Political World
Trying to rescue banking inquiry from the wreckage

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com
After speaking to about half a dozen members of the parliamentary banking inquiry on Saturday, you’d be half expecting see Tom Cruise abseil from a helicopter onto the roof of Agriculture House on Kildare Street, as the theme of Mission Impossible 11 blared out.
What a mess the banking inquiry is turning out to be.
Ten days ago, the investigations team produced a draft report. It ran to 750 pages which was extraordinarily long.
Immediately, the members realised there was a problem of zeppelin proportions.
The word that has been bandied around is ‘not fit for purpose’.
Nobody outside the committee members has seen it but you can take it the assessment of the report just doesn’t toe the particular party lines.
There are some very smart people on the committee and they are full aware of the limits of the 2013 Act that set up parliamentary inquiries. When they say the draft report is deficient, you can take it they are not too far off the mark.
The headache the committee has it has to have the draft report completed by next Tuesday. The reason for this is there is a whole protocol that has to be followed. There are loads of formal and legal requirements that need to be fulfilled in order to get the report out on January 20.
That means the draft really has to be finished by next week.
Unless, that is, the committee decides to come back and work on the only week that they have marked free. That, of course, is Christmas week.
The notion of Eoghan Murphy and Joe Higgins, Pearse Doherty, Susan O’Keeffe and Michael McGrath eating turkey and ham in a Dublin hotel on Christmas Day is a live possibility. If they came back and worked that week they would have an extra week to draft the report – and from all accounts, they need it.
Everybody I spoke on the committee said the draft as presented was a mess. It wasn’t a case of revising it. It was a case of writing a new report, trying to salvage any parts of that report.
But having a week to write a report based on thousands of documents, 130 hearings, hundreds of hours of evidence, and dozens of witnesses sounds, well, like the plot for a (rather dull) Tom Cruise franchise movie.
But there you go, that’s what the committee has set out for itself to do. Two of its members, Eoghan Murphy and Susan O’Keeffe billeted themselves into Agriculture House all weekend with a “finalisation team” in an effort to rescue the whole operation.
“We put in a few hundred submissions to the draft report a few weeks ago,” said one member to me. “We can forget about them now. It’s all about getting something together.”
That’s going to be really hard to do. The Nyberg Report, (the Commission of Investigation into the banking collapse) ran to about 165 pages.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune
The fine art of good timing when it comes to elections

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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Connacht Tribune
Inch protest arguments are more subtle than Oughterard

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.
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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.
Connacht Tribune
Sinn Féin hunt for seats in ‘locals’ across Galway

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.