Support rallies for Sean Quinn is everything that's wrong with Ireland -- we're addicted to local sugar daddies

Sean Quinn

There are many things in Ireland that are popular that I can’t quite get. The government’s insistence on selling off our natural resources to highest bidder, for example. The Saw Doctors. Ray Foley.

But the thing I don’t understand the most also seems to be our biggest problem: the inability to divorce a positive personal interaction with a powerful bigwig, and the egregious wrongdoing they’ve committed.

We’ve seen it with Charles Haughey. For years and years and years his fabulous wealth and the origins thereof was all but an open secret, and yet he was Taoiseach over the course of four parliaments and had the most hysterically loyal following in Christendom.

We’ve seen it with Bertie too, when everyone knew full well he was a devious little gurrier, but sure wasn’t he just an ordinary man who liked a pint and a football match, loved his mammy and got his ashes at the start of Lent?

We’ve seen it with Lowry, who in spite of resigning from the cabinet and his party due to the overwhelming smell of rat, has topped the poll in Tipp North for fifteen straight years, and will only be displaced when his head is chopped off in a sword-fight at the top of a mountain.

And now, we’re seeing it with Sean Quinn. Last week, thousands turned up to a rally in Cavan in support of their friendly neighborhood beleaguered ex-billionaire. Several respected luminaries were in attendance, among them Fr Brian D’Arcy and Tyrone manager Mickey Harte, and a letter was read out from that known paragon of virtue, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. The great local conglomerato himself was there too, he even gave an emotional speech to his adoring public, Irish Citizen Kane style. Throughout the rally people paid tribute to his generosity, loyalty, decency and the fact he provided employment for a troubled, deprived area, and he’s been given an awful unfair hard time of it. Paying tribute to someone is perfectly fair and fine, but everyone seemed to be willfully blind as to why he’s in trouble in the first place.

He put a monster bet on Anglo Irish Bank shares that would have seen his fortune go stratospheric, but it didn’t and instead lost billions. To give the whole thing a metaphysical, Alice in Wonderland feel, the money he used to amass a 25% stake in Anglo was borrowed from, eh, Anglo. Worse yet, he borrowed another half a billion to buy some property to use as security. To compound matters, the company siphoned off funds from the profitable sectors of his business to keep the struggling ones up, and played an extended global game of Hide The Assets with the Irish courts, which is what landed his son in prison, made his nephew a fugitive and makes Quinn’s freedom shaky at best.

So in other words, an uber-capitalist takes a massive gamble and loses, to the extent that everyone with an insurance policy in Ireland has to pay an extra 2% because of it, broke the law explicitly and engaged in a flagrantly obstructive and obtuse game of chicken with the courts. But sure, isn’t he a decent fella?

Sean Quinn is merely the latest exhibit to prove that Ireland will never be a country free of corruption, gombeenism or a near-feudal loyalty to parochial heroes. We simply love our blameless, imperious regional sugar daddies too much. People in Cavan and Fermanagh decry the Anglo swine who ruined the country and why aren’t they being put through the ringer, though they’re perfectly blasé about the fact that, at a 25% stake in the company, Sean Quinn *was* Anglo. They hold asinine placards like “Bring back Quinn and let him create jobs”, apparently unaware of the connection between his actions and those like him and the state of the economy that makes expenditure cuts and layoffs the order of the day. Sean Quinn’s net contribution to Irish society at this point is firmly in the red, and it’s an absurd case of mental reservation or blind, bewildering, unwarranted loyalty to say otherwise. But, loads of people are, and why? Because he’s local, and a good honest man he is too. 

How the IMF are killing the Irish patient -- more austerity cuts are the wrong diagnosis for ailing Irish economy

IMF fail to fix what ails Ireland

When I was about ten, I was diagnosed with asthma. I was given an inhaler, one of those tubes you have to blow into to measure your lung capacity, and an amount of information and fact sheets along the lines of “So, you’ve become dust’s bitch” that would have stunned an ox. There was just one problem: I wasn’t asthmatic.

After the initial diagnosis my health was getting worse if anything, and every time my mother and I protested as much, I was fussed around by confused doctors like I was The Six Million Dollar Technology: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology...we just have to give him more asthma stuff.” Eventually we just decided to unilaterally stop using the inhaler, the lung capacity thingamajig and everything else, and sure enough, I got better.

Turns out I had just a standard level of childhood sickness for a kid with glasses as thick as mine, but after I was diagnosed something weird started happening. Loads of children who I knew from school also started being diagnosed with asthma. Like, loads of them. It seemed if you had a cough, splutter, took a drink and a bit went down the wrong way or got a bruise in the shin, asthma was probably the problem. People started to wonder what the hell was going on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it feels like some of those childhood diagnosticians have given up medicine for economics, and ditched their MDs in favor of the IMF. Recently it was announced that the International Monetary Fund, Ireland’s economic proctologist, wanted more cuts to social welfare payments, child benefit, raising a property tax and, their most bristly resolution, removing the automatic right for old age pensioners to have a medical card.

The IMF was set up after World War 2 with the intention to help and invest in countries in perilous economic situations. In more recent times, it has become the ultimate arbiter of asymmetric free market policy, the adherents of which believe they are the only show in town. So, when the IMF detail countries to make such structural changes, they do it not entirely out of sheer bean counting necessity, but ideological prerogative and zeal. Ireland is sick alright, but asthma medicine isn’t going to make us better.

What Ireland has needed for years and needs now more than ever is wise investment made in the right areas. The free market notion that if you throw enough money at it things will cascade into their natural positions is simply not viable or practical. Every decision made at government level effects many others and all a cut in the dole payments will do is make it harder for people to live rather than easier for people get a decent job, because the investment simply isn’t there. A wiser use of the government’s time and money would be to make the social welfare system more comprehensible. As it stands, if I was on the dole but got a couple of weeks of stand-alone, temporary work, I wouldn’t have my money deducted for the few weeks, as would be the rational thing to do. Instead, you have to sign off, and then undergo the whole desperate rigmarole again when you’re done as if you’ve never been in the office before. It’s a small example but one that exemplifies the wider logic gaps and inefficiencies of that department, and the government as a whole.

To paraphrase the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”. But, in even given the IMF’s best intentions, their fundamental wrong-headedness in dealing with economic crisis is doing just that. Cuts, hikes and universal entitlement revocations is the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms, at the wrong place at the wrong time. I truly hope the IMF will realize that flinging an inhaler at us will not solve all our ills, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Beauty pageants for children in Ireland - Maybe one Americanism too far

As the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, the other side of Atlantic catches cold. And while we have benefited immensely from certain elements of American culture being introduced over here – rib joints, Dr Pepper, Neil Patrick Harris – there are a few things we could be doing with not traveling over. Child pageants, for example.

This week it emerged that the Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant would be hosting an event in Ireland in November this year. And on a very fundamental level, that really weirds me out.

Case in point: there are, apparently, three rounds to these things. The first is the gown, the second is the talent and the third is freestyle I guess, where in the words of the organizer Annette Hill, “the children can wear whatever they want to wow the judges”.

Furthermore, she also countered the notion these things are hyper-competitive, mini-Barbie fests by saying that everyone gets a trophy and “When you get to a certain age group, four and up, we do like a certain amount of hair and makeup, but just enough to accentuate their natural beauty.”

Annette Hill is, according to her website, available to “teach your child modelling lessons” and offers a photo retouching service that “can add teeth, eyelashes, change backgrounds, remove blemishes, change colors, and lots more. We offer a low price for our retouching services, regardless of how much retouching your photo needs”.

I will now allow about ten minutes for your brain to reset, so you can process the lunacy of that last paragraph.

Welcome back. Apart from wanting me to take out my premise bazooka and blowing all this pageant business to kingdom come, I’m also full of questions. Confused, angry questions. Why should kids of five be actively trying to impress anyone, much less judges? Why does natural beauty need to be accentuated by any make up? Especially when you’re five bloody years of age? Why would you send photos of your child to a stranger to have them retouched? What the hell is wrong with you people?

I normally don’t like saying things like “kids should be kids” because that line has been essentially hijacked by culturally reactionary Ned Flanders types who use it as a means of sheltering young people from pretty much every fact of life beyond “Jesus is a smashing bloke”, but I will say it now: kids should be kids.

Below the age of ten, kids should fundamentally preoccupy themselves with the following:

1) Running for hours in no particular direction, just because you can.
2) Orchestrating a military-style climbing mission to get something from a high press.
3) Asking teachers can you spend the afternoon drawing.
4) Waking up bewildering early at the weekend to watch cartoons featuring unlikely animal friendships
5) Staying away from bloody pageants.

Here's some footage from a 2012 Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant award ceremony -

Healthcare, gay marriage and the right side of history - dealing with our modern pressing social issues

Sometimes, it seems that imagination is a slave of modernity. You can look around you and see the swirl of technological gadgets that assist your living and generally consider the relative ease with which you live and think to yourself: how can we possibly top this? Are there any quantum leaps left? What possible thing could our kids complain in a “back in our day” manner to our grandkids?

Of course, there are plenty. Not just in the technological sphere but in the social, and in fact the intersection between those two will be the ethical battlefield for several generations to come. But in the meantime, we have plenty of pressing social issues to deal with. The first of which is healthcare.

In no sphere of influence is American exceptionalism found more pathetically lacking than with health provision. The notion that a developed country, much less the ostensible greatest in the world, would have such primitive ideals in dealing with their sick and vulnerable is nothing short of macabre. And the fact that so many people kick up such an hysterical fuss at advancing American healthcare so much a mere step in the direction of civilization is just disturbing.

Most of the opposition seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of even the most basic tenets of political theory. Some seem to think that universal health care run, in any form, by the government entitles Vladimir Lenin to emerge from his mausoleum and give you a kick up the arse whenever he feels like it. But they’re not even the worst of it.

The worst are the ones who seem to take “Give me liberty or give me death” a bit too seriously, as if health insurance and freedom are mutually exclusive. More times than I care to admit I’ve heard Americans say “If people can be compelled to buy health insurance, they could be compelled to do anything!” What a terrifying prospect. Imagine a world where a government also compel you to insure your car, force you to apply for a license to drive it and limit the speed at which you travelled in it for fear of sharp punishment? Chilling.

The other hot button issue of the day is of course gay marriage, and curiously a lot of the same people bloviating about liberty when it comes to health care mandates get suddenly prescriptive when it comes to freedom to tie the knot. Thankfully the case for marriage equality is gathering steam, legislative heft and generally large public support, and in the last few weeks alone the US President, UK Prime Minister and Irish Tanaiste and Justice Minister have all stated their support for gay marriage. And yet, the state of North Carolina are digging their tar heels in with a proposed gay marriage ban, the religious right continue their absurd fixation on rounding up/curing gay people, in Africa homosexuality is treated as a real and present bogeyman, and in the Ukraine a new law proposes to clamp down on gay “propaganda”, making discussion of gay rights, talking about homosexuals in general or stating a fondness for Culture Club illegal. In this day and age, it’s just wrong. Hell, it’s wrong for any day and any age.

Thankfully, progress is inexorable, and the line in the sand is being drawn. There will come a time, not all that far away from now, where the notion that a man and another man couldn’t get married, or a first responder to a crisis would have to wait over a decade for rudimentary health coverage, will be preposterous. As preposterous to us as not allowing a black woman to sit anywhere she wants in a diner. Fifty years ago a great many of people would have put up a strenuous fight to stop that black woman sitting there, but those people have been proved to be dogmatically small-minded and stupid. So too will anti-gay bigots and anti-healthcare ideologues. History will prove it. 

The meaning of pro-life abortion argument in Ireland -- what happens once these children are born

Pro-life billboard in Dublin

If you’ve been in Dublin recently, you can’t have failed to notice the throngs of audacious billboards and public transport ads that, well, advocate a stridently pro-life point of view, let's put it like that.

In a year that will be so important for the future of children’s rights, it’s disconcerting in the extreme to see the way in which the discussion has been pivoted onto such a narrow and divisive fraction of the debate. But even more disconcerting is the fact that the image of being pro-life exists as it does in the zeitgeist.

When you hear the term “pro-life”, it automatically conjures certain images, and usually those images are of fetuses on large placards, being carried by the most ardent single-issue campaigners in politics, picketing family planning clinics and challenging politicians about their stance outside Mass. And in the US it’s much more intense.

But not only does the term, and those who vocally self-identify with it, construct a false duality (there are, I daresay, very few people in favor of legalizing abortion who are generally pro-death) it also falls horribly short in scope. Pro-lifers of the kind we have placing billboards seem inordinately focused on unborn babies, but once they emerge into the world, then what?

This is the question we have been failing to ask ourselves for far too long, and in failing to answer it we have done our young people a serious disservice. In the last thirty years we have had innumerable schismatic debates on abortion, but what point is shouting about when life begins if we can’t provide a fundamental quality of life to our children?

In this country far too many children are born to poverty, to social deprivation, to effective pariah status because of who their parents are. In this country far too many children can’t get access to a good education or the basic resources of bettering themselves. In this country far too many children are voiceless when it comes to being given a say and a role in how their communities should be run. In this country far too many children have to grow up too early. And in this country far, far, far too many children are neglected when they should be looked out for the most. Throwing up billboards is doing nothing for them.

It’s easy to say you’re pro-life, but without a fidelity to tackling the problems that face our young people throughout their development then it just boils down to nothing more than emotionally charged, histrionic sloganizing. No matter what their age, children deserve much better than that.

Time for a new Munro Doctrine for the press: don't be a git like Obama's Irish heckler

A lot has been made in recent days about...actually, I won’t give his name, because since he’s clearly an attention seeking goon, I won’t give him any. But, the actions of that Daily Caller correspondent on the White House lawn are just the latest symptoms in a corrosion of respect that is currently riddling the American political process.

It’s not something I say lightly, but at the moment it seems the level of debate in United States is as unhealthy as it has ever been. As usual the main culprits are the far right, getting more and more established as mainstream as days go by.  Since Barack Obama took office a shrill, well-organised rump of extremists have hysterically come at him with sticks on a daily basis in a way far above and beyond what other Presidents have had to endure in recent times.

Politicians at the highest level should of course have a thick skin, but what the right have flung at the President in his first term, from calling him a commie/Nazi to insisting he wasn’t born in the country to making thinly veiled jibes at his ethnicity, is nothing short of malevolent bullying. And the right wing media hyenas are judge, jury and executioner in their witch hunt.

While simultaneously crowing about the need to bring America back to a time where authority was respected, people were decent and God was feared, the vanguard of conservative vitriol are deeply unedifying, toxic and unchristian. And while they do all this, they also try and pretend as if they have the moral high ground.

This couldn’t have been more evident than when Tucker Carlson, a man previously most famous for wearing a bowtie and getting his ass handed to him by Jon Stewart on a show that was promptly cancelled, attempted to justify his reporter’s action by claiming he was trying to his job, high-handedly suggesting that his guy is some kind of Dirty Harry-style maverick reporter, the only one who has the guts to stand up to the fancypants, emigrant loving elite. Either Carlson is deluded, cynical beyond all belief or an idiot, and I’m not sure which is worse or more dangerous.

To their credit, a great deal of Fox correspondents decried the reporter’s conduct as disrespectful and impertinent, but by the same token they also have to take responsibility for the fact that people like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin and Megan Kelly have driven the standard of debate in the US so low into the ground that cheap hacks like we saw last week end up going deeper still to try and get themselves recognised. It’s a race to the bottom with no end in sight.

The prevailing wind among the right-wing media at the minute seems to be that the ends justify the means. The President needs to be opposed and questions need to be asked, and as long as you do that (and get some big attention into the bargain) who cares how sneaky, snide, hysterical, rude or undignified you are while you’re doing it? A bit of pride in method wouldn’t go amiss. Or pride in general, for that matter. 

Starbucks Ireland macchi-atone for their "British" sins, but who really cares?

Maybe it’s because summer is closing in, but this week we may have already got the silliest story of the season.

On Tuesday, Starbucks, the most famous thing to take its name from a Herman Melville book now that Moby doesn’t seem to be making records anymore, launched a UK marketing campaign to dovetail nicely with all that Jubilee business. Except, they made a now infamous geography malfunction. Now, social network marketing campaigns can be a difficult needle to thread at the best of times, but whenever you send out a tweet asking what makes proud to be British from your Irish account, you’re just asking for a hiding.

I’m not going to add to the mountain of puns (If it gets to court, will they be represented by a barista? Ha-cha cha cha cha!) but inevitably the quips came thick and fast, some of them about how Ireland is actually German and not British, and some of them funny. But in some quarters it seemed to cause genuine, high-handed annoyance. The Irish Times went as far to say it prompted “outrage." Outrage, I say! Why anyone would be annoyed by such a blunder seems almost as perplexing as people following a coffee outlet on Twitter in the first place.

After all, it’s a well-worn trope that successful people from the Emerald Isle are co-opted as British when they’re successful, and as they’re on the way down they’re Irish. Such custody battles don’t bother me, if anything we should be a bit flattered that the UK want to co-opt our famousers. After all, we take in abroad dwellers as our own all the time, from David Gray to Counting Crows to basically everyone who played football for us in the late eighties.

Ireland seems to have mastered missing the point completely. In the last few days, news eccentric TD Mick Wallace was avoiding tax to the tune of €2 million has been met with a worrying amount of moral equivalency, while last week the country essentially sleepwalked into accepting a treaty that will have far-reaching implications, with just half the country showing up at the polls. But no, it’s the coffee that really seems to get us energized.