Political World
Vote of confidence in Perry is a sure sign of the high jump!
I will be surprised if John Perry is still a Minister of State when the Dáil resumes on September 18.
While all the public pronouncements of Government Ministers – including Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore – have pledged unstinting support, the tide has definitely turned against him.
Ministerial colleagues say privately that things don’t look too well for him… the controversy surrounding his personal debts are beginning to look like a “running sore” as one put it.
It’s like the chairman of an English Premier League club releasing a statement saying he has full confidence in the manager. Once that is issued, you be sure that as sure as night follows day that the manager is a goner.
Perry’s difficulty is that the crisis he has found himself in just can’t be explained away… well not in an easy way at the least. He obviously over-invested during the boom years and now the chickens are coming home to roost.
The reasons he got so much support when the judgement in favour of Danske Bank emerged was that he was not alone in his predicament. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of small to medium business people like Perry who expanded too much during the good years, over extended themselves, but are now paying the price.
That outpouring of sympathy from colleagues, including virtually all ministers, was in response to that. “It seemed like a plain vanilla business failure when first reported. Admittedly, more had come out since then which I didn’t know about,” said a minister to me in a text.
The first was that Perry owed the taxman a lot of money (€125,000) when he became Minister and it took a while (including a loan from a bank) for him to resolve that situation. So the first bit of explaining he will have to do is when and how he got a clean bill of health form the tax authorities and to ensure the public that he has no current issue with the Revenue Commissioners. He will have a bit of clarifying to do on that front.
Secondly, if Perry was Minister of State for, say, Housing, he would have no difficulties whatsoever. But he was Minister of State for Small Business. If you were to do a Venn diagram depicting Perry’s ministerial and business interests there would be a considerable overlap.
Back in April Perry as Minister was calling in the chief executives of Bank of Ireland and AIB, essentially asking them to explain their positions and policies on small and medium business, including those with distressed loans.
The Court papers showed that at around the same time Perry was telling Danske Bank that he knew Richie Boucher personally and was talking to the AIB at a senior level.
You can talk until the cows come home about Chinese walls but it gives rise to a perception of conflicts of interest. The court documents also show that Perry has other substantial loans.
All of this needs explaining and a lot of it. And once you get to that level of explanation you are in real difficulty – especially when your personal and ministerial interests are so intertwined – was he speaking to the head of the bank as a junior minister or as an individual seeking a loan or a rescheduling of debt?
This is an edited version of Harry McGee’s column. For the full version see this week’s Tribune here
World of Politics with Harry McGee
Academically, politics is described as a science. But in the real world, it’s more of an art – and one of the big decisions a Government has to make is to decide when to call an election.
Will they see out the full term, or will they go early – either to mitigate the damage they will ship, or to secure a victory before things go awry, or the economy takes a dip, or some kind of controversy erupts?
Timing is everything.
And there’s a bit of art to that – not to mention a lot of luck. If you call it early and win big, you’re a genius. If you call it early and lose, you are the political version of the village fool.
Charlie Haughey was a poor judge of the public mood. Twice he called snap elections and on both occasions they backfired. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in late 1979 and did not – technically – have his own mandate. He tried to remedy that by calling an election in 1981. But it recoiled. Ray MacSharry warned him not to hold it during the H Block hunger strikes when republican prisoners were dying each day. He did not listen to the advice and found himself out of office.
After his return to power in 1987, Haughey tired of presiding over a minority government that kept on losing votes in the Oireachtas (the opposition won nine private members motions).
So he called a snap general election and it backfired. Fianna Fáil lost seats and had to broker a coalition deal with the Progressive Democrats and his long-standing political adversary Dessie O’Malley.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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World of Politics with Harry McGee
I was cycling down Mount Street in Dublin on Tuesday. It’s a wide esplanade that links the Grand Canal with Merrion Square. The street is a mixture of fine Georgian buildings and modern office blocks.
About half-way down is the office of the International Protection Office, which deals with asylum seekers who have arrived in the country.
Needless to say, the office has been overwhelmed in the past year. Besides an estimated 80,000 refugees who have arrived from Ukraine, there have been about 20,000 people from other parts of the world who have arrived into Dublin (mostly) claiming asylum.
The numbers peaked around Christmas, but they have been falling a little. In January, more than 1,300 people arrived seeking asylum but the numbers fell back to 831 and 858, in February and March respectively.
They are still huge numbers in a historical context.
So back to my cycle on Tuesday. I knew that some asylum seekers were camping outside the International Protection Office, but I was taken aback by how many. There were six tents lined up on the pavement directly outside. Then on the ramp that led down to the basement carpark on the side of the building, there were about another 20 tents.
It looked like what it was, a refugee camp in the middle of Dublin’s business district. If you pan out from Mount Street, you will find tents here and there in nearby streets and alleys. There were a good few tents in an alleyway off Sandwith Street about 500 metres away.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
God that was a dramatic and historic weekend in England, wasn’t it? So much excitement, so much change, so much hype, so much out with the old and in with the new, and what looks like the coronation of a new leader. Yes, the local elections in Britain were something else weren’t they!
Apologies for not going on about King Charles III but the contract I signed when I became a lifelong republican forbids me to discuss the topic!
I know the British local elections sound a bit boring by comparison, but the results were stunning.
The Conservatives lost nearly 1,000 seats, the British Labour Party gained almost 500 and both the Lib Dems (with 350 gains) and the Greens (gaining over 200) also had amazing days at the polls.
It was Labour’s best day since 2002 but its victory was only partial. The Greens and the Lib Dems actually made gains at the expense of Labour in more affluent areas, and in parts of Britain where there were high numbers of graduates.
It was in the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England where the Labour recovery was strongest. These are working class constituencies with pockets of deprivation where people voted for the Labour Party forever. But all of those constituencies voted for Brexit and then voted for the Tories in the next general election. Labour is now winning back some of those votes.
Local elections are classified as second-tier elections which essentially means – from a national perspective – they are not life-or-death affairs, and not everything turns on them. Of course, it’s really important to have good local representation. But they are not an amazing weather vane for who rules the country.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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