Category Archives: Misc

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Social Democrat co-founder Catherine Murphy (bong out of picture)

Yes.

The latest edition of Hot Press is on all good shelves now.

In it, is an interview with Social Democrats co-founder Catherine Murphy by Jason O’Toole.

What to expect?

Drugs:

On the topic of drugs, Murphy openly admits having inhaled marijuana a few times and says she’s in favour of looking at evidence that supports decriminalisation. She also favours for the introduction of injection centres and making marijuana available for medicinal purposes….

Abortion:

Describing herself as pro-choice, Murphy has words about the Eighth Amendment, saying that kicking the issue to the Citizens Assembly is a form of political cowardice. “You know, we do have a Citizen’s Assembly,” she says. “It’s called the Dáil. Ideally, I’d like to have seen that approach. The Citizen’s Assembly should be removed from the constitution.”

Voluntary celibacy:

One issue Catherine is passionate about is the housing crisis and homelessness. Asked, hypothetically speaking, if she could solve this crisis tomorrow – on the one condition that she’d have to give up sex – she readily agrees to such a deal.

Homelessness:

“I’d almost give up anything to sort the housing crisis because I see people here every day of the week. If there was something you could actually personally sacrifice to resolve that problem, there would be very little that you wouldn’t do, to sort that housing and homeless crisis. It’s the tragedy of our time.

“But I would do way beyond that. There’s lots I’d give up to sort that crisis out.”

FIGHT!

Social Democrats leader Catherine Murphy reveals all in this week’s Hot Press (Hot Press)

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The Button Head collection.

For your family.

From Fiona McEvoy, of The Wishing Tree Studio, who writes:

I’m a graphic designer based in Kells, County Meath. I create cute and quirky personalised frames and prints for any occasion, at any time of year.

The frames from our ‘Button Head’ collection make gorgeous gifts for grandparents and families and it’s our most popular collection at Christmas time.

Final date for delivery before Christmas is Friday, December 2 and everything can be bought online…

The Button Head Coillection (WishingTreeStudio)

The Wishing Tree Studio

The Wishing Tree Studio (Facebook)

Irish-made stocking fillers to Broadsheet@broadsheet marked ‘Irish0Made Stocking Fillers’. No fee!

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Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan and Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald

This afternoon.

From 3pm to 5pm.

Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan will appear before the Policing Authority

The Policing Authority was established on January 1 of this year to “oversee the governance, structures and performance of the Garda Síochána in the policing area“.

According to the agenda of the meeting, Ms O’Sullivan will discuss the recommendations made following the O’Higgins report – which made a series of findings about serious Garda malpractice in the Cavan-Monaghan division.

Readers will recall how, during the O’Higgins’ Commission of Investigation into Sgt Maurice McCabe’s allegations, Colm Smyth, SC, initially told Judge Kevin O’Higgins that – on behalf of Ms O’Sullivan – his instructions were to “challenge the integrity of Sgt McCabe and his motivation”.

This was claimed to be based on a meeting in Mullingar between Sgt McCabe and two gardaí.

Several months later, on the day Commissioner O’Sullivan was due to give evidence – by which time Sgt McCabe had produced a transcript of his meeting in Mullingar with two gardaí – Mr Smyth told Judge O’Higgins: “The position now is that his motive is under attack, credibility is under attack from the Commissioner. But not his integrity.”

Meanwhile, this morning – before Commissioner O’Sullivan’s appearance – the Policing Authority will discuss the matter of Garda appointments.

Readers will note how, in May, the Government approved the appointment of four assistant commissioners.

In addition, it was reported that further senior appointments were in the process of being made – even though, under pending new legislation, the Policing Authority was to take over the responsibility, from the Government, for senior Garda appointments or promotions.

At the time, Francesca Comyn, in the Sunday Business Post, reported:

Nóirín O’Sullivan’s husband, Detective Superintendent Jim McGowan, is among 18 tipped for elevation. Another name of note understood to be on the list is Superintendent Thomas Maguire – the senior officer who, back in 2012, recommended that Sergeant McCabe be the subject of a disciplinary inquiry. The probe related to a computer, seized as evidence in an investigation, which went missing in Garda custody.

Maguire later exonerated McCabe, but the inquiry he conducted was criticised by O’Higgins in his report. He was found to have withheld statements from the whistleblower and initially preferred, on a paper review, the conflicting evidence of another garda over that provided by McCabe.

In July, the Department of Justice announced that it had appointed ten people to the position of Chief Superintendent and 18 to Superintendent – before the new appointments process, under the Policing Authority was introduced.

Mr McGowan and Mr Maguire were among those promoted.

In September, Josephine Feehily, chair of the Policing Authority, told the Oireachtas Justice Committee that it was disappointed that it had not been consulted about the senior garda appointments made earlier.

Yesterday, it was reported that the responsibility for Garda appointments will move from the Government to the Policing Authority from December 31 – just as Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald announced 11 new Garda promotions, comprising of one assistant commissioner, three chief superintendents and seven superintendents.

Watch the Policing Authority meeting live from 3pm here

Rollingnews.ie

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Yesterday

The Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, North Great Charles Street Dublin 1

John Connors, Christy Moore and Bressie helped launch a position paper on Traveller Men’s Health. Research shows that men in the Travelling community suffer more from depression, low self-esteem and discrimination.

The Pavee Point organisation wants a national strategy to address the suicide rate among the male Travelling community, which is almost seven times the national average.

Research published a decade ago showed Traveller men’s lives were 15 years shorter that the overall male population in Ireland. Pavee Point says there is nothing to suggest that has changed.

Call for strategy to address male Traveller mental health (RTÉ)

Meanwhile….

The Traveller advocacy group Pavee Point has welcomed the news that Taoiseach Enda Kenny has resolved to support the recognition of Traveller ethnicity.

Mr Kenny said on Wednesday that the Government would begin taking steps towards the recognition of Traveller ethnicity in the new year.

The Taoiseach said he had asked Minister of State at the Department of Justice David Stanton to prepare a report for the social affairs committee on the question of recognising Traveller ethnicity. The report is expected in a few weeks.

In fairness.

Pavee Point welcomes recognition of Traveller ethnicity (irish Times)

Rollingnews

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Michelle Moran and Roughan MacNamara of Focus Ireland launching the charity’s campaign calling for legislation to fully protect Irish homes from vulture funds in August

First-Time Buyer writes:

Effective lobbying is done as quietly as possible behind the scenes, ensuring that you get the result you were looking for without anyone else being the wiser…

Back in September, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan proposed a number of changes to Section 110 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 which contains the provisions for Ireland’s securitisation regime.

This was on the back of various concerns raised in the media that “investors” (foreign funds) were using the legislation to avoid paying tax on Irish property by using S110 Special Purpose Vehicles (“SPVs”) for their transactions.

The Irish securitisation regime is very generous in that it permits certain companies to deduct interest payments on profit participating debt (i.e. loans where the interest rate is directly linked to the underlying profits of the SPV rather than a set rate).

In effect, this means that these SPVS could wipe out all of their profits with interest deductions leaving only a very small taxable margin (usually €1,000). These SPVs were making tens of millions from Irish property, but effectively were only paying as little as €250 to Revenue.

The aim of the amendments to the regime were to ringfence profits arising from a property business and ensure that a deduction was not available for profit participating interest.

This would protect the Irish tax base by ensuring these SPVs would pay tax at 25% on all of its Irish property profits, rather than only on the token €1,000.

A property business was originally defined as one which is involved in the holding or managing of “any financial asset which derives its value, or the greater part of its value directly or indirectly, from land in the State”.

When interpreted this would include property loans and mortgages but also shares in a company which derive its value from Irish property (e.g a Limited company that holds property, also known as a “Propco”).

What nobody noticed though was that in the time between the publishing of the original legislation in September to the publication of the Finance Bill in October a very deliberate change was made to narrow the definition of ‘specified mortgage’.

Such a narrowing means this anti-avoidance legislation is now only confined to loans and specified agreements deriving their value from Irish land but not to shares in a Propco (more on why below).

At the same time of this deliberate change, the Government included another, seemingly unrelated, measure to restore 100% interest deductibility for landlords of residential properties. This generous tax break encourages Propcos to be highly geared, to ensure their rental profits are significantly reduced by interest deductions.

When you combine these two measures it means the ‘investors’ will warehouse their Irish properties into simple Propcos, rather than the complicated SPVs, QIAIFs or ICAVs that we’ve been reading about in the media.

The investors will own the Propcos, via their existing S110 SPVs. They will fully leverage the Propco with related party debt, maximising the new 100% interest deductibility rules. This will ensure that any income arising will be fully sheltered by tax deductions, thus a continuing ability to avoid tax on the Irish rental profit.

In addition, the investor can avoid capital gains on a disposal of the property by simply selling the shares in the Propco rather than selling the property asset directly.

The gain on the sale of the shares of the Propco will arise to the S110 SPV and because the definition of ‘specified mortgage’ does not include the sale of shares, the SPV can use profit participating interest to wipe out its gain on the sale.

You couldn’t make this up.

Related: Vulture funds hit by political cave-in on tax reprieve (The Irish Times, November 22, 2016)

Previously: Mars Capital, Matheson And The €250 Tax Bill

Sasko Lazarov/Rollingnews

rte

dan

From top: RTÉ coverage begins for the first of five general elections held during the 1980s; Dan Boyle

Each Great Leap Forward is followed by several steps back.

Dan Boyle writes:

I first cast my vote in 1981. Ronald Reagan was the US President, Margaret Thatcher the British Prime Minister, and Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In the general election of that year the Trinity of Irish politics – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, had won its usual 95% of the vote. Those of us coming of age then had little expectation that things could change quickly, or indeed change at all.

There were small signs indicating otherwise. A handful of interesting independents were elected. In Limerick, a speak as you found him socialist, Jim Kemmy, was arousing interest. The most that could be said about Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus was his name.

Noel Browne was being elected for his fifth and final political party, Socialist Labour. Sinn Féin, in its Workers Party incarnation, won its first seat since 1957. The first Sinn Féin TD to take their seat in the Free State parliament.

The abstentionists were represented by the election of two H-Blocks hunger strikers. Those behind their election would later claim sole proprietorship of the Sinn Féin handle.

The Abortion Referendum of 1983 allowed some of us at least to fly a flag for another Ireland, even if we never believed that holy, Catholic Ireland was ever possible to shift.

It wouldn’t be until 1990, with the election of Mary Robinson as President, that any election I invested in yielded a positive result.

The nineties and onset of the millennium brought social change at a rate that had barely seemed possible in the previous seventy years of independent statehood before that.

Maybe those of us of a progressive bent got greedy, wanting more change more quickly. More likely having been denied change for so long, progressives have forgotten that change is never relentless nor is it linear. Each Great Leap Forward is followed by several steps back.

I fear that once again we are entering a dark age. The momentum has been gained, and the agenda has been won back by reactionaries. Hard won rights will recede amid much gnashing of teeth.

Despite that I’m not overcome with any sense of impending apocalyptic doom. Or with the feeling of powerlessness of the 1980s. Let them do their worse. They cannot roll back everything. When the argument has been won again, we will be starting from a place still far ahead from where we had begun.

Social justice can’t be guaranteed but it is inevitable. For now, at least temporarily, this is the new normal. We had better get used to it, but not for too long.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Top Pic: RTÉ Archive