Bill Gates sees his faith in Irish recovery & likes it as bond investments soar
Microsoft founder Bill Gates
Microsoft billionaire’s Foundation enjoys Irish success
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is cashing in after backing Ireland’s ability to bounce back from recession.
The world’s richest man is enjoying massive profits after his foundation bought Irish government bonds.
Reports that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made a fortune on his bond holdings.
The bonds have rocketed in value as Ireland exits the EU/IMF bailout and met the terms imposed after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
The report adds that Gates regained his crown as the world’s richest man last week when the Bloomberg Billionaires index rated his wealth at $78.5bn, up $15.8bn in the last year.
The paper says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation owns nearly $20m worth of Irish bonds.
It outlines that at the end of December 2012, it held close to $7.8m worth of Irish 5.4 government bonds with a maturity of 2025, $6.03m worth of Irish 5 government bonds with a maturity of 2020, and $4.14m worth of Irish 4.5 bonds with a maturity of 2020.
The report says the bonds have been a spectacular investment, returning close to 10 per cent over the last year.
The Bloomberg World Bond Index for 2013 rated Irish bonds as the second-best performing government debt as they generated returns of close to 12 per cent for investors.
US investor Franklin Templeton, led by renowned trader, Michael Hasenstab, have also bet heavily on the Irish recovery.
The paper says the Gates investment in Irish government bonds is bigger than its holdings in gilts from other countries.
The foundation lists a $14.5m holding in British government bonds, over $12m in French bonds, $4m in Swedish government bonds and $12.7m in New Zealand government bonds.
Gates has also seen shareholdings in seven Irish public companies soar with those shareholdings are now worth over €23m.
The Gates Foundation owns 61.6 million shares in Bank of Ireland, worth around €18.5m as well as shares in bookmaker firm Paddy Power.
Gates was also a bondholder in Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Nationwide Building Society, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks, according to filings obtained by the Sunday Independent.
The documents showed that the Gates Foundation trust held almost €27m worth of bonds in Irish banks at the tail end of 2006. This included 7.29 million bonds in Anglo Irish and associated entities, which it valued at nearly €8.15m.
The Gates Foundation trust held Irish bank bonds worth €16m at the end of 2007 but latest filings reveal that it no longer holds any bonds in Irish banks.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private endowment fund in the world, with about €28bn in asset earmarked for good causes.
Bad old days and transparency is not water under the bridge for Ireland yet?
Reform and accountability have dominated the nation’s attention recently. We’ve had the Central Remedial Clinic scandal, the City of Culture fracas, the debate about civil service accountability — and now Irish Water’s disclosure that it spent almost €50m on consultants alone in its first year of operation and hired some of these consultants into their organisation.
These stories paint pictures of the kind of behaviour most of us hoped, if not quite believed, were behind us as a country.
Some of the commentary, in particular contrasting Irish Water’s consultant spending with possible cuts in disability allowances, for example, has been exaggerated.
The usual political games are being played following the revelation of just how much this company has cost, and it is clear the public needs to be told what the consultants were doing, and judge whether the money was well spent. But the money has been spent. It’s gone.
Unless the Public Accounts Committee or another body finds otherwise, we must assume these contracts were awarded following a tendering process, and after they are satisfied, oversight of the money has been provided by the executives of the company in a transparent manner, then, essentially, that’s that.
We do need a sense of scale here. Irish Water is a massive endeavour, on the order of €2bn or so.
Set against this scale, €50m, about one-40th of the total company, is not that significant.
The task Irish Water is set is to agglomerate the functions of 34 local authorities very, very slowly over time into one water management company. Reform is clearly not on many people’s agendas in this process.
As reported in December 2013 by Colm McCarthy, local authorities will not have to transfer all of the functions to Irish Water until 2025.
The charges for water start at the end of 2014, however. That pace of reform is clearly not what most people voted for in 2011.
Post-bailout Ireland just might be coming to terms with some of the damaging institutions and practices that led us into the property bubble and collapse, but that doesn’t mean we know what to with them.
The Irish love of quango formation hasn’t stopped since the first days of the Celtic Tiger.
Quangos present a problem for economists. Quangos are free to increase their costs essentially at will, and so have very little drive for efficiency. Because they occupy near monopoly status — remember the threatened ESBstrike on December 16? — quangos can always push increased costs on to the consumer.
And when it comes to water, that consumer would be, well, you.
‘Reform’ is not a policy, nor is it a set of steps to take us from the status quo toward something better.
Using a phrase like “we need reform of institution X” really amounts in practice to saying little more than “we have no idea how to change institution X, but we don’t like how it is working right now. Someone should really do something.”
We elected the Government to reform the Irish policy landscape. With 2014 the only year in which real reform can happen, an articulation of that reform needs to take place now.
Any delay will show the public, and that important subset of the public, the electorate, that the Government is not serious. Electoral carnage will result.
Irish Water should answer its critics. But those critics need to be resourced to discover wrongdoing where it exists, with the powers to directly penalise those who excel only at passing costs on to the taxpayer.
Meanwhile, assessing value for money for the €50m expenditure will be a job to be done by, yes, you guessed it, more consultants!
The Irish republic was to blame for bombs carnage in 1974
SAYS IAN PAISLEY
Ian Paisley has effectively accused the then Irish government of provoking the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, which claimed the lives of 33 people.
The 87-year-old former Democratic Unionist Party leader declared: “They brought that on themselves” as he revisited the standout moments of his political career for a new documentary on his life.
He said he had been very much shocked by the bombings, which are still the subject of controversy. However, he then continued: “But I mean who brought that on them? — themselves.
“It was their own political leaders, who they had endorsed in their attitude to Northern Ireland. At that time the attitude of the southern government was ridiculous.”
He also described the republican mortar bomb attack which almost killed British prime minister John Major and cabinet ministers in 1991 as “a cracker for the IRA”.
In a series of farewell interviews which were full of surprises, Rev Paisley also said that he had been angered by the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, when paratroopers shot civilians who, he said, had been protesting within the law. He had been further angered by attempts at a cover-up and was glad to hear the current British prime minister David Cameron eventually “telling the truth”.
In the 40 hours of interviews conducted by veteran Belfast broadcaster Eamonn Mallie, Mr Paisley also caused amazement by conceding that many of the grievances of the 1960s nationalist civil rights movement were justified.
FUNDAMENTALIST: This represents a stunning turnaround for a figure who took to the streets to confront the movement, which he at the time denounced as anti-British, anti-Protestant and as being mostly a front for the IRA.
But today he says the then unionist government was unfair and unjust in refusing to grant the central civil rights demand of one man, one vote. This was unfair, he said forcefully.
“The whole system was wrong,” he declared in his interviews. “It wasn’t one man, one vote. A fair government is that every man has the same power to vote for what he wants.”
He said the system “was not acceptable, not acceptable at all, it wasn’t justice at all”.
Dr Paisley continued: “Those that put their hands to that have to carry some of the blunt and blame for what has happened in our country.
“If you vote down democracy you’re responsible for bringing in anarchy. And they brought in anarchy and they set family against family and friend against friend. It was bad for everybody.”
He insisted, however, that none of this justified the violence of the Troubles, emphasising: “I don’t believe in killing and never have.”
Although he has moderated his views on some issues, he did not deviate from his strongly fundamentalist attitudes.
Mr Mallie put it to him that he had once accused the Queen Mother andPrincess Margaret, who had an audience with the Pope, of “committing spiritual fornication with the Antichrist.”
Dr Paisley responded: “That was the language of Luther and Calvin and Protestantism and I have no apology to make for being a Protestant.”
He stuck to his statement that he was anti-Catholic but said: “I love the poor dupes who are ground down under that system.”
He would not accept that any of his controversial statements over the years had been provocative or that they had made the Troubles worse.
Dr Paisley’s remarks came in the series of interviews to be broadcast by the BBC from next Monday.
In recent years, Dr Paisley has stepped down from the post of Northern Ireland’s first minister and from the leadership of the Free Presbyterian church which he headed for decades.
He is currently in hospital for tests but in the lengthy interviews he showed no sign of any mental deterioration.
Childhood abuse can slow recovery from depression
Recovering from depression may take longer if a person was physically abused as a child or had parents with addictions, the results of a new study indicate.
Canadian researchers followed the progress of over 1,100 depressed adults. The participants were followed up every year until remission occurred, for up to 12 years.
“Our findings indicated that most people bounce back. In fact, three-quarters of individuals were no longer depressed after two years,” the team from the University of Toronto said.
However, the study found that some people recovered at different rates and ‘early adversities had far-reaching consequences’.
However, the study found that some people recovered at different rates and ‘early adversities had far-reaching consequences’.
“The average time to recovery from depression was nine months longer for adults who had been physically abused during their childhood and about five months longer for those whose parents had addiction problems,” the researchers explained.
They emphasised that while many studies have shown that childhood abuse and parental addictions can make people more vulnerable to depression, these findings ‘highlight that these factors also slow the recovery time among those who become depressed’.
Civilisation library set to open in Ireland
A new library on the history of civilisation is due to open this week.
One of Ireland’s most unusual libraries is set to open this week – with the world being asked to decide what should be in its collection.
The Library of the History of Civilisation is the brainchild of Frank Kennan, who lives in Roundwood House, a remarkable Palladian villa nestled in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom mountains in Co Laois.
After a year long odyssey trying to step outside the maelstrom of everyday news to discover where the human race was headed, he has come up with around 700 books he believes sums up our journey so far.
The collection was helped by a “shocking number of opinions” from guests who come to stay at the house – saved from ruin by the Irish Georgian Society and taken over by Frank and his wife Rosemary in the 1980s.
“There was no one came into the drawing room and said they were a philosopher, but there were an enormous number of philosophers,” he said.
But now he wants to take it beyond the drawing room, and is asking the wider world to help determine the permanent collection.
Finishing touches are being put on a purpose-built library in one of the old grain stores at the rear of the historic house which will house the books.
The library attempts to map out what French philosopher Voltaire described as the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilisation, according to Frank.
But he says years of reading and thinking about civilisation and what it meant led him to less than obvious choices for the project.
“It’s easy to say Newton, Einstein, Dante, Shakespeare, these are books we would all agree on, and the Bible and the Koran,” he said.
“But I think in looking in books, I had a sudden realisation that actually everything is involved in civilisation.
“So books on spices show us spices affected our history, and so did salt and pepper – in terms of trade routes, and taxes, and revolutions.”
Frank said there would be little serious argument about the first 300 or 400 books in the collection, but the remainder will constantly change as civilisation itself changes.
Some will become less important and others will become more so.
“The library doesn’t match most people’s ideas of a library. Books don’t usually get thrown out of a library,” he said.
The quest has left him optimistic about civilisation, he says, despite the chance the human race could “wreck it” with the bomb or climate change.
“I’ve become more optimistic the more I read, the more I think about it,” he said.
“An awful lot of people spend their time thinking the world is getting worse, or we’re facing incredible dangers or we’re going in all sorts of directions and none of them mean much.
“But if you know we are on an upward path, it would stop us worrying, stop journalists writing about the terribleness of the world and talking utter rubbish about the good old days.”
The library is to open this week, and the public is being invited to visit or get in touch to offer their opinion on what should be in – and out – of the collection.
Homes evacuated in Guatemala as lava pours from a volcano
Lava flowing from the Pacaya volcano near Guatemala City has prompted the evacuation of people living nearest the crater, Guatemala authorities said today.
Alejandro Maldonado, director of the National Office for Disaster Reduction, said lava is flowing down one side of the volcano, but he did not say how many people have been evacuated. Local news media report the number is small so far. The volcano has also been closed to tourists.
The National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology says today’s lava flow in some areas is as large as 600 yards wide and 1.8 miles (3km) long.
The volcano just south of the capital city is also registering small explosions and emitting gas and ash.
Pacaya is one of Guatemala’s most active and picturesque volcanos.
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