisation and more as noble agents of international economic and social transformation.
But, having got to slap each other on the back after their gamble on South Africa paid off, and having chosen Brazil for 2014, they will be regarded by some as riding their luck a little by going this week for Russia rather than, say, England or Iberia.
Reading the electorate well, though, the Russians pushed all the right buttons for the Fifa suits. Qatar, having a little less social and sporting legacy to play with, simply threw money at its winning bid to host the 2022 tournament, not least in South Africa, where it rented something like 25 high-end apartments at the hugely expensive Michelangelo hotel in order to do its wining and dining.
As long as the oil and gas keep flowing, both will, at least, have the money to deliver on their extravagant promises.
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 10, 2010 9:31:35 GMT
By Lise Hand
Lise Hand: Green space cadets suffer Confusion reigns over junior coalition partner's exit plans
Friday December 10 2010
EAMON Gilmore looked genuinely perplexed. He was availing of the Order of Business in the Dail yesterday morning to try and figure out what the Government's junior partners were up to.
"Can the Tanaiste tell us what planet the Green Party members are wired to today?" he appealed to Mary Coughlan.
And who could blame the Labour leader? Their shenanigans have left everyone -- as a citizen dolefully remarked in the aftermath of the Budget -- as confused as a chameleon in a bag of Skittles.
For it seems that the Greens have mastered the intricate Lanigan's Ball two-step beloved of past junior coalition partnerships. Labour's Dick Spring was a master of the 'I stepped out and I stepped in again" political manoeuvre, and the PDs were veritable twinkle-toes at it.
So now the Greens have taken to the floor. First, they threw everything up in a heap two-and-a-half weeks ago with their sudden announcement that they intended to pull out of government. The Taoiseach received about a nanosecond's notice of their decision which, in a breathtakingly ham-fisted and ill-judged piece of timing, came less than 24 hours after it was finally confirmed that the IMF were coming to town.
But party leader John Gormley explained they weren't taking their ball home on the spot. They would hang in until the Budget and its legislation was home and hosed, and then they'd walk the plank.
Confusion reigned. The Greens were under the impression that they'd be up ladders with posters by the end of January, but Fianna Fail were adamant that the Finance Bill wouldn't be complete by that time. So when was an election likely?
Would it be in February as the Greens fondly hoped, or would Taoiseach Brian Cowen still get to go to his favourite gig of the year in the White House next Paddy's Day?
The short answer is that nobody has a clue -- especially since there appears to be another outbreak of confusion among the Greens.
The Fianna Fail senior hurling team have intimated that an early bath will mean that all sorts of beloved Green carrots (the climate change Bill, the Dublin Lord Mayor Bill and legislation on corporate donations) could inexplicably disappear into the same black hole as the Anglo billions.
And so this week it began to look as if the Greens, having half-stepped out, were readying themselves to step back in again.
No wonder Eamon Gilmore was a bit bamboozled during the Order of Business. "We need to get clarity from the Government with regard to its own future," he declared.
"From news reports this morning it would appear that the Green Party members have changed their minds again and have now found a new basis on which to prolong the life of the Fianna Fail-led Government," he charged.
With impeccable timing, the door of the Dail chamber swung open and in marched Paul Gogarty, headphones in his ear and laptop under his arm, to take his seat on the hitherto empty Green side.
But the Tanaiste was giving away no clues about possible election dates. "As the Taoiseach has said, the General Election will be in 2011," she hedged.
Eamon Gilmore was very unhappy. "We know from experience that when the Government states 2011, it usually means the end of 2011," he grumbled.
Likewise, Fine Gael's James Reilly was anxious to be reassured that the election wasn't going to be finagled onto the mear fada. "The people need to know that, and they need to know the Greens will keep their word this time -- that they are going to stay green and not turn yellow yet again," he fretted. And Eamon returned to the worrying topic too, asking the Tanaiste for confirmation that the Green Party will be withdrawing from Government, as it had indicated, in January?"
Up in his seat Paul Gogarty bristled. "You should ask the Green Party, it's our decision," he informed the Labour leader.
"Will the real Tanaiste please stand up?"chortled an amused Caoimhghin O'Caolain.
"I'm trying to find out what is going on. I don't care who answers," grinned Eamon.
But Mary wasn't a bit amused. "The Taoiseach indicated that the post-budgetary legislation would be dealt with, at which stage he will decide when the election will take place," she pointedly informed everyone, including Presumptuous Paul.
Meanwhile, Dan Boyle was in the Seanad insisting that there would be no delay in their planned exit. "The Green Party leader has announced that on the completion of the budgetary process, which will be the passing of the Finance Bill in both houses, it is not our intention to remain in Government," he insisted.
What a muddle. There can be only one logical explanation for such bumbling carry-on. After three and a half years in captivity, the Greens are suffering from Stockholm syndrome and they have begun to identify with their captors.
And now John Gormley, the political Patty Hearst, can't imagine a life in which he isn't shackled to the government radiator and is in a tizzy over the looming early release.
Many moons ago, John Gormley railed against 'Planet Bertie'. Well, now he and his party of space cadets are up there with him.
- Lise Hand
Irish Independent
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Post by bilythewalsh on Dec 13, 2010 2:36:09 GMT
Wikileaks documentary
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Post by glengael on Dec 16, 2010 10:27:06 GMT
No point being coy about celebrity cocaine debate
Colleagues have circled wagons amid sorry tale of Gerry Ryan’s death – but why hide ugly truth from the masses? writes SARAH CAREY
HOW TYPICALLY Irish was the attitude expressed by Ryan Tubridy on his show on Monday that Gerry Ryan should be let “rest in peace”, and that he “would not abandon his friend”.
What Tubridy meant was that we shouldn’t talk about Ryan’s cocaine habit and that for him to do so would be disloyal. The protective instinct was notable by the awkward silence throughout RTÉ last week and in stark contrast to the days of tribute broadcasting that followed Ryan’s death.
It’s a misguided position, but common in cases where one has just buried a “larger than life” friend who was the “life and soul of the party” or “lived life to the full”. These are the usual euphemisms for people who drank a lot and then died as a direct consequence of their behaviour – usually at the wheel of a car – and leaving a trail of misery behind them.
In Ryan’s case he’s left debts, five children, a wife with no apparent income and a broken-hearted girlfriend. What a mess. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last, but for God’s sake, don’t talk about the sheer irresponsibility of it all. Sure then you might start to figure out what’s wrong with a society that continually produces such needless pain.
The RTÉ code says that debate on our dysfunctional relationship with drugs, legal or otherwise, socially acceptable or not, must be reserved for generalised hand-wringing, middle-class teenagers or the criminal classes. If it creeps into the “celebrity” class, discussion is considered downright rude.
I know it must be hard for his colleagues, but they don’t get to decide which truth is acceptable broadcasting. Analysis was left to the likes of the Daily Star ’s Michael O’Toole who did a great interview with Newstalk’s Chris Donoghue. But sure the Star is only a tabloid so we can look the other way if it breaks the rules.
When Katy French died her family were also quick to shut down any discussion on her drug use. The same week French died, two young men, John Grey and Kevin Doyle from Waterford, also died from cocaine use. Rather than hiding behind platitudes, the Doyle family issued a statement acknowledging the cause of death and begging others to take heed. They said: “We would earnestly ask all those, both young and old, who may be tempted to dabble in potentially lethal substances to simply say no. No amount of so-called fun is worth the loss of life that so often befalls young people in Ireland today.”
That’s an honourable message worth giving at times like this.
People in the public eye set the standard by which the rest of us judge ourselves and others. I’m sure some broadcasters feel their socialising is blown out of proportion, but Ryan cultivated an image of a whiskey drinker who loved his big meals in well-known restaurants. It’s telling that his most successful television chat show featured a restaurant-style set that included champagne on the table and whiskey underneath it.
Just as skinny models don’t explicitly ask all women to feel bad for being normal, neither does this set-up or gushing reports of celebrity partying insist the rest of us should keep up. But the pressure is on and the message is clear: “Have fun! Lots! Even if you’re too tired and don’t feel like it! We had SUCH a laugh last night!”
Which is fine if you really did have a laugh instead of being so bored you had to get drunk or snort a line of coke to keep going.
It’s such a shame because I used to listen to Ryan’s radio show, in particular his regular hour with Fiona Looney. The warm-hearted truths they shared were hilarious, comforting and showed it is possible to have conversations that mean something without drink or drugs.
Melanie Verwoerd said Ryan was happiest having a quiet night in with her. I believe her. But you get the feeling that almost had to be a secret shared between them. Why?
I also believe he was trying to live a new kind of life with Verwoerd but obviously found it very hard to leave the old one behind. You don’t realise how oppressive the pressure is to be drunk, or nearly drunk, or high, or fabulous and full of energy until the wee hours until you decide you can’t do it anymore.
I can’t bear the thought of waking up hungover and unable to function. It’s a really alienating experience, especially at Christmas, trying to socialise when so many people remain determined to get drunk or high as quickly as possible. I’m constantly bewildered by the number of people that brag about how bad they’re feeling today and how bad they intend to feel tomorrow after they’ve gotten completely pissed tonight.
Why is it still socially unacceptable to say you don’t want to live like that? If Gerry Ryan really was enjoying himself he wouldn’t have needed the coke or the whiskey to keep going. If the pressure to be the person other people thought he was, or the person he thought he should be was so great that he needed the props, imagine how hard it is for anyone else who wants to give it up? That’s a conversation worth having.
And according to RTÉ, one we’re not going to get.
Irish Times December 16th 2010
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Post by glengael on Dec 17, 2010 9:54:35 GMT
The Irish Times - Friday, December 17, 2010 New group plans to claim for AIB bonuses
A SECOND group of AIB workers was yesterday planning to file claims for bonus payments ranging from €3,000 to €38,000 with the courts.
The Credit Institutions (Stabilisation) Act is due to come into force today giving, amongst other things, the Minister for Finance the power to make support for banks conditional on them not paying bonuses.
It is understood a group of staff in AIB’s capital markets division were yesterday considering filing claims with the Circuit Court for the payment of bonuses promised them by the bank for 2008, but since deferred.
Earlier this week, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan warned the bank that if it went ahead with plans to pay €9.2 million in bonuses, the Government would not provide it with any further bailout funding.
AIB was planning to pay the bonuses after one capital markets trader, John Foy, succeeded in getting a High Court judgement against the financial institution for his €161,000 bonus.
Around 90 of his colleagues had taken similar action and the bank believed it had no choice. It then said it would not pay those bonuses after the Minister intervened.
Overall, the bank was due to pay €58.7 million in bonuses, with some senior individuals receiving up to €780,000.
AIB is due to get over €13 billion from the taxpayer and the State will end up owning over 90 per cent of the group as a result.
A number of sources confirmed a second group of capital markets staff was planning legal action to force the bank to pay the bonuses.
Its members intended to file the initial documents relating to the claim with the court yesterday to ensure their case was in the system before Bill was passed.
Existing and former capital markets staff entitled to the bonuses were canvassed earlier in the week for the personal details needed to initiate the claim.
The sums involved range from around €3,000 up to €38,000, the maximum amount that can be dealt with by the Circuit Court.
It was not known if the plan to file the claims went ahead yesterday. Sources said not everyone who is entitled to the bonuses were actually intending to join the group.
The bonuses related to 2008, the year that exposure to the rapidly falling property market almost crashed the Republic’s financial system.
Most of the people entitled to the payments worked for capital markets, a profitable division that had not been involved in property lending on a large scale. The bank is contractually bound to pay the bonuses.
Staff in the British and US subsidiaries of this division have already been paid €17 million in bonuses after threatening to sue the bank. The bank has also paid €39.2 million in bonuses relating to 2006 and 2007, and a further €2.4 million to junior management and clerical staff in offices in Jersey and the Isle of Man.
Bank of Ireland has also paid bonuses to what it says is a small number of middle managers, but the bank is refusing to reveal details of how much it actually paid out.
There is said to be growing anger amongst AIB Capital Markets staff at the fact that while the public row over the Foy case has effectively barred them from receiving bonuses, their overseas colleagues received their payments, as did those working for competitors such as Bank of Ireland.
AIB originally promised the bonuses in early 2009, after the State had committed to recapitalising the institution. The bonuses were for 2008, and were agreed in January and due to be paid the following month.
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Post by glengael on Dec 17, 2010 10:01:45 GMT
Don't Stop Believin'
The power ballad that refused to die From Glee to The X Factor, Journey's Don't Stop Believin' became inescapable in 2010.
Dorian Lynskey on the 30-year-old track that slowly burned its way into our consciousness
"Just a small town girl …"
When was the last time you heard Don't Stop Believin'? Was it on the radio or in the pub? At a festival or a wedding? Was it sung by Journey themselves, the cast of Glee, a fan on YouTube, a choir of schoolchildren or a drunk friend on a karaoke machine? Boxfresh pop songs such as Tinie Tempah's Pass Out might have a decent claim on being the sound of Britain in 2010 but nothing has wriggled its way into every corner of the culture quite like a slow-burning power ballad that's about to celebrate its 30th birthday.
Let's take some figures. The year began with the curious sight of Journey's song at No 6, with the Glee version at No 5, and it has barely left the top 75 since. In the US, download sales have passed 4m, making it by far the biggest-selling 20th-century catalogue track. Americans have had longer to live with it. It was a hit there back in 1981, and it's had so many phases that even its comebacks have had comebacks. But over here it stalled at No 62 on its first release in February 1982 and didn't begin to register in the pop psyche until relatively recently. Its path from obscurity to ubiquity mirrors its unorthodox structure: the slow build towards the last-minute eruption.
"A singer in a smoky room …"
It was a song inspired by failure. Journey started life as a jazz-rock band in San Francisco in 1973, but they were floundering and hitless when, four years later, they recruited singer Steve Perry, who was having little luck himself. Their fortunes drastically improved, but the sentiments of Don't Stop Believin' harked back to the lean years. Before keyboardist Jonathan Cain joined in 1980, he was also struggling while living on LA's Sunset Boulevard. Each time he called home in despair, his dad would tell him: "Don't stop believing or you're done, dude."
The song was written backwards. Cain had nothing but the climactic chorus when he brought the stub of a song to Perry and guitarist Neal Schon, and they worked together on how to get to that moment. They all liked the concept of two lovers fleeing their hometowns by train (a reverse homage to Gladys Knight's Midnight Train to Georgia), and Cain told Perry about his time in LA, hence the "strangers waiting up and down the boulevard" line. "I [saw] that every night in Hollywood," Cain told The Mix magazine. "People coming to LA looking for their dream. We felt that every young person has a dream and sometimes where you grow up isn't where you're destined to be."
"Some will win, some will lose …"
In Britain, Don't Stop Believin' flopped, despite being Kerrang!'s single of the year for 1982. In the US, however, it was a substantial hit, the first of many from 1981's multi-platinum Escape album. "Everyone in an American high school in the early 80s probably had a Journey cassette," says Brian Raftery, author of Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life. "But then in the early 90s all the cheesy 80s music got rejected and it basically disappeared. Journey were seen as the kind of overblown arena act that grunge and hip-hop were meant to obliterate."
The band weren't best-placed to argue otherwise. Perry left in 1987, and then again after a brief reunion in the mid-90s, confirming the sense that Journey were yesterday's men. But a few years ago, Raftery started noticing younger people singing Don't Stop Believin' at karaoke. "It amazed me," he says. "First of all, how did they hear this song? And secondly, why? I think that younger people aren't aware of the stigma. They just think it's another awesomely cheesy anthem."
Cain dates the song's resurgence back to its tongue-in-cheek cameo in the 1998 Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer. After that, other soundtrack co-ordinators turned to Journey for a song that was both humorously retro and genuinely stirring. It appeared in a pivotal montage in Scrubs (2003) and a karaoke scene in Family Guy (2005). And then, in 2007, came The Sopranos.
Series creator David Chase has never explained why he wanted Don't Stop Believin' for the last-ever episode, but it was a song that would have resonated with every member of the Soprano clan – for Tony and Carmella it was the sound of their youth, for Meadow and AJ a new discovery at college or high school. But when Chase first sought permission from the songwriters, Perry demurred because, he later explained, "I was not excited about the Soprano family being whacked to Don't Stop Believin'". He withheld consent until three days before the episode aired, when Chase agreed to tell him (three-year-old spoiler alert!) that the ending was ambiguous. And so 12 million viewers were left hanging with Journey ringing in their ears.
That's how a song that was already slowly re-entering the culture reached the tipping point. Kanye West sang along to it, in a kind of gauche superstar karaoke, on his 2008 tour. The Broadway musical Rock of Ages climaxed with a massed rendition. The LA Dodgers adopted it as their theme song. Just when it could hardly get more popular, it appeared, cleverly rearranged, in the pilot episode of Glee and wooed an even younger generation. "I think that helped stymie Don't Stop Believin' fatigue," says Raftery. "They managed to make a song that was very easy to sing along to even more accessible." In Britain, Joe McElderry's version on The X-Factor provided the final shove.
But this cultural carpet-bombing can only explain why people have heard it, not why they love it. What exactly is the unrelenting appeal of Don't Stop Believin'?
"It goes on and on and on and on …"
Raftery has a suggestion: "It's the kind of song you can wink at, but at the same time it's very emotional. You can have it both ways." Like Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer, Don't Stop Believin' is inspirational kitsch, taking the borderline corny, ordinary-Joe heroism of Springsteen circa Born to Run and pushing it way over the top. But whereas Springsteen is more likely to focus on the smalltown world being left behind, Perry and Cain are all about where their heroes are going. The characters' self-image is shaped by rock music and cinema: "Oh, the movie never ends …"
The lyric is just specific enough not to be woolly but vague enough to apply to any situation in which not stopping believin' is important. If you're a sports fan, it says you may still get to the finals. If you're an aspiring musician, on Sunset Boulevard in the 70s or on The X Factor today, it says you may yet see your name in lights. And if you're just young and think you could do better, well then it's a song for you as well. No wonder its self-mythologising resonates at a time when nothing is more important than "following your dreams". "This song has helped me personally to not give up, and I'm finding that goes for a lot of people out there," Perry told Planet Rock radio in February.
"As cheesy as it is, it's pretty convincing," says Raftery. "Here are these kids, they've gone through some hard times, but you know what? You gotta keep pushing through it. Which is the story, for better or worse, of America: don't look back, don't let your past drag you down, just keep pushing forward."
And that's what the song does on a structural level – it pushes forward. It is that midnight train, steadily gathering speed, and as a listener you want to stay on until it reaches its destination. "It's like a wave about to happen," Cain told the LA Times. "The anticipation of something happening, a change in your life."
According to Will Byers, a music teacher and former host of the Guardian's School of Rock blog, the structure is the key. Yes, Cain's opening piano chords are potent – as Australian comedy trio Axis of Awesome have demonstrated in a much-watched clip, it's the same chord sequence (I, V, vi, IV) that appears in Take On Me, Under the Bridge, You're Beautiful and Let It Be, the minor vi adding just a touch of yearning. And yes, as Byers points out, each new guitar chord appears on the last quaver of the bar, giving the song an extra push. But these are common strategies. It's the slow burn that makes Don't Stop Believin' so unusually compelling.
"Over time, we learn to appreciate these songs that don't offload all they've got in the first minute – Elton John's Tiny Dancer being another one," says Byers. "You invest some emotion in bothering to listen all the way through."
You have to wait a full 80 seconds before the drums come in properly, and the chorus only arrives less than a minute before the end. It generates not just momentum but, as Chase recognised, suspense. It contains the possibility of failure ("Some will win, some will lose") until the last surge of indomitable optimism. The opposing vision of Midnight Train to Georgia, about someone who leaves LA after discovering that "dreams don't always come true", lurks in the shadows. It's no lyrical masterpiece, but it is a hugely effective bit of storytelling.
"It's the sense of theatre," says Byers, who has coached several students to sing it in the past year. "You can get away with a song building in a musical. In a way, it lends itself more to being placed in a narrative than it does to being a radio hit."
"Hold on to the feelin' …"
Glee dissolves the wall between star and fan, between professional performance and karaoke, making it an ideal vehicle to promote Don't Stop Believin' as a song for anyone to perform. "It's one of the most perfect karaoke songs ever," says Raftery. "I doubt anyone who works in a karaoke bar goes three hours without hearing it."
The song gives you license to overact, especially if you don't have a voice half as supple and precise as Perry's and you need to compensate with sheer gusto. In that context, it's both heroic and daft, narcissistic and communal. It's appropriate that Journey's current frontman, Arnel Pineda, was recruited after the band saw him performing Don't Stop Believin' on YouTube with his previous band. Perry made it great, but the song has now eclipsed the singer.
So first it was a normal song, then a forgotten one, then an ironic reference, then a genuine comeback, then a phenomenon, and now it's just there, like the sun or gravity or Hey Jude.
"I used to love that song and I'm so sick of it now," says Raftery. "The minute that piano starts I'm like, 'oh my God.' It won't go away. I feel like in a year and a half you guys will be where we are – please don't put on Don't Stop Believin'! But," he sighs, "it is fun. You can't deny how fun it is."
Don't Stop Believin' is out now and until the end of time on iTunes.
The Guardian December 17th 2010
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 30, 2010 10:15:27 GMT
By Allison Bray
Our cold snap was nothing compared to the Great Irish Frost of 1740
Thursday December 30 2010
THE record-breaking cold snap that brought Ireland to its knees this month was little to compare with the Great Irish Frost of 1740 that killed more than a third of the population.
Between 310,000 and 480,000 people out of a population of 2.4 million are believed to have died during the Great Frost which swept across Ireland between 1739 and 1741, according to a new book called 'Arctic Ireland' .
By Trinity College history professor David Dickson, the book explores the causes of the calamity.
Mr Dickson said the frost "remains to this day the longest period of extreme cold in modern European history", and its causes remain unknown.
But it wreaked utter devastation across Ireland leading to food riots, famine, epidemic and death.
In an eerie similarity to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland last April, the Great Frost of 1740 is believed to have been precipitated by volcanic eruptions on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia which sent thousands of tons of dust into the upper atmosphere.
While much of the country has coped with weeks of unseasonably cold temperatures, snow and ice this winter, our forebears endured "21 months of bizarre weather" that was "without known precedent and defied conventional explanation," according to the book.
And there was no let-up for almost two years in which extremely cold and bitter wind, freezing temperatures and drought were regular features.
The Great Frost began shortly after Christmas on December 29, 1739, and "introduced a cold so penetrating that liquids froze indoors and ice floes appeared at the river mouths".
Ice
Three ships sank in Dublin Bay, drowning all on board while the body of one of the crew members was found washed up on Merrion Strand covered with ice.
But unlike our wintry conditions this year, there was hardly any snow due to a vast high pressure system affecting most of northern Europe.
Such was the cold that the rivers Liffey, Slaney, Boyne and parts of the Shannon froze over within days as well as Loughs Cong and Neagh. Huge numbers of frozen fish were found along the shores of Strangford Lough and Lough Neagh.
Coal could no longer be brought in from across the Irish Sea due to ice-bound quays and frozen coal yards causing coal prices to soar.
As a result "hedges, fine trees, and nurseries around Dublin were stripped bare as desperate people searched for substitute fuel," Mr Dickson wrote.
"The frost also plunged the streets of Dublin into darkness at night, for not only were there problems in milling the rape-seed to make the customary lamp oil, but even fully serviced lamps were being snuffed out by the intense cold," according to the book, published by White Row Press.
Things took a turn for the worse when the frost virtually wiped out the potato crop the following spring.
Drought
As if that wasn't bad enough, widespread drought coupled with unseasonably low temperatures and bitter northerly winds killed off sheep and cattle as well as crops of wheat and barley.
At the port of Drogheda, locals ransacked a grain ship bound for Scotland while in Cork city a full-scale food riot erupted aimed at grain wholesalers planning to ship their wares outside of Ireland.
And just when things couldn't get worse, blizzards hit the east coast in late October 1740, followed by widespread flooding in December and a mixture of snow and thaw leading to mini-icebergs careening down the Liffey.
Climate change expert Prof John Sweeney of the Irish Climate Analysis Research Unit (ICARUS) at Maynooth University said the cause of the catastrophic winter of 1740-41, often referred to as the mini Ice Age, remains a mystery.
A change in solar or volcanic activity is one possible theory, he said.
"But certainly extreme winters are part and parcel of history. Now and again we'll get the odd extreme event like the current cold snap," he said.
- Allison Bray
Irish Independent
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Post by kerrygold on Dec 30, 2010 10:29:35 GMT
By Martina Devlin
Thursday December 30 2010
I'm no Bonnie Tyler, but I'm holding out for a hero in 2011. It can be a him or a her -- I'm keeping an open mind.
I don't expect my hero to gallop over the horizon on a white charger, to solve all the problems in this damaged little country with one wave of the hand. But I do expect him or her to be inspirational, resilient, self-sacrificing and (the clincher) trustworthy.
Don't tell me our leader is doing his best and his heart is in the right place, even as he gets things wrong. Not good enough. We've had too much of that brand of substandard leadership, as well as a more polluted version.
What we need now from a leader is vision, intellectual rigour and, above all, accountability -- they make up the X factor for which I'm on the lookout.
The current Dail won't stagger on beyond March, and either Fine Gael or Labour will supply our next Taoiseach. So I have a question to put to Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore.
Are either of you heroes? Gentlemen, you need to be -- or else step aside for a successor before the election campaign gets under way.
Consider the word 'hero'. It comes from the Greek for warrior: it is a protector, a defender, a guardian. Heroes were often military or political figures, and sometimes they were prophets. In the past, we had Collins, Pearse, Casement, O'Connell, Parnell, Yeats. . . no shortage of heroes when they were wanted, and sometimes when they were not.
History shows us that circumstances can fashion people into heroes, and the conditions are undoubtedly ripe for such a figure to emerge. But let us not mistake celebrities for heroes, and imagine sports, film or rock stars can supply the deficit. They have a function, but it is not the role of leader.
I know heroism is a tall order. We do not live in an era of heroes and perhaps their scarcity is our own fault. In this intrusive age, we are too quick to seek out feet of clay.
Their absence may also be due to our tendency to regard votes as family heirlooms. In this coming year, we must stop voting automatically the way our parents and grandparents did, and decide for ourselves where to place that all-important X.
But cometh the hour, cometh the man or woman. I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that a hero might emerge. Surely a population of four or five million can produce an honourable leader: someone able to make us feel less ashamed, to capture our imagination, to bring us with him on the uncertain journey ahead.
I do not ask for charisma -- we had something approaching charisma with the Bert, God help us. No, I ask for decency, honesty and ability. My hero doesn't need to be a superstar. I'm not looking for one of those rare individuals, capable of projecting a dual image of the common and the exceptional, like Lincoln, Churchill, De Valera and Obama.
But he or she must do more than simply pick up the trailing reins of government. He or she will have to negotiate with the IMF and the EU on our behalf, as our Budgets are reshaped, but he or she must help us to reshape our society, too.
We don't know how Ireland will be configured by the end of these difficult years ahead. Doubt and ambiguity beset us. That's why we need someone whose authority is convincing. Brian Cowen had no mandate from the people and its absence always compromised him.
At times of crisis, everything can go into the melting pot and transformation can be undertaken. What we have here is an opportunity to make space for bigger people in the political sphere: men and women with large, progressive ideas about the kind of country we can become.
Now is the time to consider how our politicians can best serve democracy. This involves abandoning the debased version of democracy practised here -- government by the politicians for the party -- and reverting to its original principles.
A Greek philosopher once suggested that the best way to operate democracy was to give politicians their head for a pre-set number of years, then take them all out and execute them. It has some merit as a policy -- integrity would certainly be fostered -- although it might lead to a shortage of political candidates.
Still, even allowing for a longer life expectancy, we ought to look for higher standards in leadership. With the right person at the helm, we should be able to find ways to work constructively with others, both inside and outside Ireland. Alone, we are vulnerable, as recent events have taught us. We must forge lasting alliances.
Change is essential in the Ireland of 2011 and beyond, but a change of government is insufficient. It's not enough to have climbed the greasy pole of a political party. The leader for whom we are crying out must offer something more to be a hero for these times.
I don't want a social revolutionary. I don't care to see Leinster House stormed in my name. I despair of those politicians and would-be electoral candidates who urged us to tell the IMF to get lost. As if we had a choice. That's grandstanding.
Nor do I want my leader to be a deity, as the Romans did. Someone who can reform the system will be godlike enough for me.
What I really expect -- something we're all entitled to expect -- is that an exceptional man or woman will go before the people as a potential leader. Does that sound like anyone in the political firmament currently? If not, why not?
- Martina Devlin
Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Jan 10, 2011 11:25:45 GMT
Complaining about the lack of realism in EastEnders is like moaning that Monster Munch crisps don't taste of monsters. by Charlie Brooker I'm not entirely certain I can pinpoint the moment I first realised EastEnders isn't a documentary. Maybe it was when Den Watts was assassinated by a bunch of daffodils. Or when he came back from the dead and then got killed again. Or when Steve Owen's mother tried to French-kiss him on her deathbed. Or when Ricky Butcher became a speedway champion for one week. Or when Melanie Healy slept with Phil Mitchell on Christmas Day. Or when Max Branning got buried alive. Or when Janine pushed Barry off a cliff. Or when Janine got so agoraphobic she sat indoors eating dog food. Or when Janine ran over Danielle in a car. Or when Janine framed Stacey by stabbing herself on Christmas Day. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his third wife, Laura. Or when Janine slept with Ian Beale and then blackmailed him by threatening to tell his fourth wife, Jane. Or when, while Googling a list of Janine's crimes, I realised Beale had managed to convince four whole women to marry him.
Somewhere along the way I must have twigged that none of these people were real, possibly during the bit at the end where the names of the actors who play them floated up the screen accompanied by theme music.
Contrary to popular opinion, EastEnders isn't set in London, or even Britain, or even the world – it's situated in an absurd alternate universe overseen by a malicious, tinkering God with an hilarious sense of timing. Each wedding, anniversary, national holiday or mid-sized social gathering is visited by major tragedy. The most familiar noise in Albert Square is the sound of party poppers being drowned out by sobbing. Quickly followed by some pulsing electronic drums.
Over the last few weeks God was at it again. Having given both Kat Slater and Ronnie Branning newborn offspring to enjoy, God capriciously decided to kill Ronnie's baby on New Year's Eve. As midnight neared, she wandered the square in a stunned daze, unnoticed by revellers and clutching the body of her deceased child – until, alerted by the sound of Kat's baby crying from an open window, she snuck into the Queen Vic and swapped the two infants, in a scene that looked more like a Tramadol Nights sketch than the heartbreaking drama it was presumably intended to be.
And now there's an entirely predictable storm of protest; predictable, apparently, to everyone except the EastEnders production team, who seem to have failed to anticipate the sheer size of the furore – which is odd, since their job largely consists of hypothesising about all the different ways in which people can unwittingly stumble their way to an acrimonious row.
The usual excuse for any soap opera planning a headline-grabbing plotline is that they're "helping to build awareness" of some social ill, as though the average citizen can only truly come to terms with drug abuse after seeing Phil Mitchell smoke crack.
Of course, you only "build awareness" by depicting events with some degree of accuracy, which is why the soaps often proudly announce that they collaborated closely with charities to ensure that Steve McFadden's portrayal of the dark spiral of addiction would be as harrowingly authentic as possible, especially the bit where he smashed through a door like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and burned the Queen Vic to the ground.
EastEnders would never screen an episode in which Ian Beale has a breakdown and decides to walk around the Square with a dead baby balanced on his head like a hat, although that would "explore the issue" of bereavement and mental health just as effectively as the current child-swap storyline, which is equally unrealistic, yet has to be presented as a hard-hitting study of bereavement because the alternative is to admit that EastEnders is mindless entertainment – with the occasional dead infant thrown in for your amusement.
There's a basic rule in drama that the audience can suspend disbelief only long enough to accommodate one extreme event at a time. A cot death is one extreme. A baby-swap is another. Combining the two events at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve was the scriptwriters' first big mistake. Trying to pull all of this off within the context of a populist soap was the second. A self-consciously weighty one-off ITV drama-of-the-week with an A-list cast and lots of sombre camerawork would probably have got away with it, unless they did something totally crazy such as casting Jedward as the swapped babies.
Still, if broadcasting the storyline was fairly crazy, complaining to Ofcom about the lack of realism in EastEnders doesn't seem much saner – almost on a par with threatening to sue the manufacturers of Monster Munch because their crisps don't taste of monsters.
Nonetheless, the BBC appears to have backed down and the storyline, in a weird reflection of itself, will be laid to rest prematurely. The mad God of Walford originally wanted the zany saga to reach a festive climax next Christmas Day, typically. But now the whole thing will apparently be rewritten to accommodate a viewer-friendly "happy ending".
Yes: that's a cot-death-baby-swap storyline – with a happy ending. Now there's a script meeting I'd like to sit in on.
The Guardian January 10th
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Post by glengael on Jan 12, 2011 10:36:17 GMT
The only-child club
Bigger isn't always better -- at least when families are involved. A new study reveals that you'll be happier without siblings. Ailin Quinlan meets three 'onlies'
Wednesday January 12 2011
Bigger isn't always better -- at least when families are involved. A new study reveals that you'll be happier without siblings. Ailin Quinlan meets three 'onlies'
Sibs; love 'em or hate 'em, you just can't do without 'em -- or can you? A new report claims that the fewer siblings children have, the happier they are -- and that only- children are the most contented of all.
There are lots of celebrity 'onlies' -- movie stars Natalie Portman (see right), Daniel Radcliffe, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, singer Frank Sinatra, economist Alan Greenspan and former First Lady Laura Bush to name but a few -- but do they have the edge on the rest of us?
Understanding Society, one of the widest-ranging research projects on family life ever conducted in Britain -- over 100,000 people in 40,000 households -- suggests that only-children are the happiest.
Sibling bullying seems to be a problem in larger families -- about 31% of the children surveyed said they were often hit, kicked or pushed by a brother or sister, while others complained of belongings being stolen or being called hurtful names. More than half of all siblings (54%) were involved in bullying in one form or another.
However, only-child Eleanor O'Neill says she really wanted siblings when she was growing up -- a privileged lifestyle and adoring parents just didn't fill the gap.
"I had a very happy childhood but in a way it was lonely as I'd have loved to have had a brother and sister -- I never stopped longing for them," recalls the mother-of-five from Newcastle, Co Dublin.
It didn't happen, because her mum was unable to have more children, and Eleanor's loneliness eventually saw her spend some years at boarding school.
To this day, she believes her solitary childhood impacted on her personality.
"I was very self-sufficient, I didn't need other people's company, and I'm very happy in my own company. As a child I always played for hours by myself with my dolls and cars."
Being an 'only' also influenced her decision to have a big family -- though, the 34-year-old observes, her kids are less independent than she was.
"I notice that my own children tend to need each other or me to play. They're not as self-sufficient -- I think this is because they're quite close in age and are growing up in a big group."
There were some advantages to being the only child, she acknowledges.
"The upside was that I had my own room and my own toys and there were no younger siblings robbing my dolls!
'I had quite a privileged upbringing. I went to a private school, had lovely holidays and we always had a new car."
But now that she's older and has adult responsibilities, she could do with some sibling support.
"Now that my mum has ill health, the responsibility is mine, and there's a lot of pressure and worry.
"I'd love to have siblings to share it with. I feel I'm very much on my own with that. My husband's mother became ill some time ago and all her six children played a part in caring for her and making decisions which was great.
"Even though I had such a great childhood myself, I love the buzz of a big family; it's magic," she says.
Although Church of Ireland Bishop of Cashel and Ossary Michael Burrows, who grew up as the only child of elderly parents in a sprawling nine-bedroom rectory in Dundrum, says that as a child he didn't miss siblings -- that did change later on.
"I never longed for siblings until recently. After my parents died, I realised that there was no one to remember my childhood but me.
"You're by yourself; that's how it hits you. There's no one to reminisce with about your childhood.
"I'm very happily married with four children but as the only child of older parents my actual network of relatives is quite small."
Life in a big family doesn't have to be filled with strife, according to mother-of-two Marie Byrne, who grew up in a family of four.
"I was the second youngest in a family of three girls and one boy. I don't remember a lot of fighting or squabbling," recalls Byrne, a part-time school secretary from Dunboyne, Co Meath.
"We all got on quite well as a bunch of kids together -- there must have been some falling out between the four of us at some stage but I don't remember it. We had a very happy childhood.
"My brother was the eldest and he would tease us, particularly myself and my younger sister.
"As we all grew older, we got on even better -- I'm very close to my two sisters to this day."
Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Jan 21, 2011 12:30:25 GMT
‘Keep Out’ signs now adorn the grounds of Lissadell in Co Sligo, the latest development in a long-running disagreement over rights of way. Many locals applaud the owners’ restoration of the property, but most are angry and bemused by their approach to the dispute, writes ROSITA BOLAND.
IT IS A month now since the High Court found on December 20th that public rights of way during daylight hours did indeed exist at the Lissadell estate in Co Sligo. Mr Justice Bryan McMahon had considered the evidence after 58 days in court, where the owners of Lissadell, Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy, claimed that Sligo County Council had wrongfully asserted rights of way over their estate.
The couple, whose primary residence is at Morristown Lattin in Co Kildare, bought the house in 2003 for €3.75 million, and started to develop the estate soon after. They restored the house, gardens, and the former coach house, which was turned into an exhibition centre. They opened a tearoom, held two high-profile Leonard Cohen concerts there last summer, and spent an estimated €9.5 million in the process.
They also gradually closed off certain access points to the estate, locking gates and restricting use of various routes through the 410 acre estate. In December 2008, Sligo County Council voted to amend the county’s development plan to include “the preservation of public rights of way” along the four roads that run through Lissadell. The dispute ended up in court, and the house and gardens were closed for much of the intervening time.
Since the judgment, the gates to Lissadell have re-opened, but the house, gardens, exhibition centre and tearoom remain shut. In addition, an extensive amount of fencing, signs, barbed wire and boulders have gone up all over the estate. Last week I counted 22 large red and white “Keep Out, Private Property” signs alone, which stand on the avenue borders. Boulders and rubble now block what were passing out places on the avenue, thus preventing cars from parking there, or from easily passing oncoming traffic. Fences, and lines of new fencing stakes awaiting wire, march along the perimeter of every field. Barbed wire is wrapped around stanchions lying on the ground near the house. Everywhere you look, there is either a “Keep Out” sign or a new fence clearly visible. You would not describe Lissadell today as a visually welcoming place to any visitor.
JOE LEONARD IS THE current chairman of Sligo County Council and the councillor who originally tabled the motion about rights of way at the estate. He has been at Lissadell since the fencing went up. What does he think of it?
“Well now. Well now. What to say about that? They don’t do subtlety, do they?” he says frankly, in the Co Council offices overlooking the Garavogue. “I hope it’s not a physical manifestation of what they think of their neighbours. A barbed wire solution is not the way of the future. It was never necessary before to erect fortifications at Lissadell. What I want to see is Lissadell preserved for future generations, and in my opinion, that is best achieved through co-operation with the local community.”
Leonard admits to relief that Sligo County Council won the case, not only because of re-establishing public rights of way, but also as the case came at a time when local authority funding is scarcer than ever. There will be a hearing early next month at which costs will be decided: it has been estimated they will be in the region of €3 million-plus. “It has to be welcomed that the place is no longer privatised.”
He is anxious to point out that “it is abundantly clear that the wider community in Sligo welcomes the restoration and work done at Lissadell”. So why does he think the fencing has gone up? What message is it sending to the community? There’s silence. Then he shrugs his shoulders, and looks genuinely baffled. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
One of the many people living close to Lissadell who appeared in court to recount their memories of the public use of the estate is Jim Meehan, a business consultant of Urlar, Drumcliffe. “It is good we can freely express opinions now that the court case is over,” he says quietly. “I feel for the owners,” Meehan says. “They’ve done good work with the estate. But I think they could have been more prudent, and talked to people. Negotiation was the surest and easiest way through this. If they had built relationships locally, I can’t see any of this having happened. I don’t want to be going to court with my neighbours on any issue.”
Speaking of the fencing, he says: “It doesn’t seem to make any sense to local people, and it doesn’t do anything for the situation. In all the times I’ve been at Lissadell, I’ve never seen anyone misuse those paths. There are maybe a couple of hundred people who consistently use those roads through Lissadell, walking and cycling and driving. You could think of them as an unpaid community security service with their eyes and ears watching out.
“Everyone knows everyone else walking those roads. I would see these people as an asset on the estate, not as a security threat.”
“Frankly, I was surprised at the outcome of the case,” admits Stella Mew, chief executive of the Yeats Society, whose students used to regularly visit Lissadell House. “I don’t think it makes the slightest bit of difference to the community. They’re delighted that they won, but it seems to be a Pyrrhic victory. I can’t see that the locals were terribly deprived of anything prior to the case – what did they want? I don’t want to express criticism of locals, but there is a difference between access and trespass.”
Mew has not been back to Lissadell since the gates reopened, but she – in common with everyone in Sligo I spoke to – was fully aware of the new security precautions.
“I think the barriers send a message of huge disappointment by the owners. It’s a great pity. At the end of the day, there are huge bills now to be paid, and there has been no good outcome. I can’t see who has benefited from this case.”
“I think the community in general would like to see the house and estate open, and the Walsh-Cassidys did sterling work on the gardens,” says artist Michael Wann, who lives close to the estate and was a vocal supporter of local rights of way.
“I’d like to see the house back on the Yeats trail, and I can’t see why they can’t run the place as a viable tourist amenity. I would hope the Walsh-Cassidys accept the judge’s decision and don’t appeal. I certainly hope they won’t appeal but we have never really understood their way of thinking.”
ALTHOUGH PEOPLE ON the streets of Sligo initially stopped politely when approached, most of them immediately walked away when they heard Lissadell mentioned. “I’m sick of it all,” was a typical response, as was “I don’t live in that part of Sligo, so it has nothing to do with me” and “I have no interest in talking about Lissadell”.
Many of those who did talk made it clear that they were not just angry, but also highly insulted by the erection of fencing and other measures taken at the estate.
“The barricades are a pure disgrace,” said a woman coming out of Tesco, who did not want to give her name. “And I don’t see why the place should ever have been closed at all. The owners should have known that there were rights of way before they purchased it. There’s nothing stopping them from opening the house, and it should be open. It’s not right to deprive the people of Sligo, and tourists to the area, the opportunity to visit the estate.”
“It should never have gone to court,” offers Aquinas Gallagher, shopping in Johnston’s Court mall. “The owners should have had the right to say when people should come and go from their land, is what I think. I do have sympathy with the owners. It’s a terrible pity the house is closed, because it was a very good place for tourists to go.”
“The owners should have compromised with the council about the paths. They should have sat down together and talked about the road going round the house, but they didn’t. They were very adamant they wanted to go to court and they made it very clear they thought they were going to win,” said Margaret from Easkey.
“I feel sorry for them because they paid so much for the place without knowing all the details of access,” Annette Brett of Tubbercurry declared. “We haven’t that many places to go on Sundays in Sligo, and the gardens and tearoom were lovely places to go, and to bring people. It’s a loss. You’d wonder was it all about stubbornness on both parts at the end of the day.”
WHEN CONTACTED AND asked if they were considering an appeal, why the fences had gone up at the estate, and where they saw the future developments at Lissadell going, the Walsh-Cassidys had no comment.
Until a few days ago, their website lissadellhouse.com carried this statement: “Because of the judgment, Lissadell is incapable of operation as a family home or tourist facility for reasons of security, insurance and maintenance.”
The site now says: “Our vision was to transform the estate into a flagship for tourism in Sligo and the North West, whilst providing a secure environment for our children and for our visitors. We did not wish to exploit Lissadell commercially but to restore the house and gardens to their former glory, make Lissadell self-sustaining and protect this crucible of Ireland’s historic and literary heritage. This was our vision for Lissadell. Our vision is now at an end.”
The rocky road to Lissadell closure
August 2003 – Barristers Edward Walsh and Constance Cassidy buy Lissadell for €3.75 million.
December 2008 – Sligo County Council pass a proposal that the county development plan be amended to protect rights of way at Lissadell, in response to various routes at the estate being closed off by the owners.
January 2009 – The house is closed to the public.
October 2009 – Proceedings begin between Sligo County Council and the owners of Lissadell, who refute the assertion of rights of way.
June 2010 – The hearings end, after 58 days in court
December 2010 – The High Court finds that rights of way exist at Lissadell
Irish times Wednesday the 19th of January 2011
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Post by kerrygold on Jan 23, 2011 10:29:53 GMT
Sunday January 23 2011
John Drennan: Party's over as Cowen crashes out of Neverland FF's Peter Pan was still inhabiting his father's pub in the '50s as he brought party and country to their knees, writes John Drennan
ON Wednesday morning it was clear that Brian Cowen was still 'elated' after the Tuesday night before. He was so 'elated' the normally dour Taoiseach beat the opposition up after an unfortunate intervention by Enda Kenny, who suggested the Labour motion of no confidence was "ill-timed and ill-judged".
As he chortled about how he entirely agreed with Enda and noted, "I tell you one thing lads, it's worth coming in here to see you", Cowen's 'elation' reached dangerous levels.
The danger level rose even higher as an even more 'elated' Taoiseach began to re-shuffle his Cabinet after midnight. Sadly, for Mr Cowen, the hangover kicked in on Thursday morning and is not going to go away for some time.
In truth, even before the man got the job that he never wanted, we all suspected it was always going to end in tears. But even though there was always more than a small element of the prodigal son surrounding Mr Cowen, no-one could expect this child-like Falstaff would squander so much of his inheritance.
Astonishingly, the second shortest-lived Taoiseach in the country, dissipated an initial 54 per cent popularity rating in addition to his popularity within Fianna Fail, his support within the Cabinet, the support of his coalition partners, his support amongst party members and the second-biggest government majority since the war.
And of course, the worst example of his squandermania is that his self-indulgent arrogant laziness and terrible character flaws destroyed the country he loved so eloquently . . . well, within the warm confines of the pub at least.
It all meant that by the end, like so many others who suffer from his fatal flaw, the Prince Hal of the bar lobby was reduced to the political status of being dressed in rags begging for spare political change.
In fairness, at least it ended with a little bit of dignity as Mr Cowen for once put the country above the party for, by staying on as Taoiseach but resigning as leader of Fianna Fail, he may at least ensure that the critical Finance Bill is passed.
After that, for Fianna Fail it will be the abyss, for nothing can rescue it now. Micheal Martin and Brian Lenihan,
who appears to have belatedly got the credit for applying the coup de grace to the stricken king, may fight over the carcass as Mary Hanafin circles. Even Eamon O Cuiv may appear an attractive option.
Ultimately, cute Micheal of the eternally furrowed brow and the capacity to agree with the three sides of every argument will probably win, but even he will not save the party for it is the Fianna Fail brand, not just the leader, that is toxic.
The party might once have been associated with success, ceol agus craic, the Galway races, the GAA, foaming pints of Guinness and Bertie 'and the way he might wink at you'.
Now, however, it is associated with ghost estates, derelict high streets, shattered dreams, fear, despair, the mocking laughter of Jay Leno about a 'drunken moron', un-employment, homelessness, and mass emigration.
And nice but spineless Micheal Martin, the spoofing barrister Brian Lenihan and Mary Hanafin are not going to wash away that toxicity.
At the zenith of the Celtic Tiger, we used to marvel how it was that Ireland experienced over one short decade the sort of social, economic and psychological changes it normally takes a country 40 years to secure.
And then, in two ill-starred years, Mr Cowen and the worst, most spineless cabinet in the history of the State plunged us back to the 1950s.
The worst feature of it all wasn't down to bad luck or communications, for Mr Cowen was the lazy author of his long-drawn out political suicide note.
We looked for inspiration and direction, and instead all we received from Mr Cowen was a cold sense of absence.
Truly he was the Taoiseach who, rather like King James during the battle of the Boyne, fled from the theatre of conflict to the safety of a caravan before the battle was over.
Such was his appetite for self-destruction that his resignation will have come as a relief to his TDs. The extent of his Pearse-like death wish was so severe that many suspected Cowen would, like Cu Chulainn with his back strapped to a rock, fight to the death until party, country and everything else turned to rubble.
Some indeed wondered if his desire to stay on was the modern equivalent of a despairing scorched-earth policy where the country would be levelled as a punishment for its failure to live up to the ideals of Fianna Fail.
But, at the end, though he simply realised his position was unsustainable. By yesterday, Cowen had lost the confidence of his party to such an extent that a growing number of back-bench TDs were prepared to vote against the Government, abstain or go 'missing' when it came to the Labour party's no-confidence motion next Wednesday.
He might have been laughing at the Labour no-confidence motion on Wednesday but in a fast-moving political landscape that was utterly unsuited to the Taoiseach's stately style of political warfare it had turned into 'a sword of Damocles that was hanging over Cowen's head'.
Threats by TDs that if Cowen didn't go "a lot of fellows will tell him they are going to have a Dessie O'Malley-standing-by-the-Republic-moment" was indicative of how much Cowen has lost the centre ground of the party.
He did it all by himself too, for the shockwave that spread through Fianna Fail on Thursday was epitomised by one TD's claim that he "knew how Hitler and the generals felt when the bomb went off in the bunker and fellows were wandering around dazed looking for missing arms and legs".
By Saturday, in spite of his self-imposed Trappist exile, even Mr Cowen must have known he had lost the support of an eclectic combination of younger, pragmatic deputies and older loyalists.
Sources from the rebel wing of the party claimed that previous supporters of the Taoiseach such as Margaret Conlon, Johnny Brady, Aine Kitt, Darragh O'Brien, Niall Collins, Timmy Dooley and even John Cregan were utterly disenchanted.
Apart from the damage done to his relationship with the Greens the 'resignations' of the Fianna Fail ministers damaged Mr Cowen's authority in another critical way -- for their departure stripped away Cowen's political authority in the party to such an extent he was a man alone who had no big beasts left to defend him.
He had stripped himself of just about everything else, for as party grandees such as Ray MacSharry and old friends like Willie O'Dea sadly abandoned Mr Cowen's standard, he resembled a latter-day Lear -- naked on a blasted heath bewailing the loss of his kingdom. In truth, strange as it might appear, the children's author J M Barrie provides us with a more apposite analogy.
Brian Cowen was the modern equivalent of Peter Pan, the child who never grew up.
Our tragedy is that the man who never left the Never Never land of the Fifties and Ber Cowen's pub in Clara was put in charge of a party and a country which, like Peter Pan, has never fully grown up.
This week, as Fianna Fail prepares to face its own electoral sword of Damocles, would be a good time for us to start.
Sunday Independent
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Post by glengael on Jan 28, 2011 11:52:16 GMT
Landlords in the lurch as dream goes sour
Far from being members of a fat-cat elite, many small-time property investors say they face bankruptcy if Section 23 tax reliefs are phased out, writes CAROLINE MADDEN
MENTION the phrase “Ireland’s landlord classes” and it conjures up images of a rackrenting, bed-sit- peddling elite who simply sit back and watch the money roll in from their vast property empires. In reality, today’s landlord is much more likely to be a small-time, buy-to-let investor, with one or two white elephant properties, who is now facing death by a thousand cuts. Last Thursday night, about 250 such property investors gathered on Dublin’s northside for a meeting of the Irish Property Owners Association (IPOA), where they expressed fears of financial devastation. Many warned they would face bankruptcy if the curtailment of Section 23 tax relief announced in Budget 2011 went ahead.
The following afternoon, IPOA members and thousands of other investors breathed a sigh of relief as the Finance Bill put the Section 23 proposals on ice until at least 2012. However although they have been granted a reprieve, it is only temporary.
In last December’s Budget, Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced that property-based legacy reliefs were to be phased out. The most controversial element of this related to Section 23 tax relief on rented residential property in tax-designated areas.
The main attraction of this type of property for investors was the ability to offset between 75 and 90 per cent (typically) of the purchase price against all of their Irish rental income, thereby cutting their tax bill.
However Minister Lenihan announced that from January 1st 2011, the relief could only be offset against rental income from the Section 23 property, as opposed to rental income from all of the investor’s Irish properties.
As the rents on Section 23 properties tend to be low, and borrowings are almost always high, little or no taxable income arises on such properties. Therefore if the tax relief were to be ring-fenced in this way, it would become worthless for many investors.
Doubtless the Government banked on the public appetite for meting out punishment to anyone associated with property development to carry this proposal through. However the big property players would have escaped unscathed from any such restriction, as they were generally able to use up their all of their reliefs or allowances in the first year or so.
Instead, small individual investors – from middle-class full-time landlords to tradespeople to pensioners – would have found their unused Section 23 relief effectively guillotined this year.
Representative groups argued that to retrospectively change the terms of the incentive was unfair, as investors had a legitimate expectation of being able to claim the full relief as offered to them by the State at the time of investing.
The Government was inundated with several hundred submissions to this effect and announced it was delaying the change, ostensibly to allow for the completion of an economic impact assessment.
In reality, as Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton summed it up last week, what the Government has done is to simply kick the can down the road.
It will take at least six months for the assessment to be completed, by which point it will be someone else’s problem as a new government will be in place.
If the Labour Party gets into power it is unlikely to take a softer line with property investors than the current Government, but it is impossible to predict whether the Section 23 proposals will eventually be implemented, changed or scrapped.
A recently-formed group, Justice for Investors, is encouraging investors to continue lobbying TDs and the Minister for Finance on this issue because of the uncertainty surrounding it. It has provided sample letters and TD lists on its website, justiceforinvestors.com.
Paul Reynolds, president of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV), has highlighted the fact that the deferral of any decision on property incentives has created serious uncertainty in the market. Investors now find themselves caught in a limbo – whatever hope they had of selling a Section 23-type property before, they have even less chance now.
This tax-shelter saga is not the only thorn in the side of property investors. In the 2009 emergency Budget, the amount of mortgage interest that could be offset as an expense against rental income was reduced to 75 per cent (from 100 per cent).
According to a Munster-based landlord (who did not wish to be identified) with more than 20 properties and no other source of income, this is a more serious issue for investors than the proposed restriction of Section 23 reliefs as it affects everyone who owns a second property and rents it out. “It’s not purely rack-renting fat landlords,” he says. Many investors are just waking up to the impact of this change now, as they only became aware of it when they filed their tax return three months ago.
“It’s a bigger but less immediate problem. People are going to slowly go bust,” says the landlord.
“With the 75 per cent mortgage interest restriction, there is no case for investing in residential property in Ireland,” he says. “You can only lose money.” He makes the point that if, for example, an individual earns €1,000 a year in rent, and they pay €1,000 in mortgage interest, (ignoring other expenses) they are breaking even. However they can only deduct €750 for tax purposes, and therefore will be taxed on €250, even though in reality they did not make a profit.
“It’s one thing to pay tax on income you have. It’s quite another to pay tax on income you don’t have,” he says. He believes that if the 75 per cent interest restriction is not repealed, he’ll be “wiped out” and the property market will not recover. “Investors are never coming back into the market while some of the interest costs are disallowed,” he predicts.
Like many investors, he is only repaying interest on his property borrowings at the moment. “I can only repay capital if I’m making a profit, so I’m interest-only.” He says he has been “invited” by his bank to begin repaying capital, but he has not been “compelled” to do so.
“If I was, it would be become a distressed loan, so the banks can’t afford to go there,” he says. Different banks have different approaches, though, and many investors have been contacted by their lenders in recent months to inform them that they are due to begin repaying capital on their borrowings.
In some cases, investors on tracker mortgages have been presented with two options: begin repaying capital as well as interest, or switch to a more expensive variable rate mortgage and remain interest-only for a further period of, say, two years.
The problem is that many landlords are struggling to meet their interest repayments, let alone repay the principal of the loan. Not only have rents shrunk, but the list of expenses landlords face has grown considerably longer. Firstly, there’s the annual non-principal private residence (NPPR) charge of €200, which cannot be written off for tax purposes.
If the investor’s property is divided up into different flats, bedsits or apartments, this charge applies to each of the units.
Management fees are another area of growing concern for owners of apartments, including buy-to-let investors, as they can run into thousands each year. Landlords also have to register every tenancy with the PRTB now, at a cost of €70.
And as of January 1st, 2009, all homes for sale or rent have been required to have a BER certificate, which indicates how energy efficient the property is. There is no set fee for getting a BER assessment carried out, as it depends on the type of property, but it usually costs between €120 and €300.
“A lot of people are in a situation where they would be better off to have nothing [no property],” a spokeswoman for the IPOA said. “They’d be better off on social welfare instead of working and paying money towards their investment properties. They’re in a situation where they have pared down their own expenses to the bare bone.”
With the most vulnerable sections of society being hit by budget cuts, and family homes being repossessed, there is little sympathy for those who saddled themselves with debt to join the landlord classes.
But with no property market recovery in sight, many investors will soon be forced to choose between paying their taxes and repaying their borrowings, at which point their problems will become the State’s problems too.
Multi-unit bill will prevent rip-offs
PAUL CULLEN
NEW legislation which came into force this week may help prevent apartment-owners being ripped off by management companies. The Multi-Unit Development Act, which was signed into law by the President, Mary McAleese, on Monday, addresses major weaknesses in current legal protections for people who buy units in apartment blocks.
A key provision is that ownership of common areas in apartment blocks or housing estates is transferred from the developer to the management company, controlled by owners, before any unit is sold.
Transfer of ownership must occur in a timely fashion for developments already completed or partially completed. This addresses a situation where developers have held on to a small number of units to retain control of the development company. It has led in some cases to management fees running into thousands of euro being levied on apartment owners.
Another requirement will be an annual minimum contribution of €200 per unit for a sinking fund to meet any large, unexpected or non-regular costs. One unit, one vote, will apply on management companies and owners will have to pay charges, whether they are a developer or not and whether the unit is occupied or not.
The Act is one of the last that the current Dáil will pass before it is dissolved. However, the related Property Services (Regulation) Bill, which provided for the setting up of a national house price register, didn’t make it through all stages in the Oireachtas. As a result, housebuyers and sellers will remain in the dark about prices, at least until a new Government tackles the issue.
Irish Times Thursday January 27th
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Post by kerrygold on Jan 29, 2011 11:23:41 GMT
Saturday January 29 2011
Can we save the Irish salmon? In the week that the great salmon project on the Thames appeared doomed, John Costello looks at the prospects for the King of Fish here
It is as much a symbol of Ireland as the harp, a pint of Guinness and the Celtic Cross. However, Fionn Mac Cumhaill would be sadly disappointed if he returned to Ireland in search of the Salmon Of Knowledge.
While attempts at restoring salmon, the finest of all freshwater fish, to the River Thames finally failed this week after 30 years of trying, the future of the Irish salmon hangs in the balance.
"The salmon was regarded as the king of fish," says Peter O'Reilly, author and leading authority on salmon fishing in Ireland. "When I was growing up in the 1940s the rivers were thick with salmon. But man has been salmon's greatest enemy."
Years of abuse from the damming of rivers, pollution and over-fishing almost pushed the species to extinction. However, it was pulled back from the brink in 2007 when the EU forced the Irish Government to impose a ban on drift-net fishing.
"I am based in Connemara and the year after the drift nets were removed the number of salmon running the river in Ballynahinch doubled," says Simon Ashe of Salmon Watch Ireland.
Indeed, the ban has seen modest improvements in fish stocks throughout Ireland.
"Irish salmon stocks are now being managed on an individual river basis," says Dr Paddy Gargan, a senior researcher with Inland Fisheries Ireland. "Salmon can only be harvested from rivers where there is a surplus and only the surplus can be taken. No salmon can be harvested from rivers not meeting their spawning requirements [called conservation limit]."
In 2007, 103 rivers in Ireland were closed to salmon fishing. Now only 60 remain closed. Of the 81 rivers open to anglers, 29 operate an enforced system of catch and release. However, the future of the Irish salmon remains extremely vulnerable.
"We were really hoping for a major boost to the runs following the drift-net ban in 2007," says Peter Mantle of Delphi Fishing Lodge in Connemara. "We are getting a bigger fish, but the numbers have been disappointing. Drift-net fishing was obviously not the only problem -- but at least it was a problem that could be dealt with."
While commercial fishing took its toll on salmon stocks, the number of salmon returning from sea has dropped dramatically.
"The survival of salmon at sea over the last five years has gone down by about 50pc," says Ian Powell of the Blackwater Lodge salmon angling centre Ballyduff, Co Waterford. "We don't know if it's to do with climate change, a difference in water temperatures or differences in the feeding. No one really knows what is happening."
To try to understand why salmon are disappearing at sea, the SalSea project (www.salmonatsea.com) is investigating the migration of salmon in the North-East Atlantic. Irish, Faroese and Norwegian research vessels are using DNA technology to identify individual fish caught at sea and trace them back to their region or river of origin.
"We were completely ignorant about their life at sea but we are changing that," says Dr Ken Whelan of the Marine Institute and Chairman of NASCO's International Atlantic Salmon Research Board (IASRB). "The findings of the research will be presented in September at the Salmon Summit in France so by then we should have a greater understanding."
But is global warming a key suspect?
"There is no doubt there is a changing environment in the ocean," says Dr Whelan, "but it is a completely different question to ask if man has had an impact on those changes. There have been huge changes in sea fish stock dating back to the 17th century in terms of the shifting patterns. So we are just trying to get our head around it at the moment."
Every rod-caught salmon is worth €436 to the Irish economy, according to Suzanne Campion, Business Development Manager at Inland Fisheries Ireland. So with the allowable catch for 2011 at 91,338, the value for the tourism market in Ireland is significant.
However, while scientists probe the Atlantic to discover what is happening to the salmon, local activists still believe there is one major hurdle left in securing the future of wild salmon in Ireland.
"The evidence against fish farming is overwhelming," says Peter Mantle. "These farms that contain hundreds and thousands of salmon held in cages in warm inshore waters year-round are an unbelievable breeding ground for sea lice. These farms are spewing out literally gazillions of these lice, which are colonising any young wild sea trout or salmon in the area. Sea lice infestation has quite literally destroyed a huge proportion of the wild fish of sea trout and salmon."
While Salmon Watch Ireland is pushing for stricter regulation of Ireland's fish farms, the sector believes it has no questions to answer. "No one has been able to point out wild salmon stock that has been adversely affected by salmon farming," says Richie Flynn, Irish Farmers Association Aquaculture Executive Secretary.
'Sea lice is being used as an issue to confuse people but Ireland is leading the way in sea lice research and we are the only country that produces monthly figures on sea lice in fish farms.
"In the current economic climate why are people targeting a sector that employs 1,200 and creates €60m in exports?"
"I would say that Joe Public is a bit confused," says Simon Ashe of Salmon Watch Ireland. "With the abundance of salmon on supermarket shelves and in restaurants, they probably don't understand what is happening to wild salmon. As long as the price remains low for salmon your average person doesn't really want to know where it comes from. So getting through to the consumer on Irish salmon is very difficult."
With the population remaining fragile, the future for wild Irish salmon is far from secure.
"I don't think we will ever see things return to the way they were," says Peter O'Reilly.
"An Indian chief once said to George Washington, 'Not until the last river has been poisoned, the last tree cut down and the last fish is dead will the white man realise he cannot eat money'. The sad reality is if you exploit anything in an unsustainable fashion it will disappear."
The Salmon's Long Goodbye
After more than 30 years of trying, the UK's Environment Agency has finally abandoned attempts to try to reintroduce salmon to the River Thames.
Salmon, a symbol of aquatic purity, once thrived in the river but was driven to extinction in the 19th century thanks to the industrial revolution.
A fish caught in June 1833 is believed to have been the last Thames salmon before pollution spoiled its waters. However, 141 years later hope was reignited when a 8lb 12oz salmon was caught in the Thames near Dartford, on November 12, 1974. This was 10 years after a major project to cleanse the river had begun.
With hopes high the clean-up could once again see salmon thrive in the famous river, efforts to restore the population began with gusto in 1979. Smolts, juvenile fish, were released in the river to see if they could pass through the estuary and then return.
While, remarkably, they managed this feat, the real test was the challenge of swimming a further 75 miles to the potential spawning streams. The resilient salmon managed to navigate its way past 37 weirs and spawn.
Ultimately, however, after an investment of millions, the salmon never managed the swim to sea and then return to its spawning grounds.
So, the Environment Agency, after officially closing the project, is preparing for its final attempt at the stocking of young fish in the river. Sadly, in the likely event that none returns the dream will truly be over.
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Post by glengael on Jan 29, 2011 12:38:37 GMT
Can you trust those online hotel reviews?
Travel editor Gemma O'Doherty on the backlash against the Trip Advisor web site.
Saturday January 29 2011
It has become the traveller's champion, a first port of call for holidaymakers in search of the warts-and-all truth about hotels and a place where they can let off steam when things go wrong.
But the world's largest travel website, TripAdvisor, is facing a searing backlash from hoteliers who claim it is rife with inaccuracies and fraudulent claims about their properties concocted by phoney reviewers.
This week, it was slammed as "despicable and cowardly" by BBC Dragon's Den panellist Duncan Bannatyne after he complained that a "dishonest" review compared his Charlton House Spa in Somerset to Fawlty Towers. He demanded that it be removed.
The website has also incurred the wrath of a growing number of Irish hoteliers over claims that it refuses to remove dishonest and defamatory reviews from its pages.
From the moment he set eyes on it, Joe O'Flynn knew there was something fishy about a TripAdvisor review of his hotel. As the owner of one of Wicklow's most successful country homes, Rathsallagh House in Dunlavin, he takes great pride in attending to his guests, especially those who come to stay at Christmas.
Last January, a new review popped up on TripAdvisor about his hotel written by a man who claimed he had just spent the holidays there. The vast bulk of Rathsallagh's reviews on the site fall into the "excellent" category but this was headlined "disappointing, food very poor on this occasion".
The guest stated that he was a regular visitor over the years but that his latest stay was a let-down. There wasn't enough turkey and ham, he claimed, and the Christmas pudding was not up to scratch.
He also complained about Joe, whom he claimed left the running of the day to his elderly parents and didn't make an appearance once. This surprised Joe as he had spent the entire Christmas on duty in the hotel making sure everything ran smoothly.
Because TripAdvisor protects the identity of its reviewers, Joe was unable to track down the name of the guest but he posted a reply on his review asking him to get in contact so he could address the issues raised. He was stunned by the mystery guest's response.
Despite his derogatory assessment of the hotel, the reviewer lambasted Joe for making direct contact and "attempting to breach the confidentiality of the website", which he said was "anonymous and should be respected as such".
He then went on to admit that he had never stayed in the hotel but knew of somebody who had. More remarkable yet, he signed off using his own name.
Joe circulated his name to all of his Christmas guests to see if anybody had heard of him but none of them had.
He then contacted TripAdvisor, told them about the fraudulent review and asked them to remove it at once. Despite countless efforts, one year later, it is still on the website.
"This man admitted in an email that he had never stayed with us in his life," says Joe.
"This is a breach of the TripAdvisor rules which state that reviews must be based on personal experience, not hearsay. I reminded TripAdvisor of that but they didn't want to know.
"I contacted them several times and asked them to remove it but my responses were just rejected. It seems there is one rule for TripAdvisor and another for the rest of us.
'They apply an adversarial censorship which is utterly biased if it comes to exposing holes in their system. I don't believe for a minute that they have the technology to sift out the false reviews from the genuine ones. That's complete bull."
Another popular proprietor of a Wicklow guesthouse is equally damning of the website, claiming she has been the victim of a malicious reviewer who never stayed with her but whose damaging report remains on the site despite numerous efforts to have it erased.
This owner is one of just hundreds of disgruntled owners planning legal action against the site for failing to remove fraudulent information from it. Online reputation services firm KwikChex, acting on behalf of more than 1,000 hoteliers including a number of Irish properties, estimates there are at least 27,000 defamatory comments on TripAdvisor which have never been tested for accuracy or truthfulness.
It intends to have them tested in court, a move which could spell the end of the website and dozens of others who facilitate the dissemination of anonymous, unverified reviews on the internet.
Its main gripe lies in the fact that anyone can post material on TripAdvisor without proof or confirmation that they have stayed in the hotel concerned. This leaves the website wide open to abuse by competitors and others who may have a grudge against a proprietor or their staff.
Hoteliers also say the website takes a guilty until proven innocent approach to them, and even when they produce evidence that a review is spurious, they are ignored.
But TripAdvisor rejects these claims, stating objections by hotel owners can be posted beneath every review.
"All hoteliers have an automatic right to reply," says Ireland spokeswoman Emma O'Boyle. "They can post a public response putting their side of the story across.
"We receive 29 posts per minute on the site but every single review is screened by our technology and anything that's flagged as suspicious is fully looked at by our team of content specialists.
"If the evidence proves categorically that the person had never stayed there, it would be taken down.
"But the truth is that if the vast majority of experiences people put on the site don't match the experience when they get to the property, people wouldn't keep visiting and we wouldn't have this phenomenal year-on-year growth."
Last year, TripAdvisor celebrated its 10th anniversary, becoming the first travel website to register 40 million unique visitors in a single month. It was set up in Massachusetts by an entrepreneur who had a brainwave after a visit to the travel agents to book a holiday in Mexico.
The US-based company makes most of its money from advertising by other websites whom visitors can link to from the site.
But what's to stop a hotelier from putting up glowing reports about their own property?
"That's very rare," says Emma, "but if we do catch a hotelier putting up reviews about themselves, we will stick a red badge on the site warning any prospective guests that this hotel has been under investigation for suspicious activity."
John Brennan, manager of the five-star Park Hotel in Kenmare, Co. Kerry, says: "I know of one property who ups itself all the time. The problem with TripAdvisor is that anyone can simply set up an email every week and build up their property again and again so they get close to the five-star mark.
"Equally they can butcher their neighbour, the competition or just someone they don't like. The website cloaks the identity of the person making the review so, in theory, I could spend all day writing bad reports about the Sheen Falls up the road.
"We get mainly very good reviews on the site but we have had fraudulent ones too. One man claimed that we had met him in the car park and told him to go away. That never happened. We went after TripAdvisor and they took it down.
"Another guy attempted to blackmail me by saying he would use TripAdvisor as a stick to beat us if we did not hand back what he perceived to be a hidden service charge on the bill.
'He had booked through an internet third-party site that has nothing to do with the hotel and had not bothered to read the small print. He went absolutely berserk at reception and said he would tell the world if we applied the charge, which we did.
"He wrote his review. It is still there and it is the only one I have responded to online."
But even John Brennan, an experienced traveller, admits he relies heavily on TripAdvisor when planning his own holiday.
"I travel extensively and use it all the time. I would value 80pc of its content as being the truth. If a place is getting consistently bad reviews, there's no doubt that something is going wrong.
"I always look at the number of contributions made by each reviewer. If a hotel has a lot of reviews made by single contributors, I don't trust that. You don't get people going in to the website to put up just one review so I would have doubts over a property with a whole load of single reviews from single contributors.
"But on the whole, I am in favour of TripAdvisor. It has brought information to the public in a way guide books were never able to do.
"If it identifies problems that need to be addressed, that can only be good for the tourist industry and the traveller."
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Post by kerrygold on Jan 30, 2011 12:35:41 GMT
By Eamonn Sweeney
Sunday January 30 2011
Tremendous news. BSkyB chief executive Jeremy Darroch has described the various sexist comments made by the departed duo of Andy Gray and Richard Keys as "totally unacceptable . . . against everything Sky Sports stands for." Hurray for Jeremy. And hurray for Sky Sports.
Now that these two bad apples have been banished, sexism will never again rear its ugly head in the world of sports broadcasting.
I wonder what else is going on at Sky Sports. For example, at their popular magazine programme Soccer AM. Let's check the website. Hello, what's this? "Are you a fox? Do you like football? Have you got a party trick which will make the nation sit up and take notice." Hmm, perhaps by fox they mean the well known chicken-slaughtering woodland creature, or even a fan of Leicester City.
Or perhaps not. Because according to the site, Sky are "scouring the land for lovely ladies to add a bit of glamour to the gossip, guests and goals we've got coming our way." Beside this touching appeal we have a picture of a group of young ladies in T-shirts and shorts which seem to have shrunk in the wash. And there's even a table where you can rank the 'soccerettes' in order of preference.
What do you reckon Jeremy would make of that? Perhaps he would echo the words of Nigel Tufnell in This Is Spinal Tap who, on being informed that the record company find the cover of the 'Smell The Glove' album to be sexist, replies, "Well, so what, what's wrong with being sexy?"
Looking at the furore surrounding the departure of Gray and Keys last week it was hard not to be reminded of the time a few years back when the late Jade Goody was caught disparaging her fellow reality show contestant Shilpa Shetty. Among the voices howling in outrage at Goody's racism were those of newspapers who regularly ran stories about sponging asylum seekers, rapacious refugees and mad Muslims. Everyone enjoyed the feeling of briefly being united in self-righteousness and then got back to behaving exactly as they had in the past.
It made me think of the song 'National Brotherhood Week' by the American satirist Tom Lehrer which concludes, "be nice to people who are inferior to you. It's only for a week, so have no fear. Be grateful that it doesn't last all year."
Similarly, some very strange people have been taking up the cudgels on behalf of feminism. Thursday's Sun, which I picked up with the tongs normally reserved for this task, condemned Keys for referring to a woman as 'it,' and using a 'vile term' for sex. The Sun's bona fides in taking offence at the objectification of women are perhaps slightly tarnished by the fact that its website provides an extensive selection of topless Page 3 girls. Elsewhere, you can read about, 'Prem star's four in a bed orgy filmed,' 'Kim's sex tape humiliation' and 'when it comes to teenage kicks they don't get any hotter than the girls from The Inbetweeners'. Personally, I'd find The Sun's orgy of hypocrisy far more disturbing than anything 'Prem star' got up to.
One line being peddled about the disgraced duo is that they are 'dinosaurs', men in their 50s who didn't realise that this kind of sexism doesn't belong in the brave new 21st century world. That particular theory doesn't bear more than a second's scrutiny. Because contemporary culture is awash with sexism, far more so than it was a couple of decades back. Twenty years ago, for example, you didn't have magazines like Loaded, Nuts and Zoo with their softcore photos of young women and their lionisation of sexism and general male ignorance. These magazines enjoy huge circulations and it's not men in their 50s who are buying them.
Their audience is by and large the same as that which Sky target with programmes like Soccer AM, young men like those who people the audience of that wretched show and greet the arrival of the soccerettes with the troglodytic enthusiasm of travelling salesmen watching a sixties stag show.
This kind of casual sexism is everywhere. Look at the number of pop videos where girl bands are decked out in stripper chic and male stars are surrounded by a bevy of semi-naked 'lovely ladies' in a boneheaded recreation of the Playboy Mansion. Look at the idea of the landlord of that mansion, Hugh Hefner, as a kind of hero. Look at the notion that the pimp is also a pop culture icon to be admired.
Look at the apparent acceptability of internet porn and lap dancing to a new generation of men. The culture is getting more rather than less sexist. Is it any wonder that old fogeys like Andy Gray and Richard Keys are confused as to what is acceptable?
Because, for all the chat about Gray and Keys representing some older, less enlightened version of masculinity, you didn't have programmes like Soccer AM back in those supposedly darker days. Sky has led the plunge downmarket into lad mag territory but the other stations have followed. The old Match of the Day would never have countenanced a presenter like the witless Adrian Chiles, neither would it have included anything in the vein of Kevin Day's excruciatingly bloky inserts. And the contributions of the likes of David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and James Corden to BBC's football coverage has also added to the notion that supporting
football comes as part of a package which requires you to check your brain in at the turnstiles.
Old-fashioned sexism was at least honestly come by. Its modern cousin is all the more pernicious because it's perpetrated in the name of 'irony' or as a reaction against a fictitious 'political correctness'. It wasn't surprising to see that one of the first people to spring to the defence of Gray and Keys was Jeremy Clarkson who, along with his two accident-prone upper class twit sidekicks, has made a living out of peddling a more polished version of the Loaded worldview.
It's mean-spirited, mind-numbing stuff. But it has a huge audience. And so did Gray and Keys before they were sacrificed to the tabloid gods. Will TV sports coverage be less laddish and sexist as a result? Not at all. But we've all got to boo the pantomime baddies for a few days and that is all that matters.
I suppose it gave Jonathan Ross, Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and the woman who put the cat in the wheelie bin a rest.
backpage@independent.ie
- Eamonn Sweeney
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Post by glengael on Feb 4, 2011 10:39:54 GMT
Friday February 04 2011
IT is hardly a surprise any more that we are mainly saving, rather than spending, these days. Week after week another bodyblow hits Irish consumers, who it must be remembered are the main engine of growth in the Irish economy, making a bigger contribution than even exporting firms.
They want to get back on their feet, they want to stop saving at currently high levels and they want to see the economy growing again. But unfortunately they are not being allowed to make their contribution.
A series of lenders have put through a succession of variable mortgage increases in the last year, leaving some borrowers in arrears, others in severe financial distress and others simply in negative equity.
Yesterday one of the most aggressive hikers of rates, Permanent TSB, confirmed an extraordinary 1pc increase in variable rates. The scale of the increase is unprecedented even by the standards of recent hikes.
Banks normally raise rates by a quarter or half a percentage point each time, so to go beyond this in one move suggests Permanent TSB has no real sense of the damage such a move will cause.
Obviously the main impact is on the borrowers themselves, who either go into arrears or have to radically cut back their spending just to meet the new higher monthly interest bills.
The unfairness of this move is exacerbated by the fact that variable mortgage holders are at the mercy of lenders, whereas more fortunate tracker mortgage holders are paying far lower rates -- at least for now.
It is somewhat ironic that every other economy in Europe is trying to keep rates down so their economies can grow at the optimum speed, whereas Ireland is hiking rates just at the moment when a tentative recovery may be under way.
The bank's defence has merit on one level. Banks are paying more for their own money than ever before and this simply has to be passed on to borrowers.
But that is only part of the story. The banks have to source such a large amount of external funding because they recklessly ramped up their balance sheets during the boom and that was their own fault, not the fault of borrowers, who must now apparently pay the price.
More fundamentally, borrowers feel cheated because they as taxpayers propped up the banks during 2008, including Permanent TSB, with a guarantee and the only result for many is higher borrowing costs.
The problem here is very simple. What is good for the banks is not necessarily good for the wider economy. The timing issue is also relevant. While banks will ultimately have to push mortgage costs up in future if they are to return to profitability, now is not the ideal time for such a policy.
Alas, the outgoing government has had very little to say on this issue which affects so many.
Permanent TSB also yesterday announced up to 350 job losses in a fresh cost saving drive. This again makes economic sense for Permanent TSB, allowing the lender to cut its losses and gradually nurse itself back to financial health. But it is a terrible outcome for those who will lose their incomes.
Another round of job losses at this stage of the year will do nothing to engender consumer confidence, which is already fragile.
Unfortunately bank officials at many of the leading institutions are living on borrowed time. All the Irish banks have downsized dramatically in the last two years in terms of assets, but their staff numbers haven't reduced by the same amount. In that context substantial job loss programmes are likely to come soon from AIB and others. It will be one of the more unpleasant items in the 'IN' tray of the incoming government.
Just as there is a cold logic to the interest rate rises, this type of job losses are unfortunately inevitable.
Everyone connected with Irish banks is currently sharing the burden of their losses, from shareholders, to taxpayers, to junior bondholders, to the government.
Staff in the next few months will be asked to shoulder that burden too.
With more than half the banking system already nationalised, governments of the future will some day want to sell these banks back into the private sector at the highest price possible.
That means making these banks lean and ultra-efficient, which unfortunately means fewer people.
That is the harsh reality of the Ireland we now must carry forward.
Irish Independent
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Post by glengael on Feb 20, 2011 12:43:08 GMT
No more hiding places in the battle against rural isolation The GAA must have a role in reaching out to some of society's most vulnerable members, writes John O'Brien By John O'Brien
Sunday February 20 2011
IT is Wednesday afternoon as Joe McCrohan pulls up outside a ramshackle house a few miles from Cahirciveen and raps on the reinforced corrugated iron sheet that serves as a front door.
Mick Murphy greets him with familiar warmth and beckons him inside to a world that has stood still for generations. There is no toilet or running water and just enough electricity to light a single bulb. Potatoes simmer in a large pot that sits on an old camper stove beside him on the concrete floor.
McCrohan will call once a month maybe, to see if Mick is alright or if there is anything he needs from town. Mostly just to listen, though. He'll idle half an hour away hearing Mick fondly reminisce about the two South Kerry championships he won with Renard. Or how he famously won the 1958 Rás Tailteann even though he'd only taken up cycling a few months previously.
He'll tell Joe how he arrived in Dublin on a bright August evening in 1958 and slept rough that night before joining the start of the Rás the following morning. Then there was the relentless drama of the race itself: the falls, the broken bones, the delirium and the ecstasy. He promises to tell it all in the story of his life. He will call it The Convict of the Road and sell it to the highest bidder.
Murphy has lived in these primitive conditions all his life. The majority of it alone. Not that he has ever minded. He has always cherished his independence and resisted pressure to change his ways. He is blissfully stuck in a time warp. He has his makeshift gym -- a weight made of concrete slabs held together by a wooden pole -- that sits beside his bed. He has his books, his medals and his memories. "No man nor God will move me," he says.
Yet, for all Mick professes his happiness, a part of Joe feels no man pushing 80 should be entirely alone or so set in his ways. As a rural development officer, Joe helps organise outings for elderly single men in the area. In the past two years they have held 10 outings and catered for over 200 of the most vulnerable men in south Kerry. So far Mick hasn't joined them. But Joe isn't giving up the battle.
He knows there are Mick Murphys dotted all over the country, not as eccentric perhaps, but just as alone and equally stubborn about seeking help. If you needed a starting point to study the growth of rural isolation, then south Kerry was the place to start. According to the statistics, 11 per cent of the population is over 65 and, by 2026, that figure will have risen to 25. More of them live in south Kerry than anywhere else.
McCrohan has worked for the South Kerry Development Partnership since 1998. Even then the telltale signs were evident. Pubs shutting at a rate of knots. Post offices and remote Garda stations going by the wayside. Marts and creameries closing or drastically scaling back their operations. In the 1980s, McCrohan says, there were 280 milk suppliers in the Cahirciveen area. Today there are 21. The fabric of rural life slowly coming apart at the seams.
He knows parts of south Kerry where one in three men live alone. A recurring story: men who inherited the family farm and stayed while their brothers, sisters and friends left in search of work. The real tragedy, he thinks, is that the pattern of their lives was inevitable yet nothing was ever done to prevent it. "Most people would see a man living alone and they'd think sure he's grand. We'll leave him alone, keep away, that sort of thing. It wasn't right but that's the way it was done."
About 10 years ago they came up with a small idea to stage free health clinics at three marts in south Kerry and the overwhelming demand astonished them. It wasn't that the resulting queues informed them of the depth of the problem in the area -- they knew that anyway -- more the realisation that if you put something on, the men would come. You just had to provide the incentive.
From his travels around the country presenting RTE radio's Farm Week, Damien O'Reilly had become acutely aware of the issue. In early 2008, O'Reilly had come to Kerry to witness the situation there first-hand. At the mart in Listowel he found a retired farmer willing to talk about the emptiness of his life: the long days with no human contact, the constant fear of attack that was his daily companion.
It is truly shocking now to listen to the programmes O'Reilly made for Farm Week and observe the huge gap between the rural world he portrays and the affluent society that prospered during the boom. It isn't that the old world has disappeared, but it has been pushed into the margins, away from public view. When a group of elderly men visited áras an Uachtaráin three years ago, four of them had never been to Dublin. One had never made it past Tralee.
"You'd hear some incredible stories," says O'Reilly. "In Kerry, I was told about a farmer who had suffered a heart attack while milking the cows and his body wasn't discovered for two days. It wasn't until the milk lorry called and the driver saw the cows in an agitated state in the yard. Nobody had missed him. Things like that would really shock you."
* * * * *
Last month, President Mary McAleese stood before an audience of 200 in Lucan Sarsfields GAA club in west Dublin and spoke engagingly of its special place at the heart of the community. Her visit had a dual purpose: to celebrate the club's 125th anniversary and to officially launch the GAA's social initiative, a project that has been close to her heart since the idea was first conceived three years ago.
She explained how her travels around the country during the 13 years of her presidency had alerted her to the fact that there was a critical problem at the heart of our society. She would attend senior citizens' events with her husband, Martin, and the same theme became a recurring source of conversation. "The vast majority would be well attended by women," she said, "but not so by men."
Three years ago, O'Reilly visited the áras to interview the President. As they spoke, cattle grazed contentedly on the meadows outside the window. Yes, she smiled, she was a farmer too. Her mother and father had come from humble farming stock from Derry and Roscommon respectively. She shared an affinity for rural life and the people whose lives, for good and for bad, were shaped by their relationship with the land.
And she sensed their vulnerability now. It was no accident that when it came to suicide older men were the second highest risk group in the country. There were plenty of available services but, for whatever reason, they were reluctant to use them and the pace of modern life had further isolated them. "Loneliness is a lot more lonely today," she said. "More difficult to cope with."
It was Martin McAleese who had first got in contact with O'Reilly. He had heard the broadcasts on the plight of rural isolation and they had tallied with the conversations he had been having with his wife for several years. Out of that came the idea of inviting a group of elderly men to the áras for a workshop and, in turn, that led to the notion of expanding the work being done in Kerry on a nationwide basis.
From the beginning they realised that for the project to thrive the GAA had to be the primary vehicle. A couple of weeks before the President addressed the gathering in Lucan, Michaela McAreevy had been buried in Tyrone. It struck her how, in the face of such appalling tragedy, the GAA had once again showcased our best qualities as a people: organising, rallying, comforting, rescuing hope from total devastation.
And as the light begins to fade on her second and final term as President, it doesn't seem premature to speculate that the social initiative she helped to inspire will stand as her greatest legacy.
* * * * *
IT was mid-2010 and Seán Kilbride was settling into his retirement. He had spent 42 happy years in the army and was curious to see where the rest of his life would take him, never imagining it would bring him so quickly back to his first love. The GAA was casting its net for a suitable candidate to lead its Social Initiative project. A former colleague had mentioned Kilbride's name and, like that, he was drawn in.
At first he was wary. There were the long drives from his home in Athlone to Croke Park to consider as well as the regular trips around the country. More early morning starts, more time away from home. But the challenge intrigued him too. It was daunting, but it was new and the possibilities seemed endless. It was a blank sheet. A green-field site. The more he thought about it, the more it stoked his competitive juices.
More than two years had passed since the McAleeses had dreamed up their scheme and, if it hadn't exactly died, the progress wasn't as sustained as they'd hoped. Initially, four counties had been chosen as pilot areas: Kerry, Fermanagh, Mayo and Wexford. Good work had been done, but it had been no more than a qualified success.
"The GAA conducted an analysis of the project," says Kilbride, "and arrived at a few conclusions. One was that it had to be set up in the form of a charitable trust. The GAA would host it and provide resources, but the funding would be external. It also needed a full-time co-ordinator and had to become a club rather than a county-based initiative."
Last October, Kilbride held a seminar in Croke Park and was greatly encouraged by the response. Martin McAleese opened it and people flocked from all parts of the country at their own expense. Anybody with a vested interest in the project was represented: the IFA and HSE, Men's Health Forum, Pobail, An Garda and various retirement groups. Each bringing specific knowledge and fresh ideas about how to tackle the same problem.
And although it isn't an exclusively GAA project, Kilbride supposes it would be a useful start for the Association to examine its own conscience on the issue of rural isolation. All those former players, administrators and supporters who reach a certain stage in their life where they drift away and are never encouraged back. What does it say about us that we neglect the most vulnerable members of our society?
"We claim to be more than a sporting organisation and, if we are, it isn't enough that we look after our under 18s or whoever. I don't think it's in our mindset to look after all age-groups. It shouldn't be like, okay they're players, some of them will be coaches or administrators and the rest we forget about. We need to change that way of thinking. We should be looking at ways to include all our community in our activities."
He bristles with ideas. If change is inevitable, he wonders, then why can't it be for the better? Alternatives to pub life, perhaps. The CEO of Irish Heart Foundation is a former colleague and, together, they have discussed the idea of creating walkways around clubs. He has spoken to the Croke Park stadium director about special packages, to the head of ticketing about prices and to the rural transport people about travel. Simple ideas but effective.
Although funds are obviously tight, he knows it is enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility that will ultimately determine the initiative's success. It encourages him that Martin McAleese will remain as a patron even after he leaves the áras and he can call on an advisory board that includes O'Reilly and Professor Eamon O'Shea of NUIG, one of the country's foremost thinkers on issues facing the elderly.
"Someone said to me in the early days that this sounds like an idea whose time has come. We have an ageing population and I think the recession has forced people to think that real happiness might be in your community, not in Marbella or Florida. It's about making a difference to people who might be going through tough times in their lives."
After two years they will pause and take stock. He knows there will be tough days ahead, trying to convince hard-up clubs to commit money and resources to a project where the tangible benefits will accrue off the field. His initial target was to get 90 clubs involved spread out over 32 counties, and they have exceeded that total. By the end of the year he'd like to have 10 clubs signed up per county and, down the line, he envisages it opening out to men of all ages and women too.
"The challenge is to keep drawing people in," he says. "Club by club by club. It's hard work but it's worth doing. Ultimately, I'd hope to convince them that it should be part and parcel of a club's activities. Automatic. That they would see the value of it and appoint a sub-committee, make it an essential part of the club's structure."
* * * * *
TOM REILLY studied the sea of happy faces around him and smiled. A group of 48 men from a knot of tiny villages on the Cavan-Leitrim border enjoying a day out in Croke Park, happy in each other's company. Reilly had spoken to a man who had spent most of his life in Manchester and had worked at Old Trafford. "He said he'd never seen anything like Croke Park. It's nice to hear things like that."
A few had come from Reilly's home village of Blacklion, including Eddie McManus. As a boy, Eddie had seen Cavan beat Mayo in the 1948 All-Ireland final. Andy Kelly had boarded the bus a few miles down the road in Swanlinbar. At 81, he was the oldest of the group and remains the active president of his club. That day Swanlinbar would face St Mary's, Cahirciveen, in the All-Ireland Junior final. The last time any Cavan team reached an All-Ireland final was 1952. They held little hope of winning, but what matter? They were in Croke Park and they were alive.
"There's an energy and life about it," said Fr Tommy McManus of Corlough. "It's not just lads sitting around having a chat. A lot of men are a bit reluctant about going to senior citizens' outings. But there's a bit of get up and go about this. Lads here might be elderly in years, but they're young at heart."
Seán Maxwell stops to chat outside the museum. Maxwell served for 20 years as Leitrim County Board treasurer, a lifetime devotion to club and county behind him. He reminds you the day was made possible by the work of Marie O'Reilly and the Cavan Peace 111 initiative and laments the fact that the GAA, in his eyes, has been slow to rally around the project.
"The GAA has a responsibility to it and it'll be their fault if it dies," he says. "Because from what I can see they still have not got behind it. I've been to a few club and county board meetings and I have not heard it discussed. If it isn't taken up by the boards then give it two years and it's dead."
Right now that seems an unlikely fate, however. Tom Reilly is already thinking ahead to next month when they'll take a group to Cavan town to see Shane Connaughton's new play, The Pitch. And down south, Joe McCrohan looks ahead to a sightseeing tour of Valentia Island in April.
He hopes to get 100 people signed up and, you never know, maybe this time Mick Murphy will finally relent and agree to join them.
- John O'Brien
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Post by kerrygold on Mar 4, 2011 8:57:54 GMT
By Praveen Swami
Friday March 04 2011
BACK in 1976, the man who founded OPEC, the oil cartel that was threatening to bring the world economy to its knees, held out a grim warning to its members: "We are drowning in the Devil's excrement."
Now, as panicked oil corporations lobby world leaders for military action to stamp out the spreading flames in the Middle East and north Africa, both oil-producing petro-states, the West need to consider carefully the words of the late Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo.
If the West is to ensure that it doesn't become mired in conflicts across the Middle East, it will need to reduce its dependence on the region's oil. Ending the flow of cash from our wallets to the Middle East will also help build the foundations for a stable, democratic order.
For the one thing that binds the crisis isn't Twitter, it's oil. Bahrain and Libya built their future by pumping the seemingly inexhaustible pool of cash from the ground beneath their feet. Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen exported educated, low-wage workers to the petro-states.
But prosperity hasn't generated jobs. Half the population in the arc of nations running from Algeria to Pakistan is less than 25 years old, but unemployment is at record levels.
In the mid-1970s, Alfonzo told a young political-science student called Terry Lynn Karl that this would happen.
"Ten years from now," he warned, "20 years from now, oil will bring us ruin."
In a 1999 article, Dr Karl explained why the dream turned sour. Instead of building infrastructure and industries, the petro-states' rulers used their revenues to build patronage networks ensuring the survival of their regimes.
This, he argued, was inevitable. Though there was no reason why petro-states could not have used oil revenues wisely, the regimes survived by spreading their unearned loot around.
Western leaders have long acknowledged that depending on oil from an unstable part of the world isn't wise. In 2006, George Bush promised that the US would seek to substitute 75pc of its oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. Richard Nixon said the same in 1973.
So why hasn't research into alternative fuels been getting the war-footing funding that it needs? The reason is simple: strange as it might sound, the devil's excrement is still cheap. The pain you feel when you fill up your car is because of taxes, not because your money is headed to the Middle East.
Consider this: in 1929, an average American would have had to pay 1.49pc of his or her annual income of $84.90 to buy a barrel of crude oil, which then sold for $1.27. Fifty years later, oil prices soared to $31.61. But the annual earnings of the average American had risen even more sharply, to $7,956. So a barrel of oil would cost them just 0.39pc of their earnings -- a quarter of what it did in 1929.
The numbers for recent years are even more revealing. In 2008, oil prices soared to $96.91 -- very similar to now. But the average American earned $35,931 that year, which meant a barrel of oil would cost them 0.26pc of their earnings -- well below what it would have in the oil-shocked 1970s.
Bar Norway, the world's largest oil exporters are now poorer, relative to the world's great economies, than they were five decades ago.
"The conclusion must be," the commentator Amir Taheri wrote in 2006, "that those who buy oil get rich and those who sell it do not."
PARALLELS have been drawn between the recent rebellions and the fall of the Soviet Union. A more useful analogy, though, is 1848, which gave birth to modern Europe -- but it took a century and two world wars for it to come to pass.
In the Middle East, too, there will be great strife before a new order emerges. Meanwhile, the West must make decisions. It could continue to prop up the oil order and risk being sucked into crisis after crisis.
The alternative, ending our addiction to oil, involves pain -- but will insulate the West from the looming problems in the region and in the long run allow the emergence of a new, stable order.
The uprisings in the Middle East have made a new beginning possible. The West can't afford not to take the chance. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Praveen Swami
Irish Independent
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Post by Mickmack on Mar 4, 2011 18:14:57 GMT
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Post by bilythewalsh on Mar 19, 2011 4:01:40 GMT
Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage' by Robert Krulwich So there's a cosmonaut up in space, circling the globe, convinced he will never make it back to Earth; he's on the phone with Alexsei Kosygin — then a high official of the Soviet Union — who is crying because he, too, thinks the cosmonaut will die. The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won't work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth, his body turning molten on impact. As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship." This extraordinarily intimate account of the 1967 death of a Russian cosmonaut appears in a new book, Starman, by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, to be published next month. The authors base their narrative principally on revelations from a KGB officer, Venymin Ivanovich Russayev, and previous reporting by Yaroslav Golovanov in Pravda. This version — if it's true — is beyond shocking. Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Kamarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. The two men were close; they socialized, hunted and drank together. In 1967, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn't back out because he didn't want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement. The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships. The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen. The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed. The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, "I'm not going to make it back from this flight." He'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him. - Komarov talking about Gagarin Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: "If I don't make this flight, they'll send the backup pilot instead." That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn't do that to his friend. "That's Yura," the book quotes him saying, "and he'll die instead of me. We've got to take care of him." Komarov then burst into tears. On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior "a sudden caprice," though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board. Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn't open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day's launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov's chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast. All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn't make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov's wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying. When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence "picked up [Komarov's] cries of rage as he plunged to his death." On the Internet (89 cents at Amazon.com) I found what may have been Komarov's last words: Listen to Komarov as the Soyuz capsule began to fail Some translators hear him say, "Heat is rising in the capsule." He also uses the word "killed" — presumably to describe what the engineers had done to him. Americans Died, Too Both sides in the 1960s race to space knew these missions were dangerous. We sometimes forget how dangerous. In January of that same year, 1967, Americans Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire inside an Apollo capsule. Two years later, when Americans landed on the moon, the Nixon White House had a just-in-case statement, prepared by speechwriter William Safire, announcing the death of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had they been marooned or killed. Death was not unexpected. The Nixon White House prepared this letter in the event that American astronauts did not survive the Apollo 11 mission. NARA The Nixon White House prepared this letter in the event that American astronauts did not survive the Apollo 11 mission. But Vladimir Komarov's death seems to have been almost scripted. Yuri Gagarin said as much in an interview he gave to Pravda weeks after the crash. He sharply criticized the officials who had let his friend fly. Komarov was honored with a state funeral. Only a chipped heel bone survived the crash. Three weeks later, Yuri Gagarin went to see his KGB friend. He wanted to talk about what happened. As the book describes it: Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe, either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block's echoing stairwells. The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the carefree young man of 1961. Komarov's death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. At one point Gagarin said, "I must go to see the main man [Brezhnev] personally." He was profoundly depressed that he hadn't been able to persuade Brezhnev to cancel Komarov's launch. Shortly before Gagarin left, the intensity of his anger became obvious. "I'll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I'm going to do." Russayev goes on, "I don't know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face." Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. "I told him, 'Talk to me first before you do anything. I warn you, be very careful.' " The authors then mention a rumor, never proven (and to my mind, most unlikely), that one day Gagarin did have a moment with Brezhnev and he threw a drink in Brezhnev's face. I hope so. Yuri Gagarin died in a plane accident in 1968, a year before the Americans reached the moon. Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony's book is Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (Walker Publishing 2011); Yaroslav Golovanov's interview with Yuri Gagarin was published in Komsomolskaya, Pravda, June 11, 1989. Venyamin Russayev's stories about Gagarin and Komarov appeared in 2006 in Literaturnaya Gazeta and were republished on several websites. www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/18/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage?sc=fb&cc=fp
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Post by glengael on Apr 19, 2011 14:31:49 GMT
Fashion By Paul Galvin Saturday Apr 16 2011
When is a jumper not a jumper? When it's a dress, that's when. Yes, men of Ireland -- and beyond, as I gather this column is now being read from NYC to Sydney -- it brings me no particular pleasure to tell you that all those years of jumper wearing have been a sham.
Those early childhood memories you hold so dearly of mommy telling you to lift one arm and then the other, as she stuffed your pudgy arm down the sleeve of an itchy woollen Aran pullover, are not what they seem.
Pullover? How apt! It was a pullover all right, moms. Ye pulled the wool over our eyes. Ye didn't dress us, ye cross-dressed us! I need to phone my counsellor.
In the name of research, I searched for a definition of the word 'jumper'. There are three, two of which are pretty straightforward. Only in the convoluted lexicon of couture could a word as common as jumper mean something completely contradictory.
The word in a sporting context couldn't be more straightforward: Jumper -- one who jumps. Mechanics the world over are in no doubt that a jumper is one half of a pair of leads used to start a car engine. They haven't been duped into using them as earrings.
In a fashion context, it has to mean something entirely opposed to what it should: Jumper -- a sleeveless dress worn over a shirt. Excuse me while I question everything I thought I knew.
Maybe my American aunts were right all along: it's sweaters I've been wearing all these years. After all, a sweater is a crocheted or knitted garment worn over the upper part of the body. As opposed to one who perspires a lot.
Whatever it was I was wearing this week, it's not entirely my style. Jumpers or sweaters are a bit boring for my liking. The navy, fine-gauge, woollen hooded pullover is very cool, though. Made by Oliver Spencer and stocked exclusively in one of my favourite stores in Dublin, Indigo & Cloth, the fabric and fit make it something I would definitely wear.
Indigo & Cloth is located on South William Street in a basement that's quite easy to miss. It took me a while to locate it, but I suspect that's just how the owner Gareth Pitcher likes it.
Stocking exclusive labels and attractive to a certain type of customer who values well-made, unique clothing, this is not so much a store as a space; a real New York-style boutique with a minimalist appeal and a selection of great magazines, books and mini-zines to browse or buy -- it's one of those stores where shopping is an experience. They also cater for women with labels such as Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair and Nude Johansson, a women's line from ACNE.
Like ACNE creator Jonny Johansson, Oliver Spencer is remarkable in that he's a self-taught tailor and designer. For me, that gives clothes and a brand a certain appeal. Indigo & Cloth likes to champion unique labels that have an individuality and independence that sets them apart. A bit like this independent boutique itself. And I'd like to champion them for that.
Spencer is a British designer whose tailoring and craftsmanship makes his clothes feel like garments; well-constructed and durable. If there's a difference between a piece of clothing and a garment, then this jumper is it. For me, a garment is a really authentic and traditional piece of clothing.
A good mate of mine who likes his threads and knows his brands advised me years ago to buy a John Smedley jumper. I never did. I should have.
Smedley is another British designer in the traditional mould making polo shirts, shirts, cardigans and pullovers using very fine merino wool and jersey. The merino wool in the polo shirt is a fabric so fine that you hardly feel it on you. I love the colour, though polo shirts aren't really my thing.
What can I say about the oatmeal cardigan and floral shirt? I could be eaten for breakfast wearing that. Though the colour of the cardigan is nice, florals are not really my thing.
I have many cardigans and have worn them for years. I'm not a fan of woollen ones, however, as I like a slimmer silhouette. They're versatile and can work with many different looks. I've gone right off them in the recent past, though, and started wearing shirts buttoned at the top and open at the bottom over T-shirts and vests.
It's funny in fashion how you can wake up one morning and cringe at the thought of wearing something you loved going to sleep. I'm sure cardigans will make a return soon. It's a fickle business.
The 1980s weren't a great time for jumpers. I remember wearing some awful creations when I was young -- woollen ones with ridiculous patterns -- though I remember a few decent ones too, such as a grey sweater with 14 on the front that I wore back to front, so I had the number on my back.
Then there was a red-and -grey one, which was a little like an Arsenal jersey. Urban Outfitters and Topman do sporty, college-type sweaters which are cool but difficult to wear in Ireland. When do you wear them? They're quite warm and carry prints and slogans, so they need to be worn as outerwear in order to be seen. The trouble is, our winters can be too cold to wear them without a coat and any decent summer's day we get is too warm for them.
They're a real symbol of Americana culture, which I'm a fan of, and they look great in reds, navys, greys and orange. I like to wear them with layers, as they are usually cuffed at the waist and can ride up your back. Long T-shirts or striped vests layered underneath really add to the look. Spring is probably the most suitable season to wear them, but they're tricky in my experience.
Speaking of tricky experiences, writing this piece was quite a voyage of discovery. We young Irish lads were reared wearing jumpers. Our mothers dolled us up into our very first jumpers when we knew no better. We grew up thinking they were the norm. We took off our school jumpers every evening and threw on a jumper to go play in. We watched our dads throw on his work jumper every morning.
Saturday came and we used our jumpers for goalposts as we played soccer for hours. Then Sunday morning came. Dad threw on his Sunday jumper, I threw on mine and off we went to Mass. We stood among the masses and there was no shortage of more jumpers in the chapel.
So let me figure this one out. Jumpers are actually dresses. Sweaters are in fact jumpers. And pullovers? That's just a word our mothers made up to justify the lies.
- Paul Galvin
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Post by Mickmack on Apr 19, 2011 17:50:45 GMT
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