Politicians and Irish developers will be paid up to €100m?
ITS A SCANDAL?
Enda Kenny admits little hope of a return of AIB €17bn; USC cut for ‘squeezed middle’ will be just 1%
George Redmond, (90), former assistant Dublin city and county manager leaving court after the hearing.
The taxpayer will now pay up to €100m in third-party legal costs resulting from the Mahon Tribunal to developers and politicians because of the George Redmond judgment, the Sunday Independent can reveal.
Substantial and previously unforeseen legal costs, running to “tens of millions” will now have to be met by the taxpayer as the full impact of the December 19 Redmond High Court judgment emerges.
A number of politicians and developers – including former Justice Minister Ray Burke, developer Michael Bailey and businessman Joseph Murphy Junior – were previously found to have not cooperated with the tribunal.
In a number of cases, those findings have now been “quashed” on foot of the Redmond judgement. The Sunday Independent has learned that in the days before Christmas, the Mahon Tribunal wrote to parties named in its report informing them that adverse findings against them have been withdrawn “with immediate effect.”
Previous rulings refusing the paying of legal costs for those individuals, who include prominent developers and former politicians, have also been overturned. One affected developer alone is known to have amassed legal costs of at least €11m, which will now have to be paid for by the taxpayer.
While the Government had expected to spend €64m on third-party legal costs, that figure could now top €100m, senior Government sources have conceded.
The news comes as Taoiseach Enda Kenny has strongly indicated that Ireland will not receive any retrospective bank bailout from Europe for the 2008 saving of our banks.
Mr Kenny, speaking at a Christmas briefing for political correspondents, ruled out any potential return on the €32bn poured into Anglo Irish Bank and strongly indicated that Government will seek to sell AIB rather than continue to seek EU funds.
“Clearly our banks were in a very different position then, than they are now. The Government’s target here is to find out how can you get the best return for the taxpayer?” Mr Kenny said.
“So you have two options here; one is an application for recapitalisation, and that is where Ireland is mentioned specifically in that decision (June 2012), and the other is the second option that has grown now because of the improvement in the bank situation.”
The taxpayer is now facing a monumental additional legal bill after the Mahon Tribunal withdrew all adverse findings against Mr Redmond, a former assistant Dublin City manager, in the High Court on December 19.
The withdrawal arose from a settlement in the High Court of his long-running action against the inquiry. Mr Redmond was awarded his costs, which are estimated to run into several million euro.
“Arising from the settlement of proceedings between the tribunal and Mr George Redmond concerning the third interim report the findings have been quashed. Current members of the Tribunal have completed a review of those findings. Accordingly, it is their decision that the said findings of hindrance and obstruction be withdrawn with immediate effect,” the December 22 letter from Tribunal solicitor Susan Gilvarry states.
Given the tribunal has withdrawn its 2002 third interim report, which dealt primarily with Mr Redmond, people who previously had costs applications rejected by the tribunal will now have their costs paid by the State.
The latest development also follows Mr Murphy’s 2010 Supreme Court challenge which found the Tribunal was not entitled to refuse costs on the basis of findings of obstruction and hindrance made by it against him.
Among those believed to been contacted by the tribunal include some former politicians, Bovale developers Michael and Tom Bailey and Hollystown Golf Club owner Oliver Barry. The Sunday Independent understands more than half a dozen letters were sent out by the Tribunal to affected parties.
The Tribunal letter added that an “order providing for the payment of your costs subject to taxation by the Taxing Master of the High Court has been made”. Political concern is growing that the decision may now open the door for a number of other high-profile tribunal figures to recoup the entirety of their legal costs.
Mr Burke’s 2004 submission for costs of €10m was rejected in its entirety by the tribunal on the grounds that the level of his non-cooperation with the tribunal had been in breach of his legal obligation to cooperate with and assist the tribunal.
The Department of the Environment said: “The decision of the courts in respect of Mr Redmond is a matter for the Tribunal in the first place. The full findings of the decision will be examined by the department.
There is already a provision in the 2015 estimates for the department in respect of the ongoing costs in respect of the Mahon Tribunal.”
Two leading members of the Dail’s spending watchdog have said they will demand answers from the Department of the Environment as to the potential costs facing the taxpayer.
John McGuinness, PAC Chairman, said Department of the Environment officials will be called before the committee to explain their response to the fall-out of the Redmond judgment.
Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr McGuinness said: “Now that this has been stated by the tribunal, I would be concerned from a public accounts perspective, that we need to now examine the full scale of this. We need to bring in the accounting officer, who is the Secretary-General of the Department of the Environment, and discuss with him the issues and the potential exposure to the State.”
PAC vice-chairman and Government TD John Deasy said: “I think the taxpayer wants to see the end of costs in relation to tribunals. The department needs to be asked for an update as to the impact of recent court cases. It needs to be discussed as to how it will minimise costs to the taxpayer. The very least we need to find out what the liability is going to be and where the money is going to come from.”
Meanwhile, the Government is considering reducing the 7pc Universal Social Charge (USC) rate for all those earning over €17,000. There is a growing desire to reduce the “penal impact” on those low-to-middle-income earners of between €17,000 and €70,000.
Fine Gael and Labour backbench TDs have increasingly raised their concerns about the need to further reduce the impact of the hated charge ahead of the general election.
The Government is set to use a ‘spring statement’ to outline its USC plan for Budget 2016, which will then be unveiled next October.
THE 30 YEAR SECRET DOCUMENT REVELATIONS?
Border rethink raised during 1984 NI talks
Secret government documents from 1984 reveal Margaret Thatcher proposed “simply” moving the border in a bid to resolve the crisis enveloping Northern Ireland.
The talks preceded the signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement. However, the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald warned the radical change would be a “fatal mistake”, adding that they had managed to lower expectations of unifying Ireland and the move could reignite the public’s hopes of a 32-county state.
The revelation is contained in secret government files released in Dublin’s National Archive under the 30 year rule.
During heated exchanges at a critical summit in the run up to the Anglo Irish Agreement, Mrs. Thatcher argued that giving Dublin an official role in the governing of the region would plunge it into civil war.
Venting fears that Northern Ireland was heading toward a Marxist state, the Conservative Party leader told her Irish counterpart in the November 1984 talks that resolving the crisis could mean altering the border.
“She wondered if a possible answer to the problem might not simply be a redrawing of boundaries,” records an official note of the top-level meeting.
But Taoiseach Mr. FitzGerald immediately rejected the apparent offer.
“What we have achieved at present is a lowering of expectations,” he said.
Mr FitzGerald said the Irish government had worked on dampening down hopes among some for an end to Northern Ireland, as it was constituted.
Most people had accepted “unity was not on” in the short term.
The Taoiseach, and Fine Gael leader, pressed Mrs Thatcher for a new “system” of governing Northern Ireland, based on agreed policies between Britain’s secretary of state and an Irish Government minister.
Where they could not agree, decisions would be appealed to the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach, he said.
The unionists would say you are giving up your Constitutional claims but you are coming across the border and don’t really need the claim. That would put us well on the way to civil war.
Margaret Thatcher’s reaction:-
The Prime Minister said Catholics in Northern Ireland, who made up 40% of the population, argued that they owed no allegiance to London “but they took the government’s money”.
They thought they were different to any other minority and were “drawing on resources which the Republic did not provide,” she told Mr FitzGerald.
“The nationalists feel that all they have to do is to wait.”
She accepted there were problems with Catholics getting jobs and admitted some areas – pointing to Lisburn as an example – “would not accept Catholics”.
Mr FitzGerald said there had been agreement on an Irish Government role in running the region, adding that he could not ask the nation to give up its territorial claim over Northern Ireland without such a deal.
But Mrs. Thatcher insisted: “It smacks too much of joint authority. That was definitely out.”
During one sharp exchange, as she argued that Westminster was answerable for Northern Ireland, Mr FitzGerald retorted that “for 50 years they had not regarded themselves as being answerable”.
“That was partly the reason for the present trouble,” he said.
On a suggestion from the Taoiseach of a Belgium-style solution – a federal arrangement under a monarchy- Mrs Thatcher said she “had not ruled it out, even though it would be attacked by unionists as an effective repartition.”
She added: “History shows that the Irish, whether the Scottish-Irish or the Irish-Irish, don’t like to move. However, they all seem to be terribly happy to move to Britain.”
Mrs Thatcher also complained that there was too much public sector in Northern Ireland that was costing London £2bn a year – with no wealth creation.
Later that day, in a press conference, Mrs Thatcher gave her infamous “out, out, out” declaration, when she rejected three options put forward from the Irish for a solution to Northern Ireland – Irish unity; a two-state federation; or joint authority.
It was later reported that Mr FitzGerald thought her behaviour was “gratuitously offensive”.
Also revealed in the secret papers?
Ireland’s entry into the European Union was delayed by half an hour in the last days of 1972. A delay meant the official ratification papers for the EEC – as it was then – only arrived with President Eamon De Valera 30 minutes before the official signing ceremony. The documents were found to be drawn up in a manner that was “repugnant to the Constitution” and needed to be re-written. The country’s European status technically remains open to question.
In 1984 Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald wanted a national lottery set up to end the Irish State’s involvement in illegal activities overseas. Paddy McGrath – who ran the Irish Sweepstakes which operated on the black markets in the US, UK and Canada – offered to set up a lottery and end his internationally notorious gambling operation. The Irish Government took donations from the Sweep to help fund the country’s cash-strapped hospitals.
During talks in November 1984 the papers reveal Margaret Thatcher’s “incomprehension” as to what exactly Irish nationalists wanted. Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald urged Mrs Thatcher to tackle alienation of nationalists in Northern Ireland. He said there was “hard evidence” of bias in the justice, security and policing systems in Northern Ireland while the guns of the British Army’s controversial Ulster Defence Regiment were being used to “bully” Catholics. “They cannot fly the flag of their own nation in their own country” he said.
Also during those talks in November the Taoiseach proposed having different local police services across Northern Ireland to tackle the “policing problem”. He cited the example of Brussels having 46 different forces. He also foresaw “Provisional Sinn Féin” emerging as the “legitimate voice of nationalist Ireland” if constitutional nationalism was seen to be getting nowhere.
The Irish Government lavished Zimbabwean premier Robert Mugabe with gifts worth thousands of punts during his visit to Dublin in 1983. Among the centrepiece offerings from the then Taoiseach to Mr Mugabe and his first wife Sally Hayfron were a Waterford Crystal bowl, a vase, Irish linen and flowers. Gifts were also presented to President George Bush Senior and his wife Barbara during their visit.
And during a state visit to Washington, Garret FitzGerald presented the then US President Ronald Regan a book about Irish plants. Curiously it was exactly the same book he then later gifted to President Regan during his state visit to Ireland.
The lunatics world have taken over the social media asylum
Twitter and Facebook have become playthings of the authoritarian left, and they’re welcome to both of those suppositions?
Anna Stoehr drew national attention in the US after her attempt to create a Facebook account
It feels as if the world has gone mad lately. Everyone’s angry about everything all the time. Not just a bit cross, but palpably, blisteringly furious, and any spark can set it off.
Some would blame the recession – but it can’t be that, because we’ve been poor before, much poorer than we are right now, and we didn’t go utterly crazy as a result. Though perhaps the only reason we managed to stay sane back then was because we didn’t have social media.
In the same way there’s a theory that no two countries ever go to war when both have a McDonald’s restaurant, it may well be discovered in future that a country’s mental well-being is directly linked to the proportion of its population which is on Twitter. The more tweeters there are, the more messed up a country becomes.
Because there’s no getting away from it. Tweeting does strange things to people.
There was another illustration of that last week when, after the awful crash in Glasgow which left six people dead, a young man in England posted a tasteless joke about it.
What was worrying was not the joke; sick humour will always be with us. Far more disturbing was the reaction which followed, as the man became the target of other social media users, who not only circulated his photograph and address online, but wished that he would “get done in”, or that someone would “shove a knife up your fat a*******”, or “smack him with a cricket bat”.
Curiously, it was the joker himself who ended up being investigated by police, rather than those calling for his murder. The result is that another young person’s life has potentially been ruined for one small act of stupidity, but no one cares because they’re too filled with righteous anger to see their own intolerance.
Of course, there are always limits to free speech, and it’s extraordinary how so many still don’t seem to understand that things said online are public not private statements.
Otherwise normal people, who presumably hold down respectable jobs and have friends and families, suddenly become monsters when they go online, sending hundreds of abusive and defamatory tweets to, or about, other people. Here they are, with all this astonishing technology at their fingertips, and all they can think to do with it is to act like raging morons.
That each tweet must be shorter than 140 characters probably encourages them to do so, by forcing users to reduce their thoughts to the crudest caricatures. Subtlety dies from lack of space.
Add alcohol to the equation, and trouble’s bound to follow. People may say hateful things when drunk, but they don’t usually have a megaphone on hand through which to shout, and Twitter is the ultimate megaphone. There’s no filter. Just type, then send.
The young woman jailed in England for sending abusive messages to feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez had generally been drinking when she lost the lost the run of herself.
In fact, she even admitted that she’d done it again one night after being released. She came in from the pub, turned on the laptop, and was soon embroiled in a spat with some randomer who’d annoyed her, presumably involving LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS, because that’s a feature of these exchanges too.
In the past, when you rolled home the worse for wear from the pub in the early hours, the most embarrassing thing you could do was drunk text your ex. Now the whole world beckons on Twitter. It’s like having your own private media organisation. It’s compulsive.
There have been studies done on this, which suggest there’s something addictive about social media. Each time someone “likes” a post on Facebook, or retweets your comment on Twitter, it’s the equivalent of a little shot of adrenalin into your bloodstream. You feel empowered and validated. You become like Sally Field, gushing as she wins an Oscar: “You like me, right now, you really like me.”
Or hate you. It’s all the same to the needy. Each provides a quasi-narcotic kick of delight.
And when that addiction goes political, it makes for an even more toxic cocktail.
Eoghan Harris recently wrote a prescient piece on groupthink, in which he described the process whereby mobs begin to think and act as one person, and outsiders are demonised and hounded.
That’s as near perfect a description of Twitter as it’s possible to find, and this year was flanked by two textbook examples.
The first was Pantigate, when anyone who expressed the slightest reservations about same-sex marriage was howled down as a homophobe and pelted with hashtags and slogans until they either submitted to the mob or were driven offline.
The second was the mass trolling of IRA rape victim Mairia Cahill. Some of that came from pathetic individuals, drinking too much, their lives out of control, who are able to misuse Twitter and Facebook and convince themselves that sending hundreds of messages insulting a rape victim counts as iconoclasm or, more laughably, fearless investigative journalism. These are on a level with the misfits who think it’s funny to taunt Madeleine McCann’s parents about their missing child.
Far too much of it, however, was cruelly organised by supporters of Sinn Fein/IRA, which, like the hard left in general, have a social media presence hugely out of proportion to its actual support in the country, which it uses to intimidate opponents into silence.
Consider it a lesson in what life will be like if they ever do get an actual, as opposed to a Twitter, majority.
In their hands, social media has become a plaything of the authoritarian left, as they casually disseminate libels which, were they repeated in print, would have those who wrote them fired whilst likely bankrupting any publication foolish enough to reprint the lies. On social media, it doesn’t matter, because there are no consequences.
Unlike mainstream media, Twitter doesn’t accept responsibility for what its users say and do, and you can’t sue every paranoid loser with a smartphone and nothing better to do with his time than use it to stalk those against whom he has a grudge. The lack of consequences has coarsened public discourse and brought something ugly into the political landscape.
There’s nothing that can be done about that. Censorship doesn’t work online, and, even if it did, it would be wrong to throw away the anarchic, democratic openness of social media simply in order to put manners on a few socially inadequate dingbats. Whether there’s any point engaging with it is the real question.
Increasingly it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the lunatics have taken over the asylum and should be left to squat there in their own filth. They may mistake it for the real world, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to share the same sad delusion.
Making a trip to Mars is cheaper & easier than ever
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE “BALLISTIC CAPTURE” METHOD
When sending spacecraft to Mars, the current, preferred method involves shooting spacecraft towards Mars at full-speed, then performing a braking maneuver once the ship is close enough to slow it down and bring it into orbit.
Known as the “Hohmann Transfer” method, this type of maneuver is known to be effective. But it is also quite expensive and relies very heavily on timing. Hence why a new idea is being proposed which would involve sending the spacecraft out ahead of Mars’ orbital path and then waiting for Mars to come on by and scoop it up.
This is what is known as “Ballistic Capture”, a new technique proposed by Professor Francesco Topputo of the Polytechnic Institute of Milan and Edward Belbruno, a visiting associated researcher at Princeton University and former member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In their research paper, which was published in arXiv Astrophysics in late October, they outlined the benefits of this method versus traditional ones. In addition to cutting fuel costs, ballistic capture would also provide some flexibility when it comes to launch windows.
Currently, launches between Earth and Mars are limited to period where the rotation between the two planets is just right. Miss this window, and you have to wait another 26 months for a new one to come along.
At the same time, sending a rocket into space, through the vast gulf that separates Earth’s and Mars’ orbit, and then firing thrusters in the opposite direction to slow down, requires a great deal of fuel. This in turn means that the spacecraft responsible for transporting satellites, rovers, and (one day) astronauts need to be larger and more complicated, and hence more expensive.
As Belbruno told Universe Today via email: “This new class of transfers is very promising for giving a new approach to future Mars missions that should lower cost and risk. This new class of transfers should be applicable to all the planets. This should give all sorts of new possibilities for missions.”
The idea was first proposed by Belbruno while he was working for JPL, where he was trying to come up with numerical models for low-energy trajectories. “I first came up with the idea of ballistic capture in early 1986 when working on a JPL study called LGAS (Lunar Get Away Special),” he said. “This study involved putting a tiny 100 kg solar electric spacecraft in orbit around the Moon that was first ejected from a Get Away Special Canister on the Space Shuttle.”
The test of the LGAS was not a resounding success, as it would be two years before it got to the Moon. But in 1990, when Japan was looking to rescue their failed lunar orbiter, Hiten, he submitted proposals for a ballistic capture attempt that were quickly incorporated into the mission.
“The time of flight for this one was 5 months,” he said. “It was successfully used in 1991 to get Hiten to the Moon.” And since that time, the LGAS design has been used for other lunar missions, including the ESA’s SMART-1 mission in 2004 and NASA’s GRAIL mission in 2011.
But it is in future missions, which involve much greater distances and expenditures of fuel, that Belbruno felt would most benefit from this method. Unfortunately, the idea met with some resistance, as no missions appeared well-suited to the technique.
“Ever since 1991 when Japan’s Hiten used the new ballistic capture transfer to the Moon, it was felt that finding a useful one for Mars was not possible due to Mars much longer distance and its high orbital velocity about the Sun. However, I was able to find one in early 2014 with my colleague Francesco Topputo.”
Granted, there are some drawbacks to the new method. For one, a spacecraft sent out ahead of Mars’ orbital path would take longer to get into orbit than one that slows itself down to establish orbit.
In addition, the Hohmann Transfer method is a time-tested and reliable one. One of the most successful applications of this maneuver took place back in September, when the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) made its historic orbit around the Red Planet. This not only constituted the first time an Asian nation reached Mars, it was also the first time that any space agency had achieved a Mars orbit on the first try.
Nevertheless, the possibilities for improvements over the current method of sending craft to Mars has people at NASA excited. As James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said in an interview with Scientific American: “It’s an eye-opener. This [ballistic capture technique] could not only apply here to the robotic end of it but also the human exploration end.”
Don’t be surprised then if upcoming missions to Mars or the outer Solar System are performed with greater flexibility, and on a tighter budget.
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