Gilmore shakes his clenched iron fist at corrupt Uganda

Having ostracized the Vatican from his diplomatic wigwam Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore has now shaken his iron fist at Uganda and given its prime minister a flavour for ‘Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way’

The brazen and barefaced misappropriation of €4 million by the Nomenklatura of Uganda of money donated by struggling and compassionate Irish taxpayers should serve as a sharp wake-up call to our own authorities and lead to a radical and fundamental policy change with respect to Irish Aid.

We have been informed by the Tánaiste that this money is to be repaid. The Prime Minister of Uganda has told the Irish public that he is not implicated in its misappropriation. But there are no instances, anywhere on the globe, of endemic corruption prevailing among public officials who are not aided, succoured, protected and abetted by politicians, as various costly tribunals in this country and the media reports about Uganda over many years have so clearly illustrated. It is also noteworthy that it was not the Irish authorities who uncovered this misappropriation and this begs the critical question of how much more of the €600 million+ spent on Irish Aid reaches unauthorised banks accounts in disreputable and decrepit jurisdictions.

Officials attached to the office of Uganda’s President Museveni were accused last year of accepting millions of dollars in bribes. The Ugandan Parliament met in emergency session and demanded that the Uganda’s prime minister, foreign minister and internal affairs minister recuse themselves from office while the parliament investigated allegations that millions of dollars in bribes were paid by an oil company. Sam Kutesa, the foreign minister, who was involved in a separate scandal involving the use of public money to renovate a hotel, resigned in October 2011.

The Ugandan Government was also accused of losing an estimated €115 million in 2007 from various scams during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. The former Ugandan vice president resigned after being accused of being a beneficiary to the tune of €3 million to provide luxury cars used to transport visiting dignitaries.

As recently as last August Transparency International cited Uganda as registering the highest incidence of bribery cases in East Africa and fingered the Ugandan police and the Ugandan judiciary as being the most corrupt institutions in that country.

Against this appalling and indefensible background the Tánaiste is telling us that he is asking his Department to examine how Ireland could assist the Ugandan Government to recover misappropriated funds through processes similar to those employed by our Criminal Assets Bureau. This tongue-in-cheek exercise in solicitous introspection is to take place at a time when Ireland has had to face the implications of €500 million of assets being unlawfully and wilfully dissipated by the Quinn family by recruiting a Russian entity, unfamiliar to most Irish taxpayers, to untangle that opaque cobweb arrangement with the inducement of an upfront payment of €31 million  with no strings attached and 20% of the proceeds of what is eventually retrieved by the State from this dreadful illicit debacle.

Uganda is set to become the beneficiary of revenue derived from the recent discovery of large oil reserves, estimated to have the potential to deliver at least 2.5 billion barrels that will yield tax revenue of over €1.5 billion per year. The Ugandan Government has been fit to spend over €570 million on military aircraft to protect this asset. It is time for Irish Aid to cut the umbilical cord of easy Irish cash.  The limited resources of the Criminal Assets Bureau need to be fully and forensically and rigorously employed in this country hunting rogue bankers and other delinquent renegades and not used teach the Ugandan Government how to discover the road to virtue, especially in the light of our curtailed resources and the fact that not a single recruit has been enrolled in An Garda Siochána in four years.

The compassion of the Irish people must not be exploited by either vested interests, do-gooders or corrupt manipulators, nor should aid programmes be of indeterminate character. A root and branch reform of the Irish Aid programme is urgently required combined with an immediate severe pruning of its budget.

Should tax relief could be granted to those who wish to donate to corrupt countries in a personal capacity?  The era of saddling society as a whole with an outrageous burden of unaffordable generosity that fosters a culture of infinite chronic dependency must end now.

Opinion poll heralds seismic shift in Irish presidential election campaign

The latest MRBI poll results in The Irish Times are not surprising but there are 21 days campaigning days left and much can change to influence the outcome.

People are deeply and passionately interested in who is the head of state because that person becomes the bearer of a part of the ego of each and every citizen that defines our nation. The public want to know who these candidates really are and not to be merely presented with a sanitized caricature of who the candidates would like the public to perceive them to be wrapped in an enigma that is no more than a stream of vacuous consciousness of the candidate’s concept of utopia.

Michael D Higgins is the only one of the 7 that passed the biographical-details test and who introduced himself and his wife to the wider public via the Miriam Meets programme on RTE 1 Radio when he disclosed some personal minutiae about both of them.

The public also need to have some robust conviction what the election of any candidate is likely to signal about Ireland to the wider world and what impact that candidate will have on the presidential office – especially the capacity to safeguard the dignity of the office and the nation. The president is the mirror of the nation.

The potential implications of these poll trends are considerable. Fianna Fáil has demonstrated that it is so marginalised and reviled that it could not even put forward a candidate from the mainstream of Irish society to begin to inspire public confidence.

The Fine Gael party has some grounds for the deepest introspective reflection and soul-searching if their best offer to the Irish public is a candidate who is trailing second last seven – 35 points lower than the party itself. Enda Kenny has won the trust of the public and presents as a Taoiseach comfortable in that role.

I have seen first-hand in locations far away from Erin’s shore over the past 10 days that he and Eamon Gilmore have managed to salvage the credibility and stature of the country because Ireland is seen overseas as being led by a competent, stable and responsible government by power brokers whose vigilant gimlet eye defines sentiment.

Sinn Féin must think beyond the boundaries of their traditional narrow, conservative regional enclave if they are to make the stunning breakthrough they believe to be their right. They need turn up for the work they are handsomely paid to do in Westminster and scrutinise the legislation that is impacting the lives of tens of thousands of citizens in the single-seat parliamentary constituencies that they were elected to represent. Laggards in any walk of life are ultimately a useless, irrelevant carbuncle on the arse of spineless society. If Sinn Féin is to be acknowledged as a serious party of national leadership then it is time to start leading, not posturing as neighbourhood activists and playing to the whims of a narrow gallery .

Gilmore seeks to respire Social Partnership

Eamon Gimore argued in The Irish Times (Opinion & Analysis) on Saturday, 9th January that a new national agreement would build on the nation’s strengths, foster solidarity and guarantee industrial peace.

Social partnership has been sustained when its participating pillars were able to deliver incremental financial and social benefits to those they represent.  The weaknesses, limitations and cost of social partnership have been laid bare, especially in the past year. It became paralysed and dysfunctional when there were no resources to deliver.  Participants became lobbyists’ seeking billions of euro exclusively for their own vested interests, but were apparently incapable, at times of economic adversity, of embracing a multilateral perspective, perhaps because their individual mandates are rather weak. Trade unions, for example, collectively represent no more than 25% of the declining national labour force and the collapse of the economy has also taken its toll on the strength of all pillars of the process.

The legacy of national agreements in the past decade is such that Ireland’s harmonised labour cost competitiveness ranked second lowest to Slovakia in the EU-27 and was 11.8% adrift of the EU average by June 2009, as measured by the harmonised competitiveness indicators published by the European Central Bank. If this country is serious and determined about an export-led recovery in knowledge-intensive sectors that will track that of trading partners there ought to be an acute national awareness of what it is that make us competitive.  Why has there been no debate, or analysis, about the prime reasons this country lost a substantial number of skilled, knowledge-intensive jobs in fields such as aircraft maintenance or crystal manufacture? That could have begun, but not ended, with some reflection of the implications of our minimum wage being the second highest in Europe and how a small open economy can foster a standard of living that is both acceptable, realistic and, most importantly, sustainable.

Ireland will only prosper to the extent that it can successfully trade internationally but the social partnership process had grown increasingly insular and delusional in its perspective. We are citizens of a world whose boundaries extend beyond our own definition of fairness, inclusivity and social advancement. The benefits sought through partnership need to be based on the nation’s capacity to compete and on the resources available to fund the benefits sought and legitimate aspirations. Our capacity to generate authentic national wealth is more limited than we might like to admit and the commercial output from it did not grow vigorously when the international economy was vibrant. What impact could the partnership process have in this context when none of the national agreements ever dealt definitively with the issue of national competitiveness and the strengthening of it?

Total social welfare expenditure increased by 238% in the past decade when the Consumer Price Index increased by slightly over 40%. The Social Insurance Fund, which recorded a deficit of €244.7 million in 2008, is now reported to be insolvent, perhaps by billions of euro, as social insurance expenditure exceeded €10 billion last year as a consequence of spiralling unemployment. The €21.3 billion social welfare bill in 2009 was equivalent to 87% of the increase in the national debt. The overall scale of this is a by-product of national agreements and we are now on the cusp of deluding ourselves that these standards can be maintained and that almost €22 billion can be spent on social welfare in 2010 and beyond through growing the national debt.

Mr Gilmore advocates a time-limited inquiry into what went wrong in the banking system. During the decade to 2009 the stock of new residential units in this country increased by 60% when the population increased by just 19%.  But the total amount of residential loans provided increased by almost 500% making Ireland’s residential mortgage bearers’ the second most indebted in the €urozone - next to those in Holland. Data produced last week by the Central Statistics Office indicates that the income per person in the State increased by under 55% from 2000 to 2007 so it doesn't take a wizard to discover the extent of imprudent lending that has taken place and the consequential negative equity that is now a reality. What more could an inquiry elicit except to advocate that financial regulation would be sufficiently robust to defend the integrity of the banking system; that the interests of vulnerable consumers would be robustly defended and that the criminal justice system would take its course effectively and efficiently, where appropriate?

The highest standard of national governance, rather than the most far reaching social partnership, will be the catalyst for economic recovery and vitality. The ability of political parties to persuade the electorate of their capacity to lead and govern will determine the outcome of the next general election.