To nama or not to nama

We all have mammies and daddies and uncles and aunts but not all of us have ones that were in a position to set aside large portions of their incomes in pension funds or to buy shares in banks or large businesses. Mine certainly didn’t. I remember being called back to my company HQ in Bandon during the late nineties to hear a talk about how we could all buy Additional Pension Contributions. My colleagues and I listened as the MD and HR Manager spoke enthusiastically about how tax efficient it would be. Then one of my colleagues spoke. He told us how he was being paid so little by this same company that he qualified for Family Income Supplement and he asked how he could ever be able to afford APCs. In fact he was loosing money by simply listening to this presentation as in being called back to his base he had lost a days on-site allowance and would still have to pay for B&B and his meals.

I have been reading and listening to whatever has come my way regarding the question of whether NAMA as proposed by the government is a good idea. I find myself beginning to draw some conclusions at last. Central to my thinking on this issue is the motivation of Fianna Fail and the senior civil servants involved. Why would they be doing what they are doing? I do not believe for one moment that this government gives a toss about the general population as such. They base their thinking on the consequences for the people they know, the people that make up their immediate circles, the people they consider to be their type of people.

That group is a very limited group of people indeed. Brian Cowen is not an ordinary man in the street no matter what the propaganda would have us believe. You simply don’t become Taoiseach unless you have spent a lifetime associating with the people who decide who becomes Taoiseach. He may well honestly believe otherwise but his thinking has been formed by people within Fianna Fail. So it will make no sense to him to do anything that does harm to his people. And his people include the top civil servants within each of the government departments. The Department of Finance oversaw the debacle of the last five years. The Secretary of that department must shoulder his share (and I assume it’s a man) of the blame for the failure to plan and/or regulate the Irish Economy over the last ten years.

Just listen to the representatives of ISME or IBEC or ICTU and it will soon become apparent that all these speakers represent vested interests. They speak from a particular and limited perspective. If they didn’t, they would not be allowed to represent their constituency. It is no different for any of the political parties. They represent the types of people who vote for them, who support them, who want them to see things from a particular perspective. Each in their own way represents sectoral interests within the Irish population. Ideally this would result in some degree of compromise. Some degree of common interest. But not in Ireland. And the reason is that over the years of the Celtic Tiger and under Bertie Aherne all the sectoral interests were bought off with borrowed money. Money that it was assumed would be earned in future years and on which tax would be paid.

Therein lies the problem. The assumption of future earnings was a false one. Or at least the assumption that it would be earned within a relatively short period of time was a false one. Basically lots of people bought goods and services today with the expectation that they could pay for them tomorrow. Now they can’t. The people from whom they bought the goods and services also bought goods and services from suppliers on the assumption that they would be paid for them. They used money provided by the financial markets. The financial markets got their money from people who assumed that all these people would be able to earn enough to repay their loans with interest. These people were the same people who bought the APCs and thought they could retire at 55 into the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed and that that lifestyle would be paid for by a never ending supply of double income families.

I have come to the conclusion that the same people who wanted me to buy APCs that I couldn’t afford in the 1990s are the people who have supported FF for the last 15 years, are the people who populate FF and the banks and the upper echelons of the civil service. They are the people who will do everything they can to protect their pensions, their investments, their money. They will never accept that they have made investments which have not returned a profit and that they must take the loss. They do not accept that they had an individual responsibility to ensure that those who managed their investments did so wisely. They wanted profits and their greed blinded them to the risks involved. They did not ask the question they should have asked. These are not doddery auld ones. They made their money in business, in their careers. They had a responsibility to police their own investments.  Yet they did not. All they saw was the dividend popping through the letterbox.

These same people will ensure that the rest of the Irish people pay them what they believe to be their due. These are the same generation of people with the off-shore bank accounts. These are the Pee Flynns, Liam Lawlors and Charlie Haugheys of this world. And they are the people whose friends, sons and daughters, and in many cases ex-colleagues, are making the decisions. I have come to the conclusion that Nama is designed to protect the assets of this class of people. The rest is propaganda. The scary thing is that I’m not sure there is anything the rest of us can do about it.

Truely inspirational stuff

Do yourself a favour and watch these two lectures on http://fora.tv/

The first talk is given by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson and he is certainly one of the most inspirational speakers I have heard in a long time. His talk is entitled  Cities and Time and focuses on the issue of sustainability in urban environments. If you had any doubt about what is possible in terms of dealing with the major issues facing countries like Ireland listen to this man talk about what his city IS doing and HAS already done. Try not to be depressed by any comparisons with our own government or that we probably get the politicians we deserve but try and accept that if we change our thinking, our expectations as individuals, things can and will change. Really uplifting stuff.

Toastmasters should just marvel at the delivery.

Unfortunately, as the poster of a goat on the back of my kitchen door says we are so far behind we think we’re in front. This is what being in front looks like on sustainability, on energy conservation, on green tech, on transport, on housing, almost everything.

The second is a lecture titled A Theory of History with an Application and is given by economist Paul Romer. These are the issues we need to be thinking about as we face into another Lisbon referendum.

Anyway do something with your mind that stretches it a bit and watch these lecture. Then move on to the rest of the stuff that Fora.tv has to offer.

Ok, Phase One Complete

OK, well done everybody. Phase one is now complete.

We have reduced Fianna Fail to second place. We have exposed them as a rural, backward looking party. We have shown them to be in complete denial as to the part they played in the current economic meltdown. The voters now accept that the Celtic Tiger years were by and large a wasted opportunity. An opportunity wasted by Fianna Fail. We have reduced their capacity to pull strokes and do favours which was their modus operandi and as such their only way of gaining popular support. They are not much use for anything now as they have no capacity to think creatively.

They will now implode (I hope) due to the loyalty to leader thinking. Most of the top dogs were complicit in the Wasted Years so there are few, if any, Soldiers of Destiny to replace Cowen with. The idea of finding a new Duce would cause such internecine warfare as to make the description of “political party” redundant. They will become known as the Cumman Wars. Maybe Michael Martin as he got sidelined rather early.

The next step is to force a general election and consolidate the gains. In addition we need to get the various extreme elements on the left and right to bugger off and not be so stupid as to believe that there is any fundamental change in the slightly left of centre position of the Irish people. The votes for socialists are just our way of saying “I’m serious. I’ll really vote against you” but don’t represent any real ideological position. As many FF commentators have said the real challenge will arise when the budgets on councils have to be agreed. But I think Council Managers have the final say anyway so steady as she goes.

Phase two involves using the years of experience gained negotiating deals in national agreements and in the North to strike a balance between spending cuts and spending supports that will help people through this crisis without placing a burden on future generations through excessive borrowing. At its core it needs to ensure that people proposing spending in any area are made responsible for the outcomes. Extreme Socialists rarely have to take responsibility for their ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’ ideas. Everybody having enough to get by is not a long term option. They really do need to get real, study some behavioural economics, cost their proposals and while still holding to their long term goals, seek to bring people along with them rather than adopt ‘holier than thou’ attitudes. You will be dumped next time round unless you can get people on board.

The negotiating must continue after the general election with a view to getting that balance right between FG and Labour. That combination did the job cleaning up the FF mess before and should work better given the stronger support for Labour. I think Enda Kenny might have the management ability to do the business but FG need to get the message out that charisma is OK up to a point but the leadership style in cabinet is what counts. Right now we need people with organising ability. We need people to tell the truth.

You can’t run an economy like Big Brother or Britains Got Talent. People have to be allowed to express doubts about policy and it has to be OK for them to give something support in the short to medium term. Dump the PR people. We know spin when we see it. Communicate, explain, persuade but don’t try to pull the wool over our eyes. Tell us that your doing a deal and what your trading. We can take it. Explain that if people what more of your policies then they have to vote for you but twenty per cent of the vote gets you twenty percent of the policies. But above all expose the vested interests were you find them. Even your own.

If the weekends results mean real change then the people of this country have to take responsibility for the governments they elect. If they choose to vote on the basis of policies that are too good to be true then they will suffer long term. As a nation we now have to pay for the bouncy castles and the garden decks, the SUV’s and plasma screen TVs. The bill is now due and we must pay with effort, be it physical or intellectual. We must not only earn our keep but pay the ferryman too. He brought us here because we told him to. And Chris De Burg did warn us.

Institutional abuse

The congregations are involved in a certain degree of double speak. The reality is that they are currently involved in cleaning up their own mess and I’m not sure they are best qualified to do that. It’s the same type of double think that the government is subjecting us to. Fianna Fail created the Irish version of economic crisis and try to tell us that they are best qualified to fix it. The Catholic Church created the society that led to many of the social ills we are now faced with. We are a people who suppress their real emotions and overlay them with a facade of being great craic. We put on the face of friendship while we shaft you for every penny you’ve got. We are by and large a dishonest people.

This is a unique moment in Irish history that future generations of historians and social scientists will discuss in academic institutions as case history. We are being asked to make a collective decision to change the way we view the world. We are being asked to take individual responsibility for the society in which we live. We are being asked to acknowledge that in the past we have abdicated responsibility for the way we lived our lives in return for social acceptability. We are being asked to accept that we paid a high price for our collective absence of conscience.

The pursuit of the quiet life is fraught with danger. It leads to frustration as we internalise our rage at injustice, at unfairness and at abuse of power and privilege. Maybe it was the survival technique of a conquered people! Maybe. But having won our independence as a nation we have yet to assert that independence as individuals. Only when we have done that and risked the conflict over ideas and beliefs that must follow will be be truly free to place that independence at the service of society itself.

The churches and the political parties know well that if we were to think for ourselves we would soon realise that we have no need of church or party. It is in their own best interest to embed a sense of belonging as something we need to have to be happy. The last thing they want us to realise is that we can survive as individuals, that we can choose the degree to which we cooperate with others in the common interest and that there is a big difference between management and control. Complex societies need to be managed but they don’t need to be controlled. In reality complex societies are to a large extent self organising and have been since man first walked the earth.

I’m not speaking here of any ‘ism’ or any collective homogeneous belief system. I’m speaking of honestly held ideas that are defended and fought for in the clear expectation that we may be proved wrong. This is not consensus but a willingness to compromise in the common interest. A common interest that changes with the seasons, with the years and with the evolving nature of human existence. Central to this is a willingness to change. We need to foster a willingness to embrace change among our people.

To do this we need to challenge vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We need to educate our children towards change, towards innovation and learn how to manage transition so that it is not a threat but a challenge and a socially enjoyable thing to be involved in. To be stuck in the past needs to become a source of embarrassment. To be called a traditionalist needs to become an insult. To refuse to grow needs to be seen for what it is: a characteristic deserving of our pity.

Angels in my Hair by Lorna Byrne

A surprisingly enjoyable book.  Certainly thought provoking. Never mind the angels but the description of the life the author lived. Very tough, very tough indeed. The innocence and simplicity of the writing while endearing I found a little annoying but certainly written from the heart. Do I believe that she can see and communicate with angels? Certainly. No reason not to. In my own spiritual practice they are referred to as Deva spirits. If you have a belief in any existence beyond the human existence then there must be crossover points or individuals whose gift or cross it is to live life on the edge of both. The mind will interpret the experiences of such a state of being according to its cultural context. In this case: Catholic Ireland. Read between the lines and you will be rewarded by very profound insights into the nature of existance and of good and evil.

Lorna Byrne has an excellent website and obviously has some very good people assisting her. So certainly a force for good and I hope life is easier for her these days. I thank her for the love and solace she has brought and continues to bring to so many people.

A hint to the editors if this book goes to another edition: there is a repeated paragraph in the acknowledgements.

Consider yourself warned

Noel Whelan (whom I consider to be an apologist for Fianna Fail) wrote the following in today’s IT in relation to the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse:

I wonder what our generation’s response will be in 40 or 50 years’ time when our children turn to us and ask: “Where were you in the 1980’s or 1990’s or the early 21st century when these horrible things were going on?”

I will be able to say proudly that ever since I was able to vote I was voting against Fianna Fail. I do not belong, nor have I ever belonged to any political party or grouping, but I have always had an intuitive understanding that Fianna Fail was a dangerous and corrosive influence on Irish Society.

That intuitive understanding may have it’s roots in my fathers unquestioning support for the party, for I always questioned everything and was deeply suspicious and continue to be deeply suspicious of people who don’t ask questions. Even he stopped voting for them a few years before he died. For me it is the purpose of youth to question their parents and while my questions were often ignored, it is a source of great pride to me that I have raised my children to always question, everyone and everything. Such a policy is not without cost. My adultees have constantly questioned my actions, my behaviour, my ideas and continue to do so. It has been the greatest gift I could imagine for it has forced me to modify and change my ideas as the years went by.

Coincidentally, over the last few weeks I have been reading Tom Garvin’s excellent book Preventing The Future and in it you will find adequate explanation of why the abuse was endemic and accepted within Irish society. For example;

Jeremiah Newman, a well-known priest who was later to be bishop of Limerick, was at that time an influential academic sociologist who was close to government. As late as 1962, Newman let the ideological cat out of the bag, writing eloquently in favour of the middle-sized farm family, on the interesting and profoundly non-economic grounds that it produced young men who aspired to be priests. Newman pointed out that the ratio of population to priests had gone from 1,376 to one in 1871 to 558 to one in 1961; the Catholic population of Ireland had declined in that near-century by 23 per cent, but, mirabile dictu, the number of priests had increased by 87 per cent. The beginning of the Second World War had triggered a further extraordinary jump in this ratio.

Sadly, I suspect, and the report into child abuse appears to bear this out, that many were press-ganged into religious life at 13 or 14 years of age. Official government opposition to industrial development created the environment in which people with no religious vocation where left with no option to but to join the orders or take the boat. The clever ones took the boat. It is clear from Garvin’s book that the Catholic Church opposed education beyond the most basic of levels required to produce the required crop of priests, brothers and nuns. Once within the seminary system, the real education could start. Education in obedience to rightful authority (see Spiral Dynamics – Blue).

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo (of the Stanford Prison Experiment fame) tells us what can happen and why it can happen. In his book he deals with “the power of situational forces over individual behaviour”. He examines “research on conformity, obedience, deindividuation, dehumanization, moral disengagement, and the evil of inaction.” As Breda O’Brien notes (also today’s IT) “Brothers, priests and nuns were our siblings, uncles, aunts”.

Unfortunately the system thus created a population resistant to change.

However, back in 1962, the Irish priest was confronted by his real constituency of support, the Plain People of Ireland, and by the ’suspicious gaze’ of the many ’simple people … who were hostile to change of any kind. This situation was to change, but opinion change was to occur at a glacial pace.

These people who were resistant to change were, I believe, largely Fianna Fail voters and continue to be. Fianna Fail voters abhor change. They have benefited from a system of parish pump politics. A system of cronyism and pandering to vested interests that has existed since the foundation of the party. This is a party which was founded from the remnants of those who took up arms against the democratically expressed wishes of the Irish people. Then as now their primary allegiance is to themselves, to their group and to the benefits that arise from gang membership. And that is dangerous for any society.

Thankfully they are a dying breed. Anyone who tells you they have always voted FF and doesn’t think they should be changing now is too stupid to be allowed to vote but that’s in the nature of democracy. Anyone who considers allegiance to the party leader or indeed the party to be sacrosanct is too dangerous to be allowed play with sharpe instruments. Anybody who believes that power for its own sake is the primary objective will be blinded by that power. For FFers winning a seat is on the same level as winning an All Ireland final except that one is real life and the other is a game.

Back in the 80’s when nurses were being laid off left, right and center, an uncle of mine (FF of course) offered to get my wife a job in a Limerick hospital. We refused the offer. Recently a friend of mine (not a FFer) suggested I have a word with Simon Coveney about getting myself a job. I was shocked that such an attitude still existed anywhere else other than FF where at least I expected it and I told him so. I have the faint hope that Simon would have laughed in my face at the suggestion. Such is the slow, glacial, pace of change in Irish Society.

Eamon Gilmore made an interesting comment at a union conference the other day when being pressed about entry into possible coalition with FF. He asked the assembled audience how many ways they wanted FF back in power. And that is the pervasive nature of the beast. The Irish people seem largely incapable of imagining a post Fianna Fail Ireland. Such has been the propaganda machine foisted on the Irish people for almost a century that we have come to believe that feudal concepts of power for its own sake, allegiance to leaders and family dynasties are in our own best interests. Thankfully, as the FF support base erodes, the party is becoming more incestuous as the same families are having to provide more and more of the candidates as seats are handed over to sons and daughters, brothers and sisters in an ever smaller circle of thinking and ideas.

Such is the paucity of ideas that the Fianna Fail mantra that the property boom was not the result of government policy is being repeated over and over again long after everyone has stopped listening. At the last election I tried to discuss the behaviour of Haughey and Lawlor with Michael Martin when HE came to MY door. He just turned and walked away. Deny, deny, deny. The soldiers of destiny can do no wrong in their own minds and that makes them dangerous.

Michael Woods did a deal because the party was scared shitless that the Catholic Church would pull the plug on all the schools and hospitals that successive governments (of all shades) have failed to nationalise and bring under state ownership. In addition the Fianna Fail belief in power and authority forces it to back down in the face of power and authority. They willingly accept in others what they accept in themselves. To challenge traditional authority institutions would create a precedent for others to challenge the very basis of their own existence: to have and hold power.

So what will a post Fianna Fail Ireland look like? Well, I suspect it will follow the model of the more advanced societies. People will take responsibility for their own problems. If something needs to be done, they will form a group to do it. They will seek funding from whatever source it is available by going directly to the administrators of those funds with little or no recourse to politicians. They will no longer go cap in hand to politicians for that which is theirs by right. They will learn how the system works and operate accordingly. Where they believe that systems need change they will lobby to have that change but clear in the knowledge that the politician is simple the means by which the end is achieved. It’s their job and when they do that job well (according to whatever criteria or value system) then they will retain the support of the voters. It’s called a representative democracy. The politicians represents the people who vote for them, not the party to which they belong. We see such a model in Europe where MEP’s form groups based on common goals and negotiated objectives. It’s not rocket science.

We will, in effect grow up and take responsibility for our own lives. The institutions are finally falling one by one. The Catholic Church, the Garda, the Lawyers, the Doctors, the Bankers, the Unions, the Teachers, the Builders have all been exposed as fundamentally human and flawed at that. They got away with stuff because they banded together in order to intimidate opposition and protect their own selfish interests. We now know what happens when we hand over responsibility for our lives to other people. Consider yourself warned!

The weak ties that bind

A little excerpt from the book I’m currently reading is needed to place my point in some context. The book is Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.

It could be argued, in fact, that the entire capitalist system was founded on the strength of weak ties. Economic historians tell us that the rise of capitalism – a complex process that occurred over several centuries – overthrew the feudal economic system.

Spiral Dynamics Irish Style

I was reading today’s IT about the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank and something in an opinion piece by Richard Bruton (FG) struck a cord. Mr Bruton said:

The danger is that, with the state now owner of Anglo Irish Bank, Fianna Fáil will have influence over how much money is recovered from its developer friends who are Anglo’s debtors. It would be unacceptable if these debtors felt they could now get an easy ride because they think they owe the state rather than Anglo Irish Bank millions of euro.

Now that is scary stuff but strikes me as being a perfectly reasonable possibility given what we know about FF in the past. There was also a piece by Patsy McGarry (Religious Affairs Correspondent) about the views expressed by Cardinal Seán Brady regarding the deplorable behaviour of the Bishop of Cloyne, whom he (Brady) still feels is a suitable person to be responsible for child protection.

What is it about the Irish and their institutions?

The Myth of Irishness

I happen to have been born in Dublin a medium sized city on the east coast of an island that goes by the name of Ireland. That is all that’s required to be Irish and that is the extent of my Irishness. I have no sense of pride or indeed allegiance to the country in which I was born. In fact I am experiencing a growing sense of embarrassment.

The stages of student grief

My son is facing an interesting situation. His project group and class mates have gotten real angry with him today. We think it’s because of the changes going on in his college.