Gaillimh gan Dídean
A documentary from Midas Productions about Galway’s homeless crisis.
This Wednesday, January 22 at 9.30pm on TG4.
Ah Frank
at
This morning.
Kildare, County Kildare.
You may be interested in [Fianna Fáil TD] Frank O’Rourke’s ridiculous election postering. He’s been on your site before concerning the mileage allowance scheme and having clamps removed from his van
Chilly
at
.
This morning.
Davos, Switzerland.
The Irish Times reports:
European commissioner for trade Phil Hogan has stepped in to address business leaders attending IDA Ireland’s annual dinner at Davos this week, as the Irish contingent at the World Economic Forum (WEF) is shaping up to be the smallest in recent times.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had been due to host the IDA dinner on Thursday for 40-50 international executives at the Swiss Alpine village, but this was cancelled last week as he called a general election for February 8th. Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe also cancelled his planned appearance as the campaign got under way.
WEF regulars Bono and Denis O’Brien will also not be attending this year, according to their representatives.
Phil Hogan to address business leaders at IDA event at Davos (Joe Brennan, The Irish Times)
Getty
Meanwhile…
A new report by Oxfam has found that Ireland has 17 billionaires – the fifth highest number of billionaires per capita in the world.
Oxfam launched the study ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos which begins later today.
In its summary, Oxfam writes:
“Economic inequality is out of control. In 2019, the world’s billionaires, only 2,153 people, had more wealth than 4.6 billion people.
“This great divide is based on a flawed and sexist economic system that values the wealth of the privileged few, mostly men, more than the billions of hours of the most essential work – the unpaid and underpaid care work done primarily by women and girls around the world.”
The report can be read in full here
Rollingnews
This morning.
Leeson Street Bridge, Dublin 2.
Pint of Plain writes:
Last week this bench (left) beside the Grand Canal was cordoned off by gardai as part of the mechanical homeless removal investigation. Today it is home to this poor man in a sleeping bag. Eoghan Murphy still smiles from his telephone pole
Last week: At Leeson Street Bridge
From top: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar campaigning at the Rediscovery Centre, The Boiler House, Ballymun Road, Dublin on Saturday; Sunday Times/Behaviour & Attitudes poll; Derek Mooney
Of all the possible ways he could have responded to yesterday’s bad poll numbers, the Taoiseach went and picked the worst. OK, it was not quite the worst. He could have nutted a journo and told the rest of the media entourage assigned to go to hell, so at least he didn’t do that.
Where most other leaders would have taken the: well, it’s just a poll, a snapshot in time, there are three weeks of campaigning to go, the Taoiseach decided to shun humility, restraint or conciliation and went on the attack instead. He warned voters
“I think the opinion poll demonstrates that there is a real risk, a real danger that we’ll have a Fianna Fáil-led government”.
It is an approach we have seen before from this Taoiseach, when things are not going his way: the double down.
We saw it at the Frances Fitzgerald/Sgt Maurice McCabe crisis of late 2017. At a time when even his own backbencher TDs could see that the political crisis was demanding the resignation of his beleaguered Tánaiste and Justice Minister, the Taoiseach decided to double down. All he succeeded in doing was leaving himself with no alternative but to back down when the inevitable happened.
We saw it again, just a few weeks ago when he decided to double down on Charlie Flanagan’s ill-judged and ill-considered plans for RIC commemorations.
Ironically, Flanagan is the justice minister Varadkar appointed to succeed Frances Fitzgerald. Frances had originally been appointed Justice Minister in succession to Alan Shatter, who yesterday launched this latest Twitter broadside at Varadkar’s Fine Gael.
Modern political history is full of leaders who discovered too late that doubling down doesn’t make them look strong, it makes them look detached, ineffectual and querulous. Doubling down to tell voters they have no choice can often result in them finding their own alternatives.
It happened to Ted Heath in 1974. In office since 1970 his Tory government had imposed a three-day working week to try to cope with rising oil prices, fuel shortages and power cuts.
The threat of a major national strike by mineworker’s union, supported by other big unions in early 1974, led Heath to call an election. and seek a mandate to take a stronger line with the unions. His Tory government was so sure it was going to win that it ran under the slogan: Who Governs Britain?
Heath assumed there could only be one response. There was. Just not the one he expected. Not you Heath, they said as they turfed him out and backed Labour’s Harold Wilson.
Let me be clear – I do not think Fianna Fáil is 12pts ahead of Fine Gael or that yesterday’s Sunday Times poll numbers will be replicated when the votes are (almost) all counted by this day three weeks.
As anyone who has read my musings here will know I never tire of saying that political parties do not do their polling in the same way as newspapers.
I have made this point on almost every occasion where I have commented on the latest Business Post, B&A or MRBI national opinion poll – and we have two more polls due over the next week.
I do think is the Sunday Times/B&A poll highlights two key Fine Gael electoral vulnerabilities, especially outside Dublin.
The first is that Fine Gael is at risk of losing many of the second seats it holds in constituencies across the country. The second is that its incumbency advantage has been lessened.
Having well-known sitting TDs with networks of contacts beyond their parties usual hinterland can often ease the impact of big negative swing.
Ten of the FG TDs elected in 2016 (20%) are not running again in 2020 (6 are retiring, Deputies Peter Fitzpatrick, Maria Bailey and Dara Murphy have departed for a range of reasons and Frances Fitzgerald was elected to the European Parliament).
What the Sunday Times poll also suggests is that the Fianna Fáil versus Fine Gael contest is back where it was between March 2016 and July 2017.
During that time, which covers the first days of the 2016 government led by Enda Kenny through to the election of Leo Varadkar as Kenny’s successor, there were about 36 major national newspaper opinion polls.
Fianna Fáil was ahead in 24 of them, by margins as narrow as 1pt or as wide as 11pt (the average was 3.5pt) while Fine Gael was ahead in 10 and the two parties were tied in two.
So, was it for this that Fine Gael ditched Enda Kenny and installed Leo Varadkar?
Wasn’t Varadkar’s great selling point to Fine Gael TDs (though not so much to rank and file members) that he was the great campaigner who would give Fine Gael the political clarity and definition, not to mention long term electoral success that Enda Kenny wasn’t, and Simon Coveney couldn’t?
How ironic now to hear some folks around Fine Gael suggesting that the right response to this one poll is to get Leo to stand back a bit and get Coveney and Donohoe to front more of the campaign.
Writing here in July 2017 I suggested that there was “not so much a Leo bounce as a post Enda recoil”. What I did not foretell was the extent and degree to which the Leo bounce that seemed to return in the polls later that year and through 2018 would be due to the issue of Brexit – including adroit handling of a complex and tricky issue by both Varadkar and his government.
Fine Gael’s eagerness, or was it anxiety, to make Brexit an election issue, with the it is only half time in Brexit messaging, might suggest that Fine Gael’s own polling showed the Leo bounce was less attributable to him than to a policy issue on which there was a cross party consensus.
Nonetheless this is just one poll and it is one that largely predates the election campaign proper. Most Fianna Fáil colleagues I know tell me that they are viewing this poll as a very welcome morale booster, not a cause for celebrations.
In the zero-sum game of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rivalry, a morale booster for the soldiers of destiny is a morale slayer for the Blueshirts. Varadkar is now faced with two options: double down or change strategy.
The evidence points to him doubling down. Could that work for him this time? Probably not.
Derek Mooney is a communications and public affairs consultant. He previously served as a Ministerial Adviser to the Fianna Fáil-led government 2004 – 2010. His column appears here every Monday.Follow Derek on Twitter: @dsmooney
Grönt Blok
at
An artist’s impression of the new IKEA store at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station, where construction has just begun
Set for completion in early 2021, (though there’ll probably be a bunch of screws and a weird plastic thing left over), the store, with its green facade of 160 integrated trees and roof terrace, has no car parking spaces – a nod to Vienna’s first rate public transport system.
IKEA promises 24 hour delivery for any items that can’t be carried out by hand.
Yesterday.
A fact-check carried out by the Business Post in relation to comments made by the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty on RTÉ Radio One about the number of GPs in Ireland now compared to five years ago shows her information has been contradicted by the HSE and the Medical Council.
There you go now.
Election Factcheck (Business Post)
H/T: Susan Mitchell
Previously: Regina’s Gratuity
Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy
Yesterday.
In the Irish Mail on Sunday.
The newspaper’s political correspondent Craig Hughes reported that Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin had accused Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy of “manipulating social housing figures“.
It followed Mr Murphy saying on Friday that 10,000 social homes were provided last year – 6,545 new builds, 1,325 “acquisitions” and 2,130 houses “that local authorities and approved housing bodies acquired through long-term leases”.
Mr Murphy has said that, if he’s re-elected, 60,000 social houses will be delivered over the next five years.
However, Mr Hughes reported that Mr Ó Broin has called this pledge into question, writing:
But Deputy Ó Broin claimed that Minister Murphy is wrong to include more than 2,000 homes that had been acquired through long-term leasing.
According to the deputy, social houses acquired through long-terms leasing should not be included in the social housing delivery figures.
“In 2016 the cross party Housing and Homelessness Committees’ report very clearly defined social housing as housing that is owned by the council or AHB [approved housing body]. It’s only Minister Murphy and his Government that defines social housing any differently.”
Mr Ó Broin was reported as saying:
“The owner of a long-term lease property can withdraw, so you can’t categorise it as social housing as it is not owned by the local authority or approved housing body and ends up costing the taxpayer two to three times the price.”
Mr Hughes reported that the Government’s Rebuilding Ireland plan pledged to deliver 25,000 new homes (private and social) every years between 2017 and 2021 but that it failed to reach its target every year.
He also reported that the number of new homes built in 2019 is estimated to be between 20,000 and 21,000 but the final figures have yet to be released.
In addition, Mr Hughes reported that although a spokesman for Mr Murphy had pledged to provide Mr Hughes with a breakdown of the latest social housing figures – which were finalised last week – no figures were provided.
The spokesman said Mr Ó Broin’s comments were “regrettable” and misleading, adding: “Long-term leases are for 20-30 years with an option to renew. They are social houses and as secure as any other”.
Anyone?
Fianna Fáil’s Kevin O’Keeffe, from Mitchelstown, Co Cork, who’s hoping to retain his Cork East Dáil seat, posted photographs of himself standing next to a limousine on Twitter and Instagram in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It followed a Behaviour & Attitudes poll in The Sunday Times showing Fianna Fáil had a 12-point lead on Fine Gael.
However, within hours ,Mr O’Keeffe deleted the picture from his Twitter account after complaints he was “out of touch”. He told Independent.ie:
“It was very negative. I was having a bit of fun I don’t have a limousine.
“I just happened to pull in at a filling station and just for a joke I said: ‘Lads can we put a sticker on the car and take a photo?’ It was shocking they [Twitter users] thought I’d bought a limousine.”
Irish Rents rose by 40 per cent from 2007 to 2019, the second highest increase in the European Union, according to Eurostat
I’d say you’d feel fairly content
If you’re making your living off rent
So much cash rolls in
That it feels like a sin
As you’re counting the blessings you’re sent
John Moynes