President Higgins says Anglo tapes do not reflect the views of the Irish people
President Michael D Higgins speaking at the Community garden party yesterday at Aras an Uachtarain said the tapes do not make for easy listening. David Drumm pictured above right who’s voice was on the tapes.
“This week, voices from the past have been heard which serve to highlight behaviours and attitudes at the very root of that failed speculative model,’’ he added. “They do not make for easy listening.’’
Mr Higgins’s remarks, made at a community garden party in Aras an Uachtarain, drew loud applause from those present.
He said the Irish people, who had borne the brunt of a financial crisis not of their making, were shocked and dismayed that a culture of greed and recklessness emerged in some of our institutions – a culture that was neither in keeping with our core values as a nation or, indeed, our current convictions or determination to move to a new chapter in our history.
“The Irish people, who are rightly recognised for their fortitude, work ethic and courage, will take us out of this present crisis,’’ Mr Higgins added.
“The authentic voice, spirit and values of Ireland will be restored and lead to what is important – a real economy that provides sustainable employment for all and a just and ethical society that allows all its citizens to fully participate and achieve their life potential.’’
That was the message, he said, that Ireland’s sons and daughters, all Irish people, wanted to go out at home and abroad.
“And I know that informed foreign opinion will recognise that the real story from Ireland is not the aberrant voices we heard this week but the heroism of its people who are determined, not only to get through this crisis, but to secure a future that is just, prosperous and sustainable and offer that achievement to the people of Europe and beyond,’’ he added.
Mr Higgins said it was encouraging to see from the attendance such strong reassurance that the great Irish community spirit was alive and well and that so many people were showing such resilience and continuing to work to keep community and family at the heart of society.
“It is something that I have encountered again and again during my time as President and long may it continue and may it bear fruit for you and the people you care for,’’ he added.
Mr Higgins said the transformative power of communities working together was immense. Their combined strength in restoring, rejuvenating and reimagining connections with committees, celebrating and retaining all that was best about their past while participating confidently in a modern and globalised world was so impressive.
Ireland, he said, was in a decade of important commemorations. “It is a time to remember that a knowledge of our history is intrinsic to the creation of active and responsible citizenship and to the building of communities and a society that are fair, inclusive and participative,’’ he added.
Mr Higgins said that, this year, Ireland was celebrating the courage, endurance and historical human rights significance of the Dublin lockout of 1913.
“If we are to flourish in the present and future, we need to fully understand when and how things worked in the past,’’ he added.
Ireland’s weakest link was Finger’s Fingleton of Irish Nationwide
Irish Nationwide was lauded as it lent money to the high-rolling developers of this country. Pound for pound Ireland’s worst financial institution – Irish Nationwide Building Society – ended up costing the taxpayer €5.4bn.
Led by the goateed banker Michael Fingleton and chaired by professor of banking Michael Walsh, it exuded power during the boom.
Its members cheered the society from the rafters as it lent millions to high-rolling property developers – even while it relentlessly pursued small borrowers who fell into arrears.
How a small building society ended up costing the Irish taxpayer so much money is forensically examined in the best-selling Fingers by Tom Lyons and Richard Curran, which was published by Gill & McMillan.
The Anglo Tapes provide an insight into how, in a world of banks gone mad, the Irish Nationwide Building Society always maintained its own special place in the toxicity league.
As the crisis deepened, it was obvious to international investors that the society was finished.
It would take the State some months after the bank guarantee to realise this error to the taxpayer’s cost.
John Bowe (JB), as he often does in the Anglo Tapes, sees the crisis much clearer than Ireland’s authorities. In this extract from the Anglo Tapes he discusses with an unnamed English Fund Manager (FM) Irish Nationwide in the months before the bank guarantee.
FM: I guess our fear is really that they [Irish Nationwide] are the weakest link and that if something bad happens to them then the rumours spread… so it impacts your bonds, your spread, you know, and I know it’s totally difference but it’s just an Irish name.
JB: No, no, I get it… I think you’re right, I think the Regulator had it on his radar and my guess is, my personal opinion without insight is, that they will look to do something within the next six months to sort of stabilise, I suppose, the threat and consolidation I think can happen.
FM: Do you think the Irish Nationwide management, from what you’ve read about them and things, get it, because we’ve met them and, to be honest, things are terrifying.
JB: Well when you said management I was a little bit lost there, I wasn’t sure who you were talking about – I mean they have a very strong personality in their CEO and it’s difficult to see what the management team is beyond that, so if you’re asking me does Mr Fingleton get it? I don’t know, I really don’t know. You know the guy is in his 70s.
FM: Yeah, he’s pretty old.
JB: Pretty old, he’s a very wealthy man… and he’s got an inordinate amount of money paid into his pension scheme – he’s looking to cash out, that would be my view. I’m not expressing an Anglo view, it’s just a personal view.
FM: As is my view on this, I guess a lot of people probably share that view.
JB: So my guess is that might be one where the Regulator takes a stronger hand.
Irish drinks industry strategy relies on recruiting young drinkers to their brand’s
The aim of sponsorship is to ‘piggyback’ on sport’s positive images
“There are 2,000 Irish people in hospital beds today due to alcohol use.”
Since proposals to gradually phase out sponsorship of sports events by the alcohol industry resurfaced a few weeks ago, the response has been entirely predictable.
Senior sporting figures have been lined up to warn of the dangers of removing sponsorship by alcohol companies, as though it were all going to disappear tomorrow and the world of sport would collapse forthwith. As usual, alcohol companies are positioning themselves as philanthropists. Yet the reality is that sponsorship helps secure a whole new generation of drinkers.
As part of its 2009 investigation into the conduct of the UK alcohol industry, the House of Commons Health Select Committee obtained access to internal marketing documents from both producers and their advertising agencies. The documents were analysed by Prof Gerard Hastings.
His report’s title, “They’ll Drink Bucketloads Of The Stuff”, says it all about the alcohol industry’s aims. For example, internal documents from the drinks company Carling show that the aim of sponsorship was to “Build the image of the brand and recruit young male drinkers”. Carling summed it up thus: “They (young men) think about 4 things: we brew one, and sponsor two of them.”
The internal documents were equally cynical about recruiting young women. One brand described its marketing as somewhere between “MySpace and High School Musical”. The latter was a highly popular Disney Channel movie aimed at six- to 14-year-olds.
A major study of 6,600 adolescents in four European countries, published in December 2012 by Amphora, an initiative of the European Commission, found that “Alcohol-branded sport sponsorship influences alcohol consumption among adolescents. Exposure to sport sponsoring can predict future drinking.”
As Patrick Kenny, a DIT lecturer in marketing, has pointed out, one of the reasons that sponsorship is important is because consumers generally have a more benign interpretation of it than they have of advertising. Sponsorship is perceived to be generous and supportive, whereas advertising is seen as motivated by selfish reasons. People’s defence mechanisms are low when it comes to sponsorship, and high when it comes to advertising.
Alcohol sponsorship of sport is but one piece of the jigsaw when it comes to our dysfunctional relationship with alcohol, but it is an important one. The aim of sponsorship is to “piggyback” on the positive image generated by sport, so that the brand is associated with vibrant health, excitement, team spirit, and community.
A study of 462 Irish teenagers by Deirdre Palmer and Dr Gary O’Reilly found that the average age of starting to drink was 13.4 years, so you are talking about a very vulnerable and impressionable group. Many young people have an established drinking habit by 15 which mimics the adult pattern of binge-drinking. The younger people are when they start to drink, the more likely they are to experience harm.
Astronauts wives club lift lid on grim reality behind the smiling shuttle launches
Astronaut wives above, Mrs. Jane Conrad (Peter’s wife), Mrs. Barbara Cernan (Eugene’s wife), Mrs. Leslie Bean (Alan’s wife) celebrating Apollo 12 launching. Hamblin, Houston at the Conrad’s house. November 16, 1969
The Astronaut Wives Club declared themselves ‘”Proud, happy, thrilled’ as their husbands jetted into space. But a new book has shed light on the fraught reality behind the television smiles.
They were the unsung heroines of the space race, quintessential American housewives expected to stand by their men, smile to order and declare themselves “Happy, proud and thrilled” as their husbands were strapped aboard towering columns of explosives and rocketed to glory.
Poised, serene and flawlessly groomed, they were feted as the epitome of domestic perfection, undergoing a transformation from ordinary military spouses to the First Ladies of Space alongside husbands whose bravery in the face of death-defying risks and lunar ambitions knew no bounds.
Yet behind the thrills, the glamour, the celebrity status, ticker-tape parades, glossy magazine photo-shoots and receptions with monarchs and presidents, life for the wives of Nasa’s pioneering Mercury, Gemini and Apollo era astronauts was also a harrowing, fearful and at times scandalous existence.
Chronicled for the first time in a new book, The Astronaut Wives Club, the story of the women behind Nasa’s elite space explorers of the 1950s to 1970s shows that it was not just the menfolk who were expected to have the Right Stuff.
Under pressure to play a cool hand and live up to the gold standard the public and Nasa expected of them, some had to turn blind eyes to their husbands’ infidelities, sweep domestic strife under the carpet and put on shows of marital harmony “like Stepford Wives” to protect the astronauts’ images and careers.
“We all tried to be so calm and so cool and everything,” said Jane Dreyfus, who divorced from the third man on the Moon, the late Pete Conrad, in 1988. “But we were a far cry from Stepford Wives.”
Some turned to tranquilisers – or, in the case of Susan Borman, wife of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, alcohol – to help them cope with the extreme dread of seeing their husbands sent into space, or the trauma of seeing marriages slipping away.
Only by forming a sisterhood they called the Astronaut Wives Club – motto “Proud, Happy, Thrilled” – did they pull one another through the challenges and anxieties of being married to America’s first space heroes.
“If you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home,” said Barbara Cernan, the wife of Gene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and the last man to walk on the Moon.
Mr Cernan, addressing the book’s official launch event in Houston, choked back tears as he admitted: “If it weren’t for the wives who committed their lives to what we were doing, I don’t think we would have ever gotten to the Moon.”
The space race began in October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first ever man-made satellite, infuriating the US and deepening Cold War hostilities.
Two years later, on the orders of President Dwight Eisenhower, Nasa selected its very first astronauts. Known as the Mercury Seven, all were military test pilots with genius-level intellects. Tasked with beating the Soviet Union to putting a human in Earth orbit, they were seen by their country as models of integrity and valiant ambassadors of anti-Communism.
Thrust suddenly into the spotlight, the wives were considered by women across America as “seven glorious women they could look up to and emulate,” said author Lily Koppel. Their family lives were spread across the pages of Life magazine, and their home-making skills, fashion choices, hairstyles and lipstick colours scrutinised and copied by those who saw them as perfect cookie-cutter American wives and mothers without a hint of domestic turbulence.
Yet of the 30 astronauts recruited into the Mercury Project and the successor Gemini and Apollo programmes – which ultimately set man on the Moon in 1969 – the marriages of only seven survived intact.
One of them was over before Mercury even began; Gordon Cooper’s wife Trudy had left him in 1958, four months before Nasa selected him for the programme, because, as one of the other spouses would reveal, “he was screwing another man’s wife”. Driven by the prospect of riding an Atlas rocket into space, and realising he needed a “loving wife” to fit Nasa’s requirements of him, he persuaded his wife into a reunion.They split for good in the late 1960s.
The marriage of Mercury Seven astronaut Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space, and his wife Louise – nicknamed “Saint Louise” for her composure – was among the few that survived, despite dalliances that included him attending swingers parties and picking up a prostitute in a Mexican border town during a Nasa trip to California prior to his 1961 mission.
A livid John Glenn, a fellow Mercury Seven astronaut who went on to become the first American to orbit the Earth, was called on by Nasa to talk a newspaper out of running the story and incriminating photographs.
“As John saw it, any astronaut who couldn’t keep his ‘pants zipped’ threatened to ruin everything and squash America’s opportunity to beat the Russians, not only in space but on the grounds of moral superiority. They all had a responsibility to the country to be the wholesome heroes they were sold as,” said Ms Koppel.
Mrs Shepard had feared prior to her husband being selected for America’s debut space flight that his penchant for women could ruin his career. Until he gave up his womanising, she believed “he’d be stuck on earth” – yet when others asked why she tolerated his fooling around, she told them: “Because I’m the one he really loves.”
Many of the wives knew Cape Canaveral and its resort of Cocoa Beach as “that harlot of a town”, where a number of the astronauts kept a “Cape Cookie” – a girlfriend on the side.
Don Eisele, who flew aboard Apollo 7 in 1968, was served with the first “space divorce” by his wife Harriet upon his return, having endured his infidelity Cape Cookies for years out of a sense of patriotic duty.
Whenever she had voiced her fears to him that he was being unfaithful, he told her she was crazy. “If I’m crazy, I should see a psychiatrist,” she told him, only for him to answer: “You can’t. I’ll lose my job.”
The wife of Apollo 1 astronaut Gus Grissom, who died in a fire during a launch pad exercise at Cape Canaveral in 1967, knew that he was seeing other women but tried to blot it out of her mind. “I’m not saying that Gus didn’t have girlfriends.I just tried not to think about those possibilities,” she admitted.
When Pat White, the widow of Apollo 1 victim Ed White, tried to take an overdose after his death, the Astronaut Wives Club rallied around to help keep the news from the public. She went on to remarry, but killed herself in 1991, still haunted by what happened.
Buzz Aldrin could be “heartbreakingly cold” towards his first wife, Joan, to whom he once gave a monkey as a Christmas present. The monkey would bare his teeth, make obscene gestures and dance around mocking her. “Buzz, I’ve had it. It’s either the money or me. Somebody’s leaving,” his wife told him. She was met with a silent look from her husband that appeared to say “Well, what are you waiting for?” Their marriage ultimately crumbled following his return from the Moon in 1969, when he sank into depression and alcoholism.
Neil Armstrong, who preceded Aldrin on the lunar surface, was “emotionally unavailable” to his first wife. “It was hard for them to come home,” said Faye Stafford, the former wife of astronaut Tom Stafford, who orbited the Moon on Apollo 10 in 1969. “Who could ever compete with the Moon? I was lucky if I could come in second.”
Many of the astronaut wives cooperated with the book. “I see them as America’s first reality stars. Their country looked to them to hold up the public relations arm of the early space programme and the feeling was that if they did not, their men may not go into space or to the Moon,” said Ms Koppel.
“Their story is kind of The Right Stuff meets Mad Men, with a little bit ofDesperate Housewives thrown in. Decades have passed and they finally felt they could be more honest with themselves and the public about their experience.”
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