A snippy Kipper

Vignette, [old] York, St Helen’s Square, Saturday lunch-time.

A lady is passing out flyers denouncing UKIP. As, of course, is her democratic right — provided the leaflet is clean, decent, has an imprint, and fulfils the legal requirements. You take one or leave it.

Not good enough for the convinced Kipper who was loudly denouncing here and all her works. Offensively.

It was he, not she, who was blocking the pavement, and making a scene.

___________________________________

Where have I seen  similar phenomenon before?

Well, many times. Many, many times. [Thank you, Dame Celia. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.]

It all began in the Congo Civil War of the early 1960s. The Irish government made one of its first forays into international peacekeeping and despatched a batch of troops to join ONUC.

On 8th November 1960 a platoon of the 33rd Battalion were set upon by a Baluba party. Nine Irish soldiers died. Only eight bodies were recovered immediately.

I remember the parade and the crowds in Dublin’s O’Connell Street — nothing would be seen like it until JFK came to town.

There is nothing queasy about Irish humour at its broadest. It hasn’t really recovered from the excesses of Swift’s satire.

So, “Baluba” went into the Irish political vocabulary — specifically it meant the “culchies” (itself a Dubliner’s derisory term for “agricultural” country folk) who annually turned up at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fhéis to the despair of the polished urban hierarchs.

I hereby declare many Kippers are also “culchies”, and — as seen at their worst last Saturday in York, akin to “Balubas”

In gob-smacked admiration of …

… well, the Irish Times.

Malcolm is on record for his weekly indulgence in Fintan O’Toole’s A history of Ireland in 100 objects — this week we were well into the the Fourteenth Century, with the Anglo-Norman period sliding gently into the time of the “Old English” (as they were in Malcolm’s school history books).

These wee mannikins (left) are one of the seventeen illustrations in the Waterford Charter Roll and are, O’Toole says they are:

the earliest image … of the medieval mayors of Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.

Adding a neat analogy:

Eamonn McEneaney of Waterford City Museum calls the charter roll “the mediaeval equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation”, designed to “flatter the king, add weight to the legal arguments and keep those listening to the mayor’s presentation focused on the facts being elaborated”. As an exercise in verbal and visual persuasion, the roll is a brilliant early example of targeted advertising. It did the trick: the king restored Waterford’s shipping monopoly.

Extra kudos there for the “a” in what even the OED prefers as “medieval”. Doubles all round had the compositor managed “æ” (on a Mac key-board it’s option+apostrophe).

But that’s not all …

The daily dose of info-amusement comes on the main editorial page in the form of An Irishman’s Diary (except, of course, when it’s just as happily An Irishwoman’s Diary). This is always essential reading — Malcolm has a couple of acquaintances who start here, then knock off the Crosaire crossword, before proceeding to the “real” news.

Good as it consistently is, the Diary reaches a new level when Frank McNally has the by-line. As yesterday:

A History of Ireland in 100 Questions.

Here’s Malcolm’s 101, Q&A:

What are ye coin reading this tripe for?
Get ye onto that hotlink straightaway!

An’ sure enough, if ye had, ye’d have been enjoying something of a gentle brain-teaser as you tried to spot the source of many of them. Apart from the commonplaces, you’d have got:

23. Are ye right there, Michael?

25. Captain Boyle: An’ as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question – what is the stars, what is the stars?

26. Joxer: Ah, that’s the question, that’s the question – what is the stars?

27. Boyle: An’ then, I’d have another look, an’ I’d ass meself – what is the moon?

28. Joxer: Ah, that’s the question – what is the moon, what is the moon?

As well as (by Malcolm’s quick count) three from Yeats, the same from De Valera, two from Percy French (you got the easier one above), one from Christy Brown (the predictable County Clare one) and many more. So, Frank, which version of How Are Things in Glocca Morra? runs in your head — Dick Haymes? the Broadway cast album? Petula Clark (the 1968 movie)? even Sonny Rollins (though that was pure instrumental genius)?

Ray Houghton’s goals feature strongly (and properly: UEFA 1988 — England 0, Ireland 1; 1994 World Cup — Ireland 1, Italy o). The Offaly goal in the dying seconds of the 1982 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is there, too, if you know where to find it. For Malcolm, though, the gem is either:

24. Is it about a bicycle?

or

69. How do Jacobs get the figs into the fig-rolls?

Somewhere in between is the essence of Dublin, and of Malcolm’s addiction, into its sixth decade, to the Irish Times.

Lenihan & Turner

Today’s Irish Times is unmissable for all the usual reasons.

Across the front page strap is the promise (redeemed in the Weekend Review) of an interview with Martyn Turner — one of the most acidic political cartoonists in the business — followed by two whole pages of Turner’s greatest hits.

Fortunately, they are there also on line.

Politicians in general are an unappreciated breed, some more so than others. Few deserved it more than the treatment Turner extended to the late, grating Charlus [sic] Haughey. As below. +

 

Also on that front page is a finely-honed piece by — predictably — Miriam Lord, The Brian Lenihan I Knew.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum?

Well, yes — up to a point, and since it’s Miriam on the day-job … her opener gets it spot on:

Minister for finance in the middle of a massive economic crisis. He had cancer. He wanted to do his job. What he didn’t want was sympathy.

He made one demand of his opponents: “Aggressive intervention!” They were not to hold back.

They didn’t. The minister made it easy for them to forget

She also sniffs the prevalent whiff of sulphur:

The Lenihans have been with us for as long as we can remember, with their unique brand of political soap opera. Never dull, often controversial, always different.

Only at the conclusion of this beautifully-written piece does she drop a most-telling anecdote:

Brian wanted to be leader of Fianna Fáil. But when the opportunity came at the chaotic end of the last government, he botched it.

During that infamous Galway Fianna Fáil think-in last year, we sat in the hotel lobby and had a long conversation.

There had been much talk about him mounting a challenge. We could see he was still thinking about making a move, trying to talk himself out of it, but not convincing either of us.

Finally, he put down his glass of red wine. “For f***’s sake, I’m dying!” he blurted out.

That’s nearly as good a finale as Cabaret gave Sally Bowles, so:

I made my mind up without really lyin’
When I go, I wanna go like Brian.

Brian Lenihan (1959-2011)

The death of brian Lenihan, aged just 52, is sad, but anticipated.

The Da, also Brian Lenihan, was a familar, gaunt figure around Leinster House and Irish politics in Malcolm’s time in Dublin. At that stage (the end of the De Valera era) Da was in the Seanad as one of the Taoiseach’s Eleven, and regarded as a coming man.

Sure enough, ever since there has been a Lenihan on and close by the Fianna Fáil front pew: two Brians (the Da and the son) and now brother to continue the tradition. The Lenihans have a well-earned reputation for cfoxy cunning, which has frequently been their undoing.

No-one would wish a job like the Finance portfolio, as it has been these last years, on anyone. Lenihan carried on with it — and for the last two years while he battled the cancer that killed him. That is a double mark of courage. His final political achievement was to be the only FF candidate to carry a seat in the recent General Election.

There will be the usual “heart-felt” tributes to Brian Lenihan, many from those who hated his guts (and, until this moment, made few pretences about that. Not now, but at some stage one might question whether his continuance at Finance was better than any confidence lost by his deserved earlier resignation.

If “Fred Goodwin” and “Susan Bor” somehow connect close enough to be worthy of 18,000 Google hits (to which we have now added yet another, then whether Lenihan’s mind was wholly on his day job should also be.

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho!

The magic of Disney is to take an old, hackneyed tale, and add a populist twist. It’s a formula which has been successful since the first full-length toon of 1937: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Yes, folks: that’s the proper spelling of the title.

The knack there, apart from the archetypal mix of schmaltz and scary, …

Aside, trivia from imdb:

Was the first of many Disney films to have its premiere engagement at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. At the end of the film’s initial engagement there, all the velvet seat upholstery had to be replaced. It seems that young children were so frightened by the sequence of Snow White lost in the forest that they wet their pants, and consequently the seats, at each and every showing of the film.

… was giving the persons of restricted growth individual characters through the shorthand of naming them. According to the movie trivialists, several dozen names were debated for the iconic Seven.

Which brings us to the present ConDem cabinet, that compote of failed PR snake-oilers, interior decorators and private health hucksters. It takes a nano-second to recognise  Snooty, Sneery, Baldy and Dozy in this batch.

It is moot whether Theresa May (who has swanned through a less-troubled year at the Home Office, something unprecedented in recent history) should audition for Snow White or Queen or the Witch — but isn’t it somehow appropriate that her maiden name was Brasier? Either way, should Snooty fall under the proverbial bus (or, more likely, under the increasing displeasure of his own back-benches) May is regarded as worth a punt in the leadership stakes.

And then there’s Grumpier

The feastdays of “Saint Vince” are long since over and done.

Yet, the suspicion remains that some shreds of the honest man linger in the den of rogues. That he has survived in the Cabinet this long testifies to a low threshold of embarrassment. He clearly is the left man in the right job in the wrong government.

His interview for today’s Guardian should be seminal, going far beyond the ConDem mantra that it’s all the fault of the previous tenants:

He said: “We have had a very, very profound crisis which is going to take a long time to dig out of. It is about the deficit, but that is only one of the symptoms. We had the complete collapse of a model based on consumer spending, a housing bubble, an overweight banking system – three banks each of them with a balance sheet larger than the British economy. It was a disaster waiting to happen and it did happen. It has done profound damage and it is damage that is going to last a long time.”

Some of us have been saying much the same, in different contexts, ever since, in 1962, Dean Acheson noted that Britain had lost its Empire without finding a rôle. C. Northcote Parkinson had anticipated Acheson by five years, noting that colonial bureaucrats proliferated as colonies reduced, and proposing that one day British admirals would outnumber British ships.

Recent posturings in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya trebly underline the persistence of all that. Even so, the military machine demands more submarines, bigger missiles, larger aircraft carriers and glossier medal-encrusted uniforms.

Vince’s torpedo

One bit bites the ConDem hand that feeds him:

It is about the deficit, but that is only one of the symptoms. We had the complete collapse of a model based on consumer spending, a housing bubble, an overweight banking system – three banks each of them with a balance sheet larger than the British economy.

Deep breath.

If there was a single moment in the banking crisis when the whole thing went pear-shaped for Britain, it wasn’t the implosion of the US sub-primes. Even Northern Rock (destroyed by its link with Lehman Brothers) was containable. It was when the Irish Government guaranteed, in totality, deposits in the Irish banks. The knock-on was instant — the Conservative opposition (until then, arch-deregulators) and Sneery-the-putative-18th-baronet loudest in demanding the British government follow suit.

A crisis of over-production

Where western capitalism has been supremely successful is in the production of capital. That has been over an extended period when economic growth in the Western economies has been sluggish. All that loose capital had to go somewhere. It went into property speculation. Therein lies Vince’s unholy trinity of consumer debt, ghost estates and bust banks.

Many of us, too, saw the germs of this disease in the de-industrializing of Britain. The Thatcherites reckoned Britain didn’t really need to produce things: it was the service economy that mattered. Buy in the cheapest world markets, sell at a profit to a home market (financed by credit-cards), wax fat on the difference.

Now Vince recognises that game is well and truly up:

He predicted the impact on people’s lives will not come primarily from government spending cuts, but the squeeze in living standards caused by world prices and a 20% devaluation of sterling against other major currencies.

Without questioning the growth forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, he stressed the uncertainty of external factors. “We cannot predict what is going to happen in the eurozone, and how that is going to impact on us, and we cannot predict what is going to happen to oil prices.

That looks like a draft of ConDem Apologia #2.0: it’s all the fault of those pesky world markets. A year ago Gordon Brown was derided for that: now it’s handy-dandy:

Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

All-in-all, let’s be grateful for Vince as a national monument. If there is any hope of curtailing Sneery, the Mad Axe-Man, Vince is it. Who else in this present Cabinet of Dwarfs would venture to voice the K-word:

“What is not often acknowledged is that there is a lot of flexibility built into current policy. The main element of flexibility is in monetary policy and the second is the basic Keynesian stabilisers. That is the way the government is functioning. We are not trying to maintain budget balance come what may. If the economy slows down, the deficit temporarily has to rise to take account of cyclical change, flexibility is built in.”

You almost want to believe him.

Confession of the day

Fianna Fáil minister Conor Lenihan has conceded defeat in Dublin South West. “Unfortunately we are going to lose both seats here,” he told RTÉ television. “It’s not entirely a dishonourable place to be. Clearly the tide is out for Fianna Fáil in Dublin and naturally 15% is not a party that’s going places,” he said.

On the Irish Times election blog (@ 14.36)

Not wholly wrong there, Conor. You may not be going anywhere. The rump of the Soldiers of Destiny are heading for opposition (and the rag-bag of history?).

Ireland: election imminent?

Those of us outside the Pale will have to wait until Monday morning for the on-line edition of the Sunday Business Post.

David Cochrane, at politics.ie, has a preview:

Here’s the perfect political storm:

• Cowan is already at the end of his rope after that disaster of a radio interview;
• the potential for a massive uplift in the cost of Irish government borrowing (and a further dredging of ratings towards “junk bond” status) looms.

If the Fianna Fáil TDs, with or without the nod-and-wink of several cabinet members, pull the plug, and go for a leadership election, that leaves the Greens and those “independents” with serious problems. Is this the time to bale out? What hopes of a FF revival are there left in the bottom of Pandora’s box?

The moment the political grip slips, the opposition parties will be after a vote-of-confidence. If there is a new FF leader nominated as Taoiseach, there must, in effect, be one.

So, if the election is not forced in October, when? With a further stiff budget promised (it’s those government bonds again!), and as we go into the gloom of winter, from here on things can only worsen for FF. If such a thing is conceivable.

May we live in interesting times?
Better believe it!

Sinn Féin’s election: the dog that didn’t bark?

The Irish groan and shout, lads,
Maybe because they’re Celts,
They know they’re up the spout, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
Trouble is on the way.

Thank you, Noel: don’t call us, we’ll call you.

At Slugger and elsewhere (politics.ie, and now at Mick Fealty’s other home, comment is free, for examples) there is some serious debate going on (provided one tiptoes round the usual exchange of ritual insults) about:

• why Sinn Féin fell so far short of expectations in the Irish General Election

and

• where they go from here.

The general consensus seems to blame the disaffection of the Republic’s electorate with all things to do with the Black North, but identify Gerry Adams’s performance in the also-rans debate as a special factor. Those pesky dogs, the critics and pundits, are snapping at his heels.

Malcolm feels that this debate has a long way to go.

It wasn’t only SF that underperformed: all the radical parties suffered similarly. So that we all know what we’re talking about, here’s the meat:

FF 78 (-3);
FG 51 (+20, neatly restoring their position in 2002);
Labour 20 (-1, and still going nowhere);
PD 2 (-6, and effectively wiped out, except as an adjunct to FF);
Greens 6 (no change);
SF 4 (-1, after barking big, a very small bone);
and the odds-and-sods 5 (-9).

It isn’t quite a two-party system, but it’s getting pretty close.

Now, in hindsight, the outcome should not greatly surprise. The electors were asked if they liked prosperity, a housing boom, full employment, and, after a nanosecond of thought, decided “It’s the economy, stupid”.

Seán O’Faoláin, writing in 1969, noted:

time was when common words on every lip in every Irish pub were partition, the civil war, the republic, the gun. The vocab of the mid fifties and sixties was very different — the common market, planning, growth, rates, strikes, jobs, education opportunities or why this factory failed and that one flourished.

That’s why the RoI moved on, while too many in NI didn’t, and still haven’t. Forty years on from O’Faoláin, the “vocab” of SF and anyone else trying to occupy the radical left, north or south, needs to adapt again.

He didn’t recognise it at the time, but Malcolm, sitting in the public gallery of the Dáil of the early ‘60s, might have observed O’Faoláin’s change: the old men were still challenging each other about which side they and their fathers had fought in 1922: the younger sparks (and newspaper columnists) were rolling their eyes, and backing the Whitaker Plan.

That produced a step-change in the growth of the Irish economy, directly accountable to successfully attracting foreign investment and dismantling the protection racket that was the Irish economy. Exports, especially to the European market, rose; and the Irish
economy continued to grow throughout the 1970s (and began to free itself from dependency on Britain). Despite two oil crises in 1973 and 1979, high public spending kept the supply side of the economy buoyant, with the GDP growing at 4% a year. The cost was a structural deficit.

By the 1980s, though, the RoI was back in the mire. GDP growth fell back to 1.5% a year. Unemployment soared: by 1987 it reached nearly 17%, and emigration was back. Worse still, this emigration was mainly of the educated and talented. A consensus emerged between government, employers and unions: the new policy was tax-breaks to suck in the investment, expenditure on education and training, and industrial harmony. By 1992, some 37% of US investment into the European market was coming to Ireland. By 2003 unemployment was down to 1.5%, and 65% of the population were working.

So, in 2007, with Ireland one of the top-four burgeoning economies, the last thing on the popular agenda was “change”. But:

… the present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself.

And what then?

There should be an opportunity for any party which can cobble a convincing programme to cope with after-the-boom, when the appetite for “prosperity” is sated, when the economy turns. At that point, the place to be is outside the tent pissing in. Which party is capable of that posture?

On the other side of the fence, SF, the Greens and the Trots are the only parties who have been left off the roundabout of power all these years (though both SF and the Greens would love to be invited aboard). Therefore they have been the only parties credibly capable of arguing for “change”.

And that is why Malcolm’s reading of Adams in the also-rans debate was somewhat different. Adams seemed not to have, or didn’t know, an economic policy. He vainly tried to shift the argument to social policy. (SF’s social policy looks somewhat threadbare too, but Malcolm leaves that thought aside.)

There is a case to be made for a new social programme: social inequality is growing; there is a two-tier health service; Ireland (pace the UN Development Programme) has the highest level of poverty in the Western world, behind only the US; a fifth to a quarter of the population are functionally illiterate; and Ireland is observably becoming a less tolerant society. (Malcolm, generous to a fault, omits corruption from that list.)

The opportunity is going to be there. Malcolm despairs that any party, least of all the factional, and provincial party that is SF, is presently capable of grasping it.

As in 1957, with Lemass, and 1987, when Haughey effectively picked up the policies of Garrett Fitzgerald, reform will probably be left to opportunist politicians. It will come slowly as the mainstream parties apply balm and healing salve, just enough for their own survival, declaring that it is all in “the national interest.”

When Truman Capote complained about a bad review, André Gide replied with a proverb (now a cliché) from the Arabic: The dogs bark but the caravan moves on. It presently looks that the SF caravan, at least south of the border, is going nowhere.

Doublin yer mumper

Just when we all thought the thing was done and dusted, a cloud no bigger than the High Court’s hand…

It seems that the hot money is on the Ahern Government continuing with the rump of two Progressive Democrats brought on board by offering Seanad seats to departed brethren. That makes 80 seats. The Independents, who never like short Dails, will tend to support a Fianna Fáil government anyway. Two of those Independents are former FF members: Jackie Healey Rae in Kerry South, and Beverley Flynn of Mayo. Ahern and FF are thus one further seat short of a bare majority. The two Dublin Independents, Finian McGrath in North Central and Tony Gregory in Central, are both making frantic signals that they wish to snuggle up to FF. FF can ease the wheels of democracy further by having a Ceann Comhairle from FG or (more likely?) Labour. So that’s fixed.

Except …

There’s a story in today’s Sunday Tribune that might disturb this arithmetic:

[Beverley] Flynn sued RTÉ over broadcasts in 1998 reporting that she had assisted tax evasion by setting up bogus non-resident accounts while working for National Irish Bank. She lost the High Court case in 2001 and costs estimated at 1.5m were awarded against her.

According to court documents filed by RTÉ last week, she owes the station 2.84m in taxed costs, including interest, for the longest-running libel case in Irish legal history.

And RTÉ are now filing to have her declared bankrupt. An undischarged bankrupt is not eligible to be a TD.

How many shades of green?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malcolm pauses to reflect upon the record of CRH:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mind where you tread!