Yearly Archives: 2013

corruption

The World Corruption Perception index 2013 published yesterday.

Ireland scored a surprising respectable corruption perception rating of 72.

However…

Eamon Delaney writes:

What makes makes Italian style corruption almost unnecessary for those seeking gravy In Ireland. And this… what you might call an institutional corruption, and an embedded, ingrained sense of entitlement and reward for the ruling elites which is disproportionate, unfair and unwarranted, but which still goes on.
Basically, the system is fixed in a way that gives such rewards for those at the very top, or even half way up the public ladder, that there is no need for palms to be greased and money siphoned off.
Worse still, this money, and juicy extras, is being given regardless of where it is being taken from. It is also a culture of entitlement which prevails into a time of severe recession with major cutbacks in public spending elsewhere.
And so we have the bosses of certain charities get top –ups from money that might otherwise go to treat sick and disabled children. And so we have former Ministers getting pensions that run into hundreds of thousands of euro, regardless of what pressure this puts on the public purse, during a time of recession. And yet, like former Taoiseach John Bruton – who is on a very large multiple pension, and a big salary – they preach austerity to the rest of us.
And so senior public servants are immune from the pay cuts that are meted out to lower grade public servants, simply because they are senior public servants and presumably run the system and can run rings around any politicians who try to change it.
And so we have been paying the heads of quangos and boards far in excess of what they are being paid in other European countries, purely because this is what we do, and the system ensures it and there’s nothing the public can do to change it. And so we have the Government blithely breaking their own pay cap for the salaries of advisers. Most disgracefully in the case of the charity bosses, (and some hospital bosses), many of the top ups were not known to the public, but were quietly taken in all conscience by the recipients as being a customary reward for being part of the system.

Is this embedded sense of entitlement and reward for the ruling elites really much different to the more slippery corruption in Bulgaria or Greece? Do you really think the Swedes or the Danes would tolerate such extra gravy-taking when their economy was on its knees and the public finances were banjaxed?

 

Not corrupt, just special privileges for the insider elites (Eamon Delaney)

birthday_120x96cm_Inkjetprint_2009 leejeeyoung07 leejeeyoung06 leejeeyoung03 leejeeyoung02 leejeeyoung01 leejeeyoung Stage Of Mind – an exhibition of photographs by Korean artist Jee Young Lee, who transforms her tiny 3.6 x 4.1 x 2.4-meter studio in Seoul into elaborate dioramas inspired by her personal life and old Korean fables.

Lee works without Photoshop and with such attention to minute detail that the dioramas (in which she features herself) often take months to finish.

Stage Of Mind is on display at the OPIOM Gallery in Opio, France from February 7 to March 7 next year.

mymodernmet

-1As you may know we are giving away ONE Christmas jumper from Deadly Christmas Jumpers worth €40 Euro every DAY this WEEK.

A different jumper every day.

Deadly Christmas Jumpers are based at 16 Nassau Street, Dublin and produce a wide and varied range of humorous and ironic traditional Xmas knitwear.

To win today’s sweater (above), please complete this short sentence

Personally speaking Xmas only really begins when….

Lines close at 5.30pm

Deadly Christmas Jumpers

Thanks Gemma

Winner update:

Smellyer: Personally speaking Xmas only really begins when…. An otherwise pleasant family gathering is reduced to arguments about the civil war and the mammy starts to cry.

Thanks all

The final jumper will be given away tomorrow at the earlier time of 12 Noon (to beat the traffic).

fone‘Sup?

Michael Caulfield writes:

I know you don’t normally do this but does anyone know a Vicky Kelly from NY? I found her iPhone and a bunch of cards on Hatch Street,  Dublin at lunchtime. If anyone knows her they can get in touch with me via Broadsheet. Thanks.

 

Anyone?

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[Sean Quinn leaving the High Court in Dublin, June 2012]

Pat Kenny interviewed Sean Quinn this morning on Newstalk to discuss the Anglo tapes, his reputation as a gambler and his ‘fugitive’ nephew ‘Petey’.

Get a tay.

Pat Kenny: “We all heard of the video of Kiev, where Sean Quinn Jr and Peter Darragh Quinn are seen to be discussing a document and a signature and so on – and whatever about the legalities of it and whatever might be decided in court – it looks decidedly dodgy?”

Sean Quinn: “As regards the family and the way we’ve operated, or the way my children were reared and brought up – they would never be involved in anything like that – we were involved just in getting things done, making money, employing people and doing everything here 100% honest. So when we were put into this position about moving assets and how it would be done and how it wouldn’t – we didn’t do a very good job on that, and that’s not our forte, we’re not into that business.”

Kenny: “When it looked like (you) might have to lie in court, Peter Darragh Quinn had to lie in court – so be it?”

Quinn:
“Well, I don’t know, I don’t know what the details of it is, but you know, it’s not something we’d be used to.”

Kenny: “Are you in touch with Peter Darragh Quinn, and do you think he should just face the music now and get it over with as you and Sean Jr did?”

Quinn: “Well, I think it was a very difficult one, Petey, above all people, we tried to.. we all approached him and said we will do all that we can, anything we can do, we will do it. For example, we approached him in September 20011, more than two years ago and said, ‘We think there are assets that can be moved very quickly and all parties are going to lose them.’ Quinn and Anglo argued who owned them, we said we owned them Anglo said they owned them. But at the end of the day, if we go together and combine together, we will get these assets back, and we will be able to make sure and get them (assets) back. They weren’t interested in that, they didn’t want that. So, as regards when the case came along then for Petey, he was left, again he wrote to Anglo on a number of occasions and said, ‘I will do anything you want me to do, I will go to Russia, I’ll meet you, I’ll do anything you want me to do.’ But they wouldn’t do anything, they said, ‘All we want is the assets back. You give us back the assets, that’s all we want.’ And we said, ‘We can’t possibly give you the assets back, but if you work with us, together we can get the assets back.’ But they said, ‘No, you made the decision, you gave the assets away, you have to get them back.’

Kenny: “Are you in touch with him now (Peter Darragh Quinn)?”

Quinn:
“Yes, oh yeah.”

Kenny:
“And what advice do you give him?”

Quinn: “I don’t give him any advice.”

Kenny: “Is he in Northern Ireland?”

Quinn: “He is, yeah, he is yeah.”

Kenny: “And would you not say to him, come back and face the music and get it over with?”

Quinn: “I wouldn’t say that to Petey, because Petey found himself in an impossible position and I’d like to think that if the case is properly run, over the next two or three years, if the conspiracy case… if the we win the main case,which we will, the conspiracy case falls – now, whether there’s any relief for Petey at that stage, I don’t know. But Petey found himself in a position I can’t do anything about, I want to purge my contempt, I’m not allowed to do it, Anglo knows I’m not allowed to do it and they’re seeking me to the last. I wouldn’t advise any individual, Petey is 35/36 years of age.”

Kenny: “But you would, if you were advising him, say, ‘Wait out the litigation’?”

Quinn: “No, I wouldn’t say anything to him, I’d just say… he’s making his own judgement, I wouldn’t advise Petey one way or the other.”

Kenny: “The question of the ‘Anglo Tapes’, you mentioned some of them that went into the public domain through the Independent News and Media papers, ‘The Independent’, and ‘The Sunday Independent’, and we’ve heard that Sinn Fein have now got their hands on some other Anglo tapes, which they’re not as yet prepared to put into the public domain. By any chance did you or your family supply those tapes to Sinn Fein?”

Quinn: {laughing} “No, no we didn’t, I never saw the tapes.”

Kenny: “I just wondered during the process of discovery for your litigations whether you might have come across any of these, over the past time?”

Quinn: “The family would have received a lot of tapes, but I think the family may only have received about 5% of the tapes that are going to be available. I think that in the criminal proceedings and in the other proceedings that we would be bringing and all the people that we would be involved in – what you’ve seen yet in tapes – and I mean what the tapes does do – it appears to me that the tapes maybe shows a disrespect for the law and for The Regulator and for foreign countries and for various people.
But I think that is going to move on – there’s going to be big discussion between The Department of Finance and The Regulator and Anglo about what are we going to do with Sean Quinn – where are the board meetings at, where’s this, where’s that?
The tapes have got very little interest to me or the the family, because the tapes are at the small end of where we’re going – and where the family is going is much deeper than that, so the tapes are only on the periphery.”

 

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