From top: Michael Moore promoting his documentary Farenheit 11/9 and protesting the poisoning of the privatised water supply in Flint, Michigan, USA last September; Eamonn Kelly

Someone I met recently dismissed privatisation as a dull non-issue, regarding it as a fait accompli and something that wasn’t really that serious in the long run.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, is a stark reminder of what privatisation actually means as played out in the more “advanced” corporate structures of the United States, which are currently laying waste to all around them.

Privatisation in the United States is like a cancer eating up whole districts.

For instance, the so-called opioid crisis came about when pharmaceutical companies knowingly hooked people on opiate-laden painkillers in order to create a market. Like drug-pushers used to do, giving heroin to kids outside schools to create a “demand”.

With Moore’s documentary, what I imagined would be an attack on Trump is actually far more nuanced than anything so simple, turning out be as much an indictment of the Democratic Party as it is of Trump.

Or, more accurately, an indictment of the political elites of the United States, who are not unlike our own small political elites, characterised as they are by serving business, to the detriment of the people who elect them; while denigrating those who are poor in capital and in political representation.

This new breed of neo-liberal politician not only turns a blind eye to social injustice, but often actively and even knowingly, creates social injustice.

The deliberate lying that took place in the Democratic party to ensure that Hilary Clinton would get the nomination over Bernie Sanders, who actually had more support, was, according to the Moore film, morally sanctioned by the belief that a woman “deserved” to be president at last.

So, they cheated the system to promote Hilary at the expense, not only of Bernie Sanders and all his supporters, but also at the expense of the integrity of the democratic party and the integrity of the democratic process.

This deliberate deception, along with Obama’s visit to Flint, Michigan in early 2016 to address the problem of lead poisoning that came in the wake of the privatisation of the water supply, contributed to an increasing lack of faith among the electorate in the democratic process.

What happened in Flint was that after the water supply was privatised, a contract was then put out to build a new pipeline. A new pipeline wasn’t really needed, except to create a profit opportunity for a private contractor.

What this meant was that the Flint water supply, instead of being drawn from a clean lake, was instead drawn from a polluted river while the new pipeline was being built.

As well as poisoning 10,000 children with ingested lead, the river also, it turned out, was damaging components in the local General Motors car factory. Metal components. General Motors complained and were given access to the clean water supply.

The people of Flint however, were left to drink from the lead-polluted water source. The majority of these people, by the way, are African American.

A distress call was sent to the black president who arrived on Air Force one. Some people wept on seeing him. Everything would be okay now. He would stand with them surely against the Republican governor who had brought all this privatization misery and distress on the town. I was with them. I was a bit of a fan of Obama too and I totally expected some kind of happy ending.

What did Obama do? Standing at the dais to speak to and reassure the people of Flint, he asked for a glass of water. Not a bottle of water. By this time everyone in Flint was drinking bottled water. People yelled from the audience that he should drink bottled.

Obama took a sip from the glass of water brought to him. Not a big swallow, a careful sip. He minimized the issue. He said that he was sure that when he was a “kid” he might have picked at flakes of paint that contained lead, and eaten them.

He said in effect that there was no problem, and he flew away leaving behind an entire town totally disillusioned with politics and democracy and the political elite who appear to, no matter what they might say, serve business interests only and damn the ordinary people with neglect.

Weeks later, for reasons not fully explained by anyone, except one soldier who conjectured that Flint had a lot of empty and derelict buildings, the US army conducted training manoeuvres in Flint, using live ammunition, without having consulted the town of their intention to do so.

Helicopters flew low over the town firing guns. Mortars and rockets exploded into derelict buildings. The impression given was that the US government, even before Trump, was already gone rogue and was now a tool of corporate America, to the exclusion of all other considerations.

These two events, taken together, the side-lining of Bernie Sanders to promote Hilary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, and Obama’s betrayal of the people of Flint over the poisoning of their water supply, conspired to create an environment of political complacency among the electorate, combined with a more generalised anger at the political establishment, that had the effect of catapulting Trump into office, with perhaps some help from Russian hackers.

The documentary implies that Trump would never have been elected if the Democratic party hadn’t been so elitist as to alienate its own electoral base by placing feminist aspirations above democratic integrity. Cheating the democratic process in the name of a perceived good or righteous cause is still cheating.

Moore’s startling conclusion is that the Democratic party were the first to depart from democratic principles which gave rise to Trump.

Obama’s mockery of Trump’s presidential ambitions in the growing climate of political disillusion can’t have helped; while his downplaying of the polluted water supply in Flint would not have gone unnoticed by poor black communities across the country.

What Moore’s documentary showed was that the political establishment is already lost to corporate influence, as it is here and in most democratic countries, as detailed in Joeseph E. Stiglitz’s “The Price of Inequality”. In this case the price was Trump in the White House and all subsequent costs, including deliberate environmental devestation.

What Michael Moore’s disturbing documentary demonstrated was that the corporate overlords really don’t give a damn about the well-being of normal people or the environment. That there is no argument or revelation of injustice that will change their approach.

The chilling conclusion is that they know exactly what they are doing. It’s not a mistake or an oversight. They will kill to have their way. That, ultimately, is what privatisation truly means. It’s not a game. They’ll have our skins for lamp-shades if they believe there’s a market for them.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist, His column appears here monthly.

From top: Noel Edmonds on The Ray D’Arcy Show; Master of the High Court Edmund Honohan on Prime Time; Eamonn Kelly

In 2016, Edmund Honohan, Master of the High Court, offered a solution to the growing homelessness crisis in an open letter to the then environment minister, Alan Kelly, who had called for a debate about property rights as defined in the constitution.

As I understand it, there seemed to be a belief at the time that the question of property rights guarded against the government acting to acquire property in the interests of the constitutional “common good”.

Mr Honohan wrote:

“The Constitution in effect provides that the State may expropriate private property if the Oireachtas decides that to do so is for the ‘common good’. Road widening is a good example… At the moment there are long waiting lists for housing and the private rental market is unable to provide dwellings at affordable rents…Consequently, if the Oireachtas is of the view that the State should itself (or its local authorities) provide public housing ‘in the Common Good’, the State can (and probably, legally, should) decide not to wait the two/three years needed to build social housing but instead to immediately acquire houses now in private hands.”

So that’s that clarified. Honohan anticipated that the response to his suggestion would be to make it a football and kick it back to the supreme court to decide.

But it seemed the supreme court had already decided, in 2000, that “the provision of affordable housing is an objective which is ‘socially just and required by the common good’.”

So, there was no grey area. No humming and hawing, no debate required. It was quite clear. The government had constitutional leeway to provide social housing, and that any failure to do so, according to Honohan, would be a political decision.

As we know, it was decided by government to ignore this solution and to allow the homelessness crisis to fester, in a move seen by many as engineering social neglect to generate profit for certain sectors.

But legally, according to Edmund Honohan, there was no reason why those families should have been left in private hotels in the years of government inaction that have since passed.

Since then Honohan continued to be a vocal opponent on behalf of people adversely affected by the housing and mortgage crises.

The Journal reported that in recent years, Honohan has become known for his strong views on the treatment by financial institutions of debtors in distress.

He has been particularly vocal in relation to possession cases, often engaging in…

“…heated exchanges with barristers representing lenders…He has also written a bill sponsored by Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness, the Affordable Housing and Fair Mortgage Bill. The bill includes a number of proposals for tackling the number of households struggling with mortgage arrears…

He also recently wrote to Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, reminding him that it is his job in opposition to call out the vulture funds that are buying up distressed home loans…”

In a report from June 2017, writing in a personal capacity, he outlines the significance of the effect of the growing number of repossessions.

These are coming about as a result of the banks managing to sell off accounts in arrears, many of which are the result of the sub-prime mortgage phenomenon that triggered the banking collapse. These accounts are being bought up by private agencies known as “vultures”.

Mr Honohan writes:

“The crisis is not that these people are heavily in debt, it is that when they are eventually evicted…there will still be no public housing for them…”

He conjectures that many of the loans taken out during the boom were taken out for two reasons: one, the banks were pressing money on people at that time, to the extent that it was difficult not to take out a loan; and two, there was insufficient social housing for people who may, in wiser times, have gone that route if there had been sufficient social housing.

The real sting in the tail in the report is that the tax-payer will now pick up the tab for the evictions; including policing costs, legal costs, transport costs, and so on.

Again, Honohan offers legal remedies to avoid all this pain, including ways to keep people in their houses despite the debt.

He offers comparisons with other jurisdictions and solutions to similar problems found elsewhere.

It seems though that these suggestions were also ignored, and we know from the taoiseach’s recent admonition about the term “vulture funds”, along with his more general championing of privatisation, that he largely approves of the concept of private companies re-possessing homes and evicting people who will then, in the absence of a social housing programme, be accommodated in private hotels, all paid for by the tax-payer until such time as the market can deliver sufficient housing.

Put simply, the taoiseach’s privatisation programme and reluctance to provide social housing is beginning to seem more like a gamble, not unlike the banking gambles that preceded the 2008 collapse, and, is similarly, being underwritten by the tax-payer.

The taoiseach’s gamble is that the market will deliver housing, and the chips he has set down are the homeless people in the private hotels, making of the gamble something of a neo-liberal social experiment.

Let’s rephrase that again: The taoiseach’s gamble, or neo-liberal social experiment, is to be paid for entirely by the tax-payer, with further contributory costs in the form of stunted childhoods and broken families condemned to live for years in private hotels, along with further costs paid by low-income workers priced out of an increasingly restrictive private rental market, again as the consequence of a lack of social and affordable housing.

This month, Edmund Honohan, a voice for those anonymous debtors being forced from their homes, found himself at the centre of what seemed like some kind of comical trumped-up charge of vandalism.

When his requests for ventilation in the court where he works were seemingly unheard, he broke open some small windows with a hammer to freshen the air. The ventilation he had tired of requesting was then provided.

This might seem like a trivial matter, but shortly after this incident he was relieved of his duties in hearing debt cases.

Maybe it was felt he was too strongly opinionated in his opposition to the banks and the political class to offer unbiased service. Maybe he was punished for breaking windows? Or maybe he was simply politically silenced.

Who knows? No doubt that will be debated too, at length, sometime, somewhere. But David Hall of iCare Housing said that the decision was a bad day for debtors.

He added that Honohan was…

“…one of the few officials who have spoken the truth about banks’ behaviour and has tried to help those crippled with debt”.

Around the same time, in RTE, Noel Edmonds, the UK DJ who lost a fortune to the HBOS, a subsidiary of Lloyds bank, was telling Ray D’Arcy his story.

Mr Edmonds is seeking compensation from Lloyds. His combination of public figure status and his criticism of the bank has made him into a controversial figure.

Mr Edmonds claims that a whistleblower overheard the chief executive of Lloyds say that the bank would have to “crush” Edmonds to deter any other claims for damages.

At the mention of bank trouble, the audience seemed to murmur in approval, but Ray D’Arcy, seemingly keen to control the moment, said that it was different in Ireland. No Ray, it’s different for girls; but banks, like cars and neo-liberals, tend to be the same the world over.

Mr Edmonds pushed ahead and when he talked about jailing a few bankers, the Irish audience burst into loud applause. Mr Edmonds told of how the experience of losing his home, his marriage and 300,000 GBP in savings brought him to the brink of suicide.

When Edmonds mentions being driven to the brink of suicide, D’Arcy seems to murmur doubtfully.

This is quite a common response. I suppose it is assumed that if a person had tried to commit suicide and had done it “properly”, they would have succeeded, in which case sympathy would then be extended.Continue reading →

From top: Regina Doherty on ‘The Week in Politics’ last Sunday; from left: presenter Sharon Ni Bheolain, Ms Doherty, Stephen Donnelly and Martin Kenny; Eamonn Kelly

RTÉ television do a show called ‘The Week In Politics‘. I caught some of it by accident last Sunday. Sharon Ní Bheoláin was hosting.

Like many RTÉ journalists, Sharon doesn’t do anything as obvious as engage with the actual issue. Instead she occupies that favoured neutral ground known as “objectivity”, from where she basically just interrupts people as if for the heck of it.

There seems no pattern or point to her interruptions. She seems to take special pleasure in saying, “You have ten seconds!” to respond to a really complicated proposition.

Regina Doherty, sent by Fine Gael, decided to announce on this occasion that the nurses weren’t striking for more money.

This comment threw everyone, but Regina was very sure of her ground.

Stephen Donnelly, Fianna Fáil spokesperson for Health, swung his head repeatedly in astonishment to stare in disbelief at Regina.

Next to him, Martin Kenny, of Sinn Féin, spokesperson for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, had his groundings visibly challenged.

But Regina’s claim that the nurses weren’t going on strike for more money, had at its core, a small basis in logic. In other words it wasn’t entirely insane, it was just deliberately unhelpful.

Here’s how it works. Since the nurses agreed to a pay deal a couple of years back, which will be honoured, Regina concluded that the nurses, by accepting that agreement, were already “happy” with regard to money.

So therefore they can’t be striking for more money, since they are “happy”.

It might be more accurate to say, if someone had thought to say it, that the nurses are striking for more funding, to increase staff and to have a fairer wage for all.

Regina made her absurd claim about the nurses, twice, before Stephen Donnelly politely asked Sharon for permission to speak.

He said: “This is twice Regina has said this and I really have to pull her up on it.” To which Sharon replied, “You have ten seconds”.

Then someone found a clip of Leo Varadkar talking about the nurses and the strike and the money.

We can’t afford to give the nurses more money, said Leo, neatly contradicting his minister for employment affairs and social protection, who peered through her glasses like a bewildered child in a crowded Specsavers.

We have to hold onto that money, said Leo, in case Brexit goes wrong in a few weeks time, and we also need it for housing.

But no one noticed the inconsistency. The initial absurdism was now twisted into a fresh absurdism by Leo’s assertion that the nurse’s strike is morally irresponsible given the need for housing.

Suddenly it was all over. We were right out of time. And nothing was clear. Nothing had been resolved or clarified. If anything, the issue was in worse condition that it had been before Sharon and the panel got their hands on it.

Thank you, goodnight and up yours.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist

RTÉ: The Nurses Are Not Striking For More Money. Up yours (Eamonn Kelly)

From top: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection Regina Doherty; Eamonn Kelly

It seems that JobPath will be wound down sooner rather than later.

The first signs of its demise began In December 2017 when a report indicated that JobPath was ineffective in its stated aim of creating employment.

Then in June 2018 the Department of Social Protection (DSP) announced via the minister that JobPath participants could now apply for Community Employment (CE) schemes.

Prior to this the JobPath rule said that CE schemes were not “real” jobs.

Whether this change was to include placements on CE as JobPath “successes” to massage the stats, or whether it was a winding down of the entire JobPath programme and the wider privatisation drive of welfare services was not yet clear.

But then in October 2018 it emerged that 11,000 people who had completed the JobPath programme were re-referred for another go. The figure was later revised up to 15,000.

Questions were raised. Did this mean that Seetec/Turas Nua would receive another payment for the same “customers”?

The Oireachtas public accounts committee looked into the matter and Yes, was the eventual confirmation. Seetec/Turas Nua would be paid twice for unsuccessfully “processing” the same individuals.

Then, in December 2018, that quiet time when everyone’s mind is on Christmas, the taoiseach said in an interview that JobPath may be wrapped up.

He claimed that it had done its job, that there was now almost full employment, full employment that is of people who can’t afford to rent rooms.

But it was clear that JobPath had not done its job. In November 2018 The Comptroller and Auditor General, Seamus McCarthy, told the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee that only 7% of jobseekers who found work while engaged with JobPath were still in employment after 12 months.

But even that measly success rate is open to question.

There are numerous anecdotal reports of people finding jobs without the aid of JobPath, whose employers are then contacted by Seetec/Turas Nua employees to claim credit for the creation of the job in order to charge a fee from the DSP.

The current minister for social protection Regina Doherty reiterated a claim to the public accounts committee that she routinely makes, saying that JobPath is, (or “JobsPath” as she calls it, revealing a perplexing apparent lack of familiarity with her own paperwork) the most successful job activation scheme in the history of the State.

What she fails to mention, and what no one ever pulls her up on, surprisingly, is that JobPath is, strictly speaking, the only Employment activation programme in the history of the state.

“Unlike most OECD countries, Ireland has not yet developed full labour activation policy, but is under increasing pressure to do so.”

So says a paper published in 2010, “The politics of Irish labour activation: 1980 to 2010” by Mary P. Murphy from the Department of Sociology, NUl Maynooth:

According to this paper, JobPath was one of three available models for employment activation in Ireland:

“The Danish model of flexicurity (derived from the two words flexibility and security) aims to enable flexible transitions between work and unemployment: periods of unemployment are cushioned by generous welfare schemes and workers, while unemployed, remain work-active by participating in ALMPs.

The mutual obligations model promoted by the OECD (Grubb et al., 2009) recommends intensification of benefit-control activity for the unemployed and other benefit-recipient groups in a more coercive approach where moderate benefits are used to support compulsory education, training or labour market participation; intrinsic to this model is the political message it sends about the obligations of the unemployed.

The third model, active inclusion for all, is promoted by the European Commission as a holistic strategy that stresses work for those who can work and inclusion for those who cannot work. This is less work focused and avoids punitive conditionality or a narrow focus on getting people off benefits.

Rather, its three pillars focus on adequate income support, inclusive labour markets and decent public services, which strive to provide personal pathways to employment and/or social participation…”

Well, it’s clear for anyone who had even the briefest brush with JobPath that we didn’t get the Danish model. Of the three available models, the more punitive one was chosen by the Fine Gael-led coalition.

It seemed that the intention was simply to dump people off welfare at whatever cost, encouraging a new wave of emigration from Ireland while forging ahead with a ruthless privatisation programme across all public services.

Also, as Leo Varadkar’s welfare cheats campaign demonstrated, there seemed to be a clear intention to divide workers from jobseekers and to arrange a situation where one group condemned the other as dead-weights on the “economy”, as the state has come to be regarded. This in a context where the banks and so on were getting all the breaks.

The model is not unlike neo-liberal models at play elsewhere. Put bluntly, as elsewhere, the approach is basically the legalised pillaging of state resources by an exploitative elite served by an obsequious political class, and usually at the expense of poorer people.

Maybe it’s because the companies who do “punitive”, like Seetec/Turas Nua (Working Links) who had already cut their teeth in Britain tormenting the lower classes, that our government decided to take that option.

Continue reading →

From top: Ryan Tubridy interviewing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on the Late Late Show last Friday; Eamonn Kelly

Eamonn Kelly writes:

The problem with Ryan Tubridy’s interview approach is that he appears to be given a list of questions which he rushes through as if he believes that the object of the interview is to exhaust the list of questions. Once the questions are done the interview is over. Phew. Now the quiz!

The problem with this is that all the questions are taken as having equal weight and substance; there is no room to improvise – though Tubridy is far from being Robin Williams in terms of improvisation – and worst of all perhaps, there is no time afforded to the interviewee.

A few weeks back, even Mary Robinson, that paragon of patience, got a bit tetchy with Mr Tubridy’s interruptions; because, quite simply, they demonstrated that he wasn’t listening.

He was looking at his list, desperate to get to the end, so that he could do his more comfortable act of taunting the poor people of Ireland with baskets of bank-notes for a stupid money-drooling quiz.

Gay Byrne, like Michael Parkinson, knew that once you had them talking you let them at it. Mr Tubridy, on the other hand, seems to regard interviewees as obstacles between him and the completion of his list of questions.

The interview last Friday with Leo Varadkar should have been about one question and one question only: the 10,000 homeless people, parked in hotels at the taxpayer’s expense, as sacrifices to the market, in the hope of getting private investors to build houses to save Fine Gael having to go against its right-wing ideological principles by embarking on a believable social housing programme.

Mr Tubridy quoted Micheál Martin as saying that there was an upper middle-class resistance to building local authority housing.

Mr Varadkar looked pained, puzzled and bewildered at this one, denying there was any class prejudice in Ireland. Sure wasn’t he from Blanchardstown and now he’s taoiseach. Case closed. This, by the way, doesn’t count as evidence, since it is merely anecdotal.

Mr Tubridy wasn’t about to launch into a discussion on Ireland’s non-existent class structures, not with a quiz no more than ten minutes off; so, the exploration of alleged class prejudice in Ireland ended with Mr Varadkar implying with a look that maybe Micheál Martin was delusional.

Continue reading →

I always had this sense that the arts were being neutered and framed as “just for kids”, often presented in great big nursery colors as “harmless fun”. A device to get in touch with your inner child.

The proof is in the pudding as they say, as yesterday’s Irish Times article by Una Mullally shows when Dublin City council cancelled a literary event with a repeal the 8th theme. This coming shortly after the painting-over of Yes murals.

No sooner do the arts get a little political than they’re literally shut down.

There is also a short film called ‘Terminal ‘(above) doing the rounds about two women on the ferry to England which RTÉ has decided to shelve until after the referendum.

Now I understand that RTÉ as a public service broadcaster have to be seen to be impartial, but the church are reading the No side from the pulpits.

The Limerick Leader carried a report yesterday of the Yes position being likened to the Holocaust by a well known journalist speaking from a church pulpit; which, when you think about it, is an insult to both the Yes side, the Holocaust, Journalism and pulpits in general.

But what is RTÉ only a secular pulpit? God knows it is often used for that purpose.

‘Terminal’, politely deferred by the national broadcaster until after the referendum, is a valid artistic contribution to the referendum debate.In that respect it is arguably in the public interest to show the film.

Not showing the film at a time of its peak relevance is no different really than the no-sayers driving around in vans tearing down Yes posters.

Show the film RTÉ, for crying out loud.

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance writer