An Postrophe
at
This morning.
Grand Canal Dock apartment block, Dublin 2
Thanks M
Meanwhile…
Apostropocalypse.
Wow.
Spotted in North County Dublin at the weekend
(Thanks Alex Connolly)
Memmy
at
Baz Ashmawy and his mother Nancy with their International Emmy for ’50 Ways To Kill Your Mother’
“She [Nancy] put it very well, she said as soon as they mentioned that 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy was the one that won, she said she didn’t remember anything, that it was like floating,” he said. “Then we went up onto the stage and said words and spoke to a crowd of very sophisticated television people from all around the world, and she nailed it, I’m just so proud of her to be honest.”
Baz Ashmawy on RTÉ Radio One this morning after his Emmy win for Best Non-Scripted Entertainment
Fair play, in fairness.
Oh.
Brian writes:
And what about Cyprus?
This morning.
Dundrum Shopping Centre, Dundrum, Co Dublin.
Stephen writes:
This is one expensive car parking ticket…
Last night.
U2’s concert at the 3Arena included – during the song ‘Raised By Wolves‘ – a memorial to the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, an allegedly ‘false flag’ event involving the British Army and the Ulster Volunteer Force that killed 33 people.
The death toll was the greatest loss of life on a single day of the ‘Troubles’. No one has ever been charged with the bombings.
Previously: Left Unanswered
(Rollingnews.ie)
Luas Change
at
The results of a Red C poll in the Sunday Business Post at the weekend
On Sunday, the Sunday Business Post carried the results of a Red C poll, showing support for Fine Gael was up a point this month to 31%.
Other news outlets reported the results of the poll with RTÉ reporting, “At 31% it’s the highest level of support for the party since 2012.”
In his analysis, the Sunday Business Post’s deputy editor and political editor Pat Leahy wrote:
There is a saying about US presidential elections that it isn’t the guy with the answer to the question who wins; it’s the guy who gets to set the question who wins.
That is where the parties are now directing their efforts. The government parties want the question of the election to be about stability versus chaos. Sinn Féin, the hard left independents and small parties want the question to be about fairness versus austerity. Fianna Fáil is offering a bit of both – a bit of stability, a bit of fairness.
Every media interview, every piece of campaign literature stuffed through your letterbox, every speech, every canvass; politicians in all parties are supposed to follow the template decided by headquarters. “Message discipline” is one of the political buzzwords of the age. Roughly speaking it means that everyone in the party should say the same thing all the time.
For Fine Gael that means talking about the economy and the necessity for stability to sustain the recovery.
…
Sinn Féin is up two points today to 18 per cent and is set to make significant gains at the election, but like the independents, it has declined over the last 12 months.
As the economic recovery has gathered strength, and as austerity has ceased to be the central fact of Irish politics, those parties and independents which made opposition to austerity their central political message have seen their support eroded. When you think about it, that’s what you would have expected.”
In addition to Mr Leahy’s analysis, Richard Colwell, managing director of Red C, wrote:
“For some time, Red C has championed the theory that a significant proportion of those currently claiming they will vote for Independent candidates, may simply be using this option to hold fire on where their final loyalties might lie. They are torn between anger at austerity and the broken promises they believe this government has made, and the reality that the parties they voted for at the last election are still probably the safest bet for not rocking the boat over the next five years.”
“Our prediction was that, as voters moved closer to the realities of an actual general election, they may well start to shift back to the government parties and away from their claimed support for Independent candidates.”
“That shift certainly appears to be materialising to some extent for Fine Gael. The downward trend in support for Independent candidates and other parties, seen over the past four months, is very closely matched by the upward trend in support for Fine Gael.”
One man polled by Red C expressed concerns on Facebook late on Saturday night, as the poll’s results emerged in media outlets.
He wrote wrote on Facebook that he felt the phraseology used during the questioning was biased.
He wrote:
I was one of the people surveyed for this and I was shocked at how biased the phraseology used was. Questions like “given how much the economy has improved, would you risk voting for another party?” followed on from being asked to rate how much my financial situation has improved under the current Government. I stopped the questioner halfway through to ask who commissioned the survey but he wouldn’t tell. At the end I asked for a phone number for Red C to ask who commissioned the survey. So I called up and queried it and I was told they would call me back but they didn’t. At least now I know it’s the Sunday Business Post. Interesting.
Broadsheet posted this man’s comment in a post yesterday.
However, after this man contacted Red C yesterday, and discovered the questions he was concerned about were not included in the SBP coverage, he requested that the post be removed.
He was informed by Red C that some of the political questions he was asked were commissioned by a “private individual”.
Broadsheet contacted the Red C and this was confirmed.
Longer term trends positive for Fine Gael – SBP poll November 2015 (Red C)
Voters poised on standby vote (Pat Leahy, Sunday Business Post)
Steady as she goes for FG (Richard Colwell, Sunday Business Post)
What you may need to know:
1. Prequel/sequel (sprequel?) to Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).
2. Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth return.
3. Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain are in. Kristen Stewart and previous director Rupert Sanders are out. Probably for the best.
4. Hemsworth is contractually obliged to get his kit off at least once.
5. Broadsheet prognosis: ‘Tis pity he’s a Thor.
Release Date: April 22, 2016.
Mark blogs at WhyBother.ie
From left: Pat O’Flaherty, Eddie Downey, IFA president and deputy IFA president Tim O’Leary
Tim O’Leary, acting President of the Irish Farmers’ Association, spoke with Dr Gavin Jennings on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland earlier today.
It follows reports that the IFA’s president Eddie Downey is to “step back from his role” as the organisation’s chief economist Con Lucey reviews the governance structures within the IFA.
Last week, the IFA’s former general secretary Pat Smith resigned after it emerged he received a salary worth €445,000 in 2014 and €535,000 in 2013.
From the interview this morning…
Tim O’Leary: “The best way to deal with this is through the process we put in place with the chief economist to look at it, to put a proper perspective on all these things. And to give him that space, this is, I’m reiterating, to give him that space, Eddie felt it was best to step back and not be involved in the process. We have a renumeration committee of which it is a part so that would be the body, dealing with the salary and that needs space to do this properly.”
Dr Gavin Jennings: “Why did Pat Smith resign?”
O’Leary: “Same issue, the salary.”
Jennings: “He resigned over his own salary?”
O’Leary: “The size of it. The scale of it, the difficulties…pardon?”
Jennings: “Or the revelation of it?”
O’Leary: “He resigned before it was revealed. So that was the issue that was bothering farmers. It was becoming a huge issue and it was getting in the way of us doing our business.”
Jennings: “But he wasn’t resigning over the size of his salary, he was resigning because people found out about the size of his salary.”
O’Leary: “He was..no. The salary was not revealed before he resigned. It was the size of it and it was the concern over the size of it, or the potential size of it. Remember what was happening. There were leaks and there was speculation and there was talk about what was the size of the salary and we had to, or he had to move to deal with this. And it is distracting us from the work of the organisation. I accept completely that this is important stuff now, to be dealt with. And we’re going to deal with this and we’re going to work through it.”
Jennings: “Who signed off? Who agreed to pay the IFA general secretary over half a million euro in 2013? And just below that last year?”
O’Leary: “The general secretary of the Irish Farmers’ Association was hired by the organisation and a package was agreed with him. The package at that time would have been agreed by the president and the treasurer and I think that was in 2009. And in subsequent years, that salary would have been reviewed on an annual basis and signed off by the president, the treasurer…”
Jennings: “And was it signed off in…”
O’Leary: “That was signed off in 2013 by the then president, the then treasurer. Now in 2014, we received a letter from Con Lucey expressing concerns about the procedures and the structures in place which we took on board and that salary was not signed off in 2014.”
Jennings: “Why not?”
O’Leary: “Because we wanted to strengthen the oversight of the bonuses and the salary going forward. So until that was done, we were not prepared to do that. This is accountability if you want to call it that or this is the way we felt we had to work here.”
Jennings: “Will Pat Smith get a payoff? A severance package?”
O’Leary: “There is very strong law here to govern and protect employees and we’re bound by that law. It’s in the process at the moment and we’re having some difficulties with that. But I think this is a confidential process…”
Jennings: “What difficulties?”
O’Leary: “No this is a confidential process that has to be worked through now and we have to, in fairness, to everybody, we have to work through this and when we have arrived at a settlement it will be made known.”
Jennings: “Will you tell members what his payoff will be?”
O’Leary: “It will be made known to everybody, yes. It will be published. It will be published in the general council.”
Jennings: “When did you first learn, as an IFA member, what your general secretary was earning?”
O’Leary: “When we heard, when we decided that we were going to reveal this or we were going to explain this to the executive council, we got very clear figures at that stage from our Chief Financial Officer so…”
Jennings: “When was that?”
O’Leary: “Last week, last week..”
Jennings: “So you… only last week you found out that your general secretary was earning half a million euro?”
O’Leary: “The role of the deputy president did not encompass the salary of the general secretary. It never has. The role of the president and treasurer did, so I did not know.”
Jennings: “What did you think he was earning?”
O’Leary: “The common expectation or the common understanding was that he would be benchmarked off the secretary general of the Department of Agriculture…”
Jennings: “That’s about €185,000…”
O’Leary: “Now, it is €185,000. It would have been substantially higher when his contract would have been signed.”
Jennings: “So were you shocked?”
O’Leary: “Yes, I was.”
Jennings: “There were members, also last night, who are expressing a little surprise over what Eddie Downey was being paid. Did you know what he was being paid?”
O’Leary: “At the same time, when he told us, last week.”
Jennings: “So you only knew that last week?”
O’Leary: “Yes.”
Jennings: “What did you think he was earning?”
O’Leary: “I would have expected he’d have been on a pretty good salary, I didn’t speculate on that. I’m on €35,000 a year, I didn’t negotiate that, that was the package offered to me when I came in. I’m a dairy farmer, that is sufficient for me, to pay a replacement labour on my farm. So, ok, that allows me then to do the job that I do for the Irish Farmers’ Association. It’s practically a full-time job, I tell you, it’s a job and a half these days. But it’s practically a full-time job to do this. So I left my farm to do this and that allows me to do so.”
Jennings: “You don’t need me to tell you there are farmers up and down the country who are, I think it’s fair to say, livid that the general secretary was earning over half a million euro in the year before the crisis was earning less than half a million euro last year. Some of them will be pretty annoyed that a president was earning nearly €150,000 this year and last year. What would you say to them this morning? Many of whom are threatening to withdraw their membership. And are also questioning whether they should continue to pay fees for every transaction they undertake.”
O’Leary: “Yes, well, what I’d say to them first of all, on behalf of the organisation, I apologise for the mistakes we’ve made in that area, I think we are now going to review everything again. We’re going to look at these payments, through the renumeration committee, that’s what this strengthened committee is set up to do, to look at the payment of the general secretary and the stipend of the president and make recommendations on that and we will do that and we will do that in the light of current circumstances, I think is the best way to describe it. And I cannot take responsibility for the decisions of others in the past but what I can do is give a commitment on behalf of myself and the executive board and the executive council at the Irish Farmers’ Association that we will have transparency and accountability going forward, into the future now. We do everything by the book, as everything that needs to be done, we will do it. And we will be guided on that, Gavin, by Con Lucey.”
Jennings: “Will you go into it with the same level of eyes closed as you did before? When you weren’t questioning how much your boss or your president was earning?”
O’Leary: “I’m in this position two years. Before that, I was not an honorary, a national honorary officer…”
Talk over each other
Jennings: “Weren’t you curious about what your boss was earning? No?”
O’Leary: “I think the honest answer here is that the vast majority of people, members of the Irish Farmers’ Association, their concerns are about making a living, their concerns are about having enough income to educate their children, to put food on the table, to pay all the bills and to get on with it. And that is what they have this organisation for.
And I’ll be very honest with you here Gavin, the bulk of the time I’ve spent in this organisation, the vast majority of it up to this, all of it has been taken up with dealing with this issues and I want to get back to dealing with those issues and I think that we won’t let our members down. We will keep doing this, we will serve our members and we will represent our members on every facet of agriculture that needs to be done so we will deal with this issue. This is another problem we have to deal with. We are good at solving problems in the Irish Farmers’ Association. We solve this one and we will get on with the business and we will get our organisation back on track. That is the clear decision of the executive board yesterday and I’m going to carry that out.”
Listen back in full here
Coveney welcomes IFA President’s decision to step back from role (RTE)
Earlier: A Limerick A Day