Yearly Archives: 2016

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A still from gas flaring at at Shell E&P Ireland’s Corrib gas plant in Co Mayo last New Year’s Eve

Yesterday.

At Dublin District Court.

Shell E&P Ireland Ltd pleaded guilty to breaching two counts of the Environmental Agency Protection Act during “flaring” tests last New Year’s Eve.

It was fined €1,000.

Further to this.

Shell to Sea writes:

Yesterday, at Dublin District Court, Shell were fined €1,000 after pleading guilty to causing light and noise pollution from gas flaring at Bellanaboy refinery last New Years Eve. The prosecution was brought by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following complaints from people living around the Bellanaboy refinery.

The €1,000 fine is estimated to be 65 seconds worth of current Corrib sales revenue after Vermilion, who have an 18.5% stake in Corrib gas, recently stated that Bellanaboy had reached “full plant capacity“.

It is estimated that Corrib Gas sales revenues have totalled over €240 million so far this year, while no tax has been paid.

It is widely accepted that no or minimal tax will be paid by the developers of the Corrib Gas Project to the Irish State.

Former Managing Director of the Corrib Gas project, Brian O’Cathain previously stated in 2010 “That Corrib will never pay tax“. While a Vermilion investor profile estimated it would be seven years before any tax is paid.

Shell to Sea spokesperson Maura Harrington stated “We’ve seen again lately how subservient the State has become to powerful corporations. Despite making almost ¼ billion euros so far this year from our natural resources, Shell will have a 0.000% tax rate for many years to come.”

Anyone?

Shell fined for ‘noise and light pollution’ Bellanaboy (Connaught Tribune)

Related: Corrib will pay little or no tax: who is to blame? (William Hederman, Irish Oil and Gas, March 8, 2013)

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Windings – new single and album release date announced

What you may need to know…

01. Last time we stopped in with Windings, they’d just released the first single from their upcoming album.

02. The band’s leanings toward a more foreboding mood continue with You’re Dead, albeit taking a step back from the madness unleashed by previous single Helicopters.

03. Streaming above is the accompanying video clip, produced by Stephen Boland.

04. Full-length Be Honest and Fear Not has just been announced for a September 30th release via Out on a Limb Records. A launch tour is to be announced shortly to accompany same.

VERDICT: Soaked in keyboards and chorus pedal, You’re Dead scares up tension and uneasy memories with the most unlikely tools. A journey hopefully extended by the new long-player.

Windings

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The Kinsale Road direct provision centre in Cork

And living in Cork?

Further to the recent death of You Jung Han, 36, from South Korea, at the Kinsale Road direct provision centre in Cork…

Red FM reports:

Residents of a direct provision centre in Cork are staging a demonstration today in protest at the system they’re living in.

It follows the death of a young mother in the Kinsale Road Accommodation centre in recent weeks and similar protests in 2014 where asylum seekers living in Cork called on the government to end the system.

…The protest is taking place today on the Grand Parade at 2pm.

Protests Due to Take Place By Residents of Direct Provision Centre in Cork (Red FM)

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Heiko Gross draws attention to the fact that a leading campaigner for debt forgiveness is simultaneously campaigning for looser credit rules. A quick check shows that this contradictory position is shared across many political parties.

Are we suffering from collective memory loss?

I ask myself if this is a conspiracy on behalf of those who want higher property prices or if advocates for looser credit simply do not understand simple economics?

We are subject to convenient anecdotes of individuals and couples outbid on their dream property because of limits on credit. It is patently obvious that increasing available debt will merely increase competition for the same properties and hence the selling prices.

We are told that young people are forced to spend money on rent because the “average property” is out of reach and hence they cannot save. Whatever happened to the starter home? Are there no “below average properties” available?

The inability to learn from our mistakes is nothing short of tragic.

Matthew Glover,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.

Housing crisis and mortgage rules (Irish Times letters page)

Thanks PK

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Peter Sutherland on RTÉ’s Six One yesterday evening

Last night.

On RTÉ’s Six One, presenter Bryan Dobson spoke to Peter Sutherland.

Mr Sutherland is a lizard former EU Commissioner for Competition Policy (1985- 1989), former Attorney General (1981-1984), former chairman of Goldman Sachs (1995-2015) , and currently  the United Nations Special Representative for International Migration (since 2006).

They started off speaking about the makeshift refugee camp in Calais, following a news item about a protest having taken place there yesterday – with some locals and truck drivers calling for it to be closed down.

Mr Sutherland talked about how he had been there, how it is appalling and how 70 additional people arrive in Calais every day.

He then talked about the EU response, as a whole, to those seeking refuge in Europe and highlighted the problems a fragmented approach with different countries doing different things.

He called on EU countries to act with more solidarity in mind.

Then, Mr Dobson asked Mr Sutherland about the EU Apple tax ruling.

Grab a tay

Peter Sutherland: “Basically, the British are saying ‘yes, all of those who are in Calais want to get into the United Kingdom but they’re the responsibility of the French because they’re in France and we won’t allow them into Britain, so the French are going to have to deal with this. This creates obviously some tension but it also creates an enormous problem in Calais where people are constantly trying to get on lorries or on trains and it’s very dangerous and many of them are children.”

Bryan Dobson: “Does that, in a sense if you like, encapsulate the way this has been responded to by Europe, that individual states have been passing the buck?”

Sutherland: “Absolutely, and the greatest evidence of that is in the Mediterranean frontline states – Greece and Italy are taking all of the refugees. Everybody leaving Libya, virtually, is delivered, including by our Navy and the British Navy and the Germans to Italy and they are left with this huge number, growing number of refugees and I think this is grossly unfair. The same can be said for Greece.”

Dobson: “But, of course, what happened, the German chancellor Angela Merkel opened up the border, the German borders to invite people in, in this extraordinary gesture last year is that, politically, she’s facing a backlash now, isn’t she? And her political future is in question because the hostility of very many German people just to that policy.”

Sutherland: “It is, absolutely, but in my view she’s a heroine. She’s done something that others have not been prepared to do and virtually all the central and European countries are saying ‘absolutely no’ to refugees. Surely, if we are a community, a European Union, based with a concept of solidarity, we should share and we should share on a logical basis all the refugees.”

Mr Sutherland then went on to say Ireland should ‘do more’ and invite ‘thousands’ to Ireland.

And was asked about the Apple tax ruling.

Dobson: “The Government, you believe, have made the right decision when it decided to appeal?”

Sutherland: “Unquestionably, there was no decision that could be taken, other than to appeal. Otherwise it would be accepting an adjudication which, as I understand it, the Government absolutely contests. I mean the Government’s case appears to be that the Revenue Commissioners, not the Government made the decision on the application of the law in regard to taxation which would be applicable to everybody. It wasn’t a special deal. Now, if that is correct, it seems to me that that is not a state aid.”

Later

Dobson: “Do you think Apple have paid their fair share of tax to whomever it’s due – Ireland, United States, other European countries?”

Sutherland: “I can’t comment on that, I mean what is a fair amount of tax? It seems a ridiculously large sum to have avoided, I don’t know. I’ve no idea, I’ve seen no papers.”

Watch back in full here

Previously: Peter’s Friends

 

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ciaragraham

From top: Steve Jobs in Ireland,1980; The sources of iPhone’s technology; Ciara Graham

Apple is no stranger to state aid and while its founder is often hailed as one of the world’s greatest tech innovators the reality tells a very different story.

Ciara Graham writes:

Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato explains how Apple exploits technologies that were developed AND crucially funded by the US State.

Many of the technologies found on the modern iPad or iPhone were developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), founded in 1958, during the Eisenhower administration.

It is responsible for the early development of microprocessors and micro hard-drive technologies, and ultimately the internet itself.

Technologies such as Global Positioning Systems owe their origins to state funded military projects and Liquid Crystal Display technologies were funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Swiss-based CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research contributed the source of the hypertext languages, used in web browsing and also the basis for Apple’s famous ‘click-wheel’.

All those well-known Apple innovations turn out not to be Apple’s after all.

Mazzucato says:

 “Mission-oriented public investment put men on the moon, and later, lead to the invention and commercialization of the Internet, which in turn has stimulated growth in many sectors of the economy…the US government has been a leading player in funding not only the Internet but all the other technologies — GPS, touchscreen display, and the new Siri voice-activated personal assistant — that make the iPhone, for example, a miracle of American technology.“

What Apple is especially good at – and we’re not taking it from them – is design.

They have done an excellent job of pulling together some very useful technologies and installing them on ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing devices; turning these technologies into something consumers really want to buy is their great talent. They are a wonder of marketing, certainly.

But let’s not fool ourselves that they invented the technologies that their products are famous for; and the idea that they should be entitled to any proprietary rights to the technologies that they exploit is very very questionable indeed.

Apple makes billions. They do this off the back of technologies that were developed using government funding.

Fabled for their secrecy, Apple operate a closed technology platform (where only pre-approved programs and applications can interact). Given the publicly funded origins of many of their technologies,

it is ironic that Apple should be so guarded about the proprietary rights protecting their product innovation.

Apple initiated litigation against its key partner and competitor, Samsung, for patent infringement – a saga which has become known as the ‘smartphone patent wars’(3) and has seen subsequent litigations against Motorola and HTC(4).

Apple was also incensed by the open source nature of Google’s Android platform – which gives free access to manufacturers and developers – deeming it an “existential threat” to the company’s existence.

The company’s founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs, was so incensed by the unrestricted accessibility of the platform that he believed Google had “ripped off the iPhone…grand theft!”

He swore to spend “every penny” within Apple’s coffers to “destroy Android”.. More than a little contradictory for a company that owes its successes to publicly funded technologies – share and share alike Steve!

In addition to this legal state aid from the US, Apple has also benefited from what we now know to be illegal state aid from Ireland.

Ireland doesn’t have the budgets (nor the impetus) that the NSF does, but, according to the European Commission it has helped Apple to avoid its tax obligation across the globe. It deemed that through two tax rulings, in 1991 and 2007, Apple had been granted selective treatment.

Essentially, Ireland’s reluctance to take tax from Apple amounts to “illegal state aid” which gave the company an “unfair advantage” over its competition.

Paradoxically, the Commission is not doing this for the public good, but because it amounts to unfair competition over other market-led corporations.

This makes it very difficult for the Irish government to defend as the EU position does not run contrary to the government’s market-liberal policies one bit. Essentially, the Irish government is being hoisted up by its own free-market ideals.

This reminds us of the controversy – or lack thereof – surrounding the early days of the bank bail-out, when only real opposition trotted out was that it might be unfair to European banks!

We’re all familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s oft-used saying about the certainty of ‘death and taxes’. Tax is the money the State ‘earns’ in order to pay for everything it needs to provide for its citizens, and for the continued functioning of industry and commerce – the roads, the energy networks, the educated workforce – it’s part of the social contract.

Yet, so beholden have successive Irish governments become to companies like Apple over the promise of jobs that the State it seems is willing to overlook any other obligations these Multi National Corporations (MNCs) might have to their adoptive homes.

In the early days of the post-war years during the New Deal and Marshall Plan, when governments were actively rebuilding economies on both sides of the Atlantic, governments had the reasonable assurance that the investments they made in developing industry would come back in taxes.

But the new reality of global business – of tax inversion and tax sheltering – is destroying that pact; and perhaps jeopardising the very social contract in the process.

Ciara Graham is Lecturer in Business at the Institute of Technology Tallaght..

References:

Mazzucato, M. (2015) ‘The Entrepreneurial State’: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Books.
Mazzucato, M (2013) “The Entrepreneurial State: Apple Didn’t Build Your iPhone; Your Taxes Did” PBS Newshour, Available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-entrepreneurial-state-appl/ Accessed: August 30th, 2016.
“Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. et al.”. United States District Court, Northern District of California. Retrieved August 11, 2012
Barrett, Steve (2012) “Apple’s War on Android”, Bloomberg. Available at:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-29/apples-war-on-android Accessed: August 31st, 2016.
Patel, Nilay (April 19, 2011). “Apple sues Samsung: a complete lawsuit analysis”. The Verge. Vox Media. Retrieved August 11, 2012

Thanks Henry Silke

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‘sup?

This morning.

Herbert Park, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4

Miss Thea writes:

Found this little one having an early morning snooze in Herbert Park. I have left her at the Lolly & Cooks Café reunification point next to the tennis courts there in Herbert Park, should someone be missing her.

Meanwhile…

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Justine writes:

This leap card was dropped on Amiens Street around 8am this morning. It was handed into the security guard at 110 Amiens Street (by the bus stop). He’s tried to log it as lost on their website but I’m not sure how much luck he had with that….