Irish Political News

There’s an article in last months Prospect which is very very interesting indeed. Not so much because it’s correct in its general thesis, which I’m far from certain about, but rather because it illuminates some information about the new rich in Ireland and about the roots of that wealth and also provides a remarkable clarity as regards the perceptions by some of that wealth.

So it is we turn to “Lucre of the Irish”, by John Murray Brown, Ireland correspondent for the Financial Times [as it happens Mary Fitzgerald is Prospect’s editorial assistant, provides a riposte].

It argues that:

According to the historian Roy Foster, after centuries of misfortune, the Irish have finally got lucky. On most weekends you can see some of the luckiest at play at Ireland’s big racetracks—rough-handed farmer types, wads of notes at the ready, who arrive by helicopter with their well-dressed ladies and are as comfortable in the owners’ enclosure as in the company of the other punters pressed against the rails. On my last visit to the races, I saw one such man emerging from a corporate marquee, flute of champagne in one hand, pint of the black stuff in the other. It was a fitting image for Ireland’s new rich.

He continues that:

For the first time in Irish history, some of these racegoers have become, almost overnight, part of a big, indigenous moneyed class. In a population of just 4m, there are, according to Bank of Ireland, more than 30,000 euro millionaires—up from a few hundred 20 years ago—and at least 300 people worth over €30m. Almost all are self-made, and much of the money has been made in only a decade or so.

The reasons for the existence of such a ‘class’ is “a creation of the country’s extended economic boom and an associated leap in property values. The country entered the 1990s with an unusually benign combination of a growing, well-educated workforce and strong demand for labour, the latter the result of high levels of inward investment, much of it from the US, attracted by low taxes and light regulation…Average annual growth of 7.2 per cent over the past ten years has encouraged Irish expatriates to return home, and more recently Poles and other immigrants have maintained the growth rate of the labour force”. And the consequence of this apparently benign confluence is an ‘Ireland [with] the second highest per capita income in Europe (behind Norway), well ahead of Britain and the US.’

Brown asks about the nature of the ‘new rich’. He questions whether they are leaving a mark on business life, or are they simply speculators, are they philanthropic, what is their impact on the society and the self-perception of the nation? And he notes that in previous generations Irish people did make money, but usually by departing our fair shores. Interestingly he’s somewhat dismissive when he notes that ‘there is some old money in Ireland’. And intriguingly he contrasts the 30 odd year slog that it took the Smurfit’s and O’Reilly’s to gain global prominence as business people and the current crop who have managed to do so in barely a decade.

But he points to the fact that many of these new millionaires came from property and building and were ‘well placed’ when the economy began to expand in the early 1990s to take advantage of that expansion. He suggests that many are from rural backgrounds and that they have fewer ‘airs’ than previous generations of businesspeople. He doubts that many would accept a knighthood from the British monarch, like O’Reilly or Smurfit. Still, as he describes them it’s clear that whatever about the rural backgrounds, there is no lack of appetite for ferociously conspicuous consumption. He describes how Johnny Ronan of Treasury Holdings… ‘with his jet-black beard and long hair, is the industry’s most dashing “high roller.” ….after winning one bitter planning battle, he celebrated by flying 50 friends to Italy, where Luciano Pavarotti sang for them in the garden of his villa. A few years ago, he sent a voucher to his business rivals informing them that they had each had a Guatemalan pig named in their honour, as part of a fundraising effort by Trocaire, a Catholic charity. He is a keen huntsman and art collector, and owns a Humvee amphibious US army jeep as well as a €650,000 Maybach, described as “a Mercedes on steroids.”

And in truth no horny handed son of toil this, Ronan is the ’son of a wealthy Tipperary pig farmer, was privately educated, and after school trained as an accountant’.

Séan Mulryan of Ballymore Properties ‘likes to spend too…Debbie Harry performed at his 50th birthday party. He owns two executive helicopters, and racehorses and studs in both Ireland and France’.

And these are people who are intimately connected into politics. Brown notes that…’A tribunal looking into corruption in Dublin planning discovered Seán Mulryan paid 50,000 Irish pounds between 1994 and 1998 to Liam Lawlor, a Fianna Fáil deputy and Dublin councillor, although it found no evidence that this had influenced any decisions’.

What is troubling about the article is that it raises many interesting points, and also no small number of disturbing ones. Perhaps it is overstating the situation to compare our property tycoons with Russian oligarchs. And yet…”According to one estimate, six or seven businessmen own almost all the commercial property in Dublin. Such a concentration of ownership was probably last seen in the days before Irish independence. In those days Irish land was worth a fraction of that in England, but it now commands a large premium, despite Ireland’s much lower population density”

Then one might query the rather breathless presentation of all this, as if it was incontrovertibly a ‘good thing’. The rich are rich. They are a different sort of rich - although reading through the article they simply appear to be slightly better at hiding their wealth in some areas. Brown suggests that… “There is, of course, some excess. The rich Irish think nothing of flying to the US for a weekend of shopping, and party invitations among the elite now routinely include longitude and latitude details for the benefit of incoming helicopters. But many of the new rich are from humble origins, and aware of the offence that flaunting their wealth can cause. “You won’t see any boats in Irish marinas over 60 foot. Not that they don’t own them, but they keep them elsewhere,” reports one financial adviser”.

So, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Brown also suggests that while there is a left wing critique the left parties (Labour and Sinn Féin) have not ‘performed well in recent years’. He notes that there is an increase in the growth of inequality, but then argues that Ireland has always been closer to Boston than Berlin. And here he makes some serious points…”Ireland has no universal health service: nearly half of the population has private medical insurance, and less than 30 per cent are covered by the state-funded “medical card,” which entitles holders to free care”. But he also locks into a discourse which is often used by the cheerleaders of new elites, an assumption that the newcomers are somehow supplanting old elites of middle and upper class. So we are told that:

One group that is often disdainful of the new rich is Ireland’s old elite of mainly Dublin-based senior civil servants, lawyers, journalists and artists. According to David McWilliams, this group is showing a renewed interest in the Irish language, and sending its children to the Dublin Gael schools, where the teaching is in Irish, as a means of distinguishing themselves from the brash newcomers.

Then there is the other discourse where a sort of petty-nationalism is displayed to somehow ‘justify’ business - a sort of Clausewitz-like notion of commerce as war by other means… note the following:

There has clearly been a political aspect to this—although it has not been much noticed in Britain. In 2004, Derek Quinlan, a former Irish tax inspector, paid £750m for the Savoy Group of hotels in London. Like other big foreign deals, this was reported in the Irish media as a matter of national pride. Indeed, Quinlan recalls that an Irish employee at the Connaught Hotel, part of the Savoy Group, ran the Irish tricolour up the hotel’s flagpole when the story broke. “It was put up without my knowledge,” he said. “But I cried. My poor father, who was in the Irish army, would have loved to have seen this.”

And in a sense this brings us to the heart of the article, a sort of breathless approach to the issue, one where extravagant wealth becomes ‘explained’, whatever the evident inequalities (or if one prefers, egregious disparities) that it engenders, by nationalism, anti-elitism and so on and so forth. That this wealth does not appear in a vacuum, or indeed that it in itself generates new elites is forgotten in an analysis which can - for consistency - only regard the present and recent past, not the future.

Part of this explanatory discourse is to look towards that one area where wealth can be seen to be seen in a somewhat softened light - by some. That is, public philanthropy. The article ponders on the question as to:

What about the accusation that the new rich are not putting money back into society or culture, in the manner of rich philanthropic Americans? “There is a gangster charm about some of the property people,” says Michael D Higgins, foreign affairs spokesman for the Labour party and a former arts minister. “But what I regret is they haven’t the imagination to fund an orchestra, or a piece of public sculpture.”

But others in the arts and education worlds say the new rich are generous donors. In 2005, Martin Naughton, founder of Glen Dimplex, an electrical appliances company, donated €5m towards a new nanoscience research institute at Trinity College, and last year his company began sponsoring a new set of literary awards. Mick Wallace, Wexford-born founder of Wallace Construction, has funded the rebuild of Dublin’s New Theatre. Michael Colgan, director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, says it is a matter of how you approach the new rich: “They are not the sort of people who want to sit on cultural committees and feel patronised. With these guys you take them out to lunch and they will sign a cheque for €50,000. It’s not because they love theatre, but they see the Gate as part of an Ireland they want to feel proud of.”

And how can we judge, really? Is Higgins correct or is Colgan? Note too another narrative of blunt hardy folk who don’t want to feel ‘patronised’.

And pride in Ireland is a fluid thing. Bono and his cohorts prefer to have their tax affairs routed out of the country. The pragmatism of the wealthy overcomes any residual pride. Another twist on the nationalist narrative one might argue. And here the piece is very explicit:

They are using their money to make a statement—and the statement is that Ireland has arrived. Consider the sponsorship of Goffs Million, a race invented by the Irish bloodstock auctioneers in the 1980s. The original idea was to get buyers into the company’s sales ring, because only those yearlings bought at the previous year’s sales could compete in the race. It became one of the richest events in European racing. The first sponsor was Cartier, the French jeweller. Today the race carries the name of a hotel, the Parknasilla, owned by Bernard McNamara, a county Clare property developer.

I often reference Donald Horne, and he has some interesting things to say about how elites generate ‘myths’ to support their hegemony. Here we have a perfect example. The self-referential aspect of it all is evident. We have arrived as a state/society/nation because we now sponsor Goffs Million. Note the necessity to use numerous axis on which to project this ‘achievement’, because really, which one is it? And perhaps more importantly ‘we’ haven’t, and sponsoring Goffs, while no doubt cheering to those doing so, has no specific reference to the broader group termed ‘Irish’. Indeed to even posit in such terms is to ignore the divisions both political and otherwise which lead many to consider developers as a group within Irish society in a far from uncritical fashion.

And it is also supremely contradictory - as, admittedly, all things are - because it then moves to a conclusion that argues that:

On the other hand, relations between Ireland and Britain, and particularly between the Irish and the English, have probably never been better. As the Irish increasingly look beyond Britain, they have become less chippy about their relationship with their giant but often insensitive neighbour. “The Irish inferiority complex has disappeared and the British superiority complex has been weakened,” says [Garret] FitzGerald. Of course, he adds, relations will never be truly equal and Britain continues to cast a big cultural shadow over Ireland—British television, for example, is ubiquitous. “You can’t have equality between 4m and 60m. But there’s certainly less inequality.”

The article argues that:

One consequence of all this is that the Irish are now looking at themselves differently. The image of humble but poetic Catholics living in the shadow of the stiff and snobbish Protestant English is no longer meaningful on either side, even as caricature. The nation of “saints and scholars” has shown over the past decade that it has a genius for business too.

One of the great - and sometimes not so great - aspects of living a while is that you tend to notice how everything comes back in one form or another. I’ve spent a fair tranche of my adult life hearing how the “Irish are now looking at themselves differently”. In the late 1980s as we attracted expanded multinational investment we were ‘changin’. In the early 1990s it was football. Our anything but victories were evidence of a new ‘pride’, a new ’sense of success’. Then it was economic growth. Our cities, filled with the drunken laughter of our then young folk - well, my laughter as well at the time - demonstrated a ‘new Ireland’. Our shiny new divorce law indicated our society was more ‘generous’. Our skylines indicated a future written in the steel gridwork of cranes. And now, as boom flattens, perhaps even tanks, we finally ‘look at ourselves differently’. That’s twenty years of holding a mirror to our faces. I’m far from convinced by such narcissistic tropes.

And lest this seem like a carnival of begrudgery, let me note that it is on our watch - and by this I mean the contemporary Irish left, that such excess has manifested itself, that we have seen a degradation of our public services by those who pay them lip service, largely for electoral ends. That the wealth has not been turned, by any serious effort on the part of state or government, towards the public good. That however much talk there is of this having a ‘nationalist’ hue that simply does not appear to transfer in any meaningful way to our society, or in any clear way to solving the societal ills. That - even if we attempt to deal with this group indirectly - the revenue streams generated by the activities of many of those listed above (and let’s not forget those who work for them) have been squandered. That we still have no universal health insurance, no proper state education system and no proper pension provision. What a waste. But what on earth has the left been doing, what vision has it articulated, what connections has it made with the actual - as distinct from an idealised version of - the Irish people? Because, when it comes down to it, however much the excessive aspects of new wealth are concealed - and I’d have my own mind as to how successfully - the existence of such extremes of wealth are simply not questioned by the broader society. And that has to be in part our fault.

“Say what you want about him,” Pa Little declared over the breakfast table on the last day of my Christmas sojourn at the Little family compound, “but John Waters hit the nail on the head this time.” With Mrs Little, whose feminist inspired opinion of Mr Waters’ teachings is generally littered with expletives, on one side of him and me on the other it was a curiously provocative thing for my generally mild-mannered father to say but he was referring to this piece (Sub required) by Waters in the Irish Times following the death of Joe Dolan.

Waters describes Joe Dolan as:

“….one of a handful of key figures in a social movement that transformed Ireland while setting out with more modest ambitions.”

And further on:

“The showband/dancehall explosion of the 1960s and 1970s was the most radical and effective force in the breaking of the conservative monolith of post-Famine Irish Catholicism, which, by losing touch with human reality had reduced religion to a form of policing. Showbands were about music and entertainment in much the same way that Bewley’s was about coffee. Fundamentally they were about sex, about meeting, romancing and mating, and about extending to the first Irish pop generation the kind of freedom purveyed in the international arena by Elvis, Dylan and the Beatles.

“The 7/6 or 50 pence you paid to be admitted to the ballroom was not simply a tariff on the entertainment, or even a levy on floorspace, but an instalment on a licence to have a love life without attracting more than cursory notice. It was a nominal tax on freedom and one we gladly paid. (Part of the blame for our poor sense of history must be placed on the unctuously disingenuous nature of most of the chronicles of this era by those who were there. If you want to know what was really going on, read Derek Dean’s recent book, The Freshmen Unzipped .) Far more than Gay Byrne or Nell McCafferty or David Norris or Mary Robinson, men like Joe Dolan revolutionised Irish attitudes to, in a word, sex.”

Pa Little grew up the only son of a small farming family in a tiny village in rural Ireland. Radio was still a relative rarity for the Little family who couldn’t afford to have one. A trip to the big town was rare. A trip to the city unheard of and a trip to Dublin filled with romance and mystery. Most of his schoolmates emigrated and those that remained behind bore the full weight of the Roman Catholic Church and its intolerant attitude to sex.

And then, came the showbands. Joe Dolan is perhaps the most successful. But Pa Little saw most of them. Big Tom, (Both before and after his split with the Mainliners, at the time one of the biggest events ever in Irish showbusiness), the Miami Showband, Dickie Rock and all the others. Ballrooms sprang up in rural towns across the west and the midlands and young people for whom prior to this the pint after mass or the GAA was the only source of amusement had something else to look forward to.

Young men and women had an opportunity to mingle, to talk to each other and to have sex that had never occured to them before. Pa Little remembers one evening where he watched the local Canon jumping into the ditch along the road from the bandhall to the main street to physically haul out courting couples.

For those of us reared in the 80s and 90s, and generally in urban environments, it is difficult maybe for us to fully understand what the showbands and what Joe Dolan and others like him meant to people like my father. To describe him, as Waters does, as a ‘liberator’ strikes one initially as being completely over the top but the more I think of it, the more he might deserve it as much as any of the feminists, academics or TV celebrities often credited with dragging the country kicking and screaming into the 20th century some six decades after it began.

It’s probably in poor taste but I can’t help compare the passing of Joe Dolan and the passing of Katy French. As human tragedies there is nothing to choose between the other. Two families lost a loved one and it would be obscene, regardless of the circumstances of their passing, to make a comparison on the grief of their families. But I can’t help but note it was to Joe Dolan’s funeral that several thousand ordinary Irish people flocked to and to Katy French that the media darlings, and hence the media coverage, went to.

It’s a shame to realise that there’ll never be another ‘Joe Show’ again.  

The Irish Times has an interesting piece today (Sub required) with Justice Minister Brian Lenihan laying out his priorities for the year to come in an interview with former left-wing revolutionary turned Irish Times Legal Affairs correspondent Carol Coulter. The interview flags up the forthcoming Immigration and Residence Bill and points to the benefits this will have in the area of human trafficking, two items I intend to return to in coming weeks as it happens. But it is the proposed DNA database, which is dealt with at the very end of the article that struck me:

“However, he said legislation on a DNA database was coming. “Admissions are declining as a source of convictions. Science will play a greater role. I will be bringing proposals on a DNA database to Government. “People who are convicted will have their DNA taken. But I think there is a reason for a much broader database - not on a compulsory basis, but we could promote people voluntarily giving DNA. That could exclude people who innocently left traces at a scene.”"

Ahh….voluntarily.

Little has been heard of this proposal since last August when the Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) issued its observations on the Criminal Justice (Forensic Sampling and Evidence) Bill 2007, which aims to establish just such a database. The IHRC makes clear its concerns about the human rights implications of such a database not being understood by the wider public and points to a lack of safeguards in the existing legislation. Two aspects of the legislation in particular terrified the Hell out of me when I first read it.

The first was that DNA samples provided would be held indefinitely. So, hypothetically, I decide in the interests of assisting the Gardaí to provide my DNA to rule me out as a suspect in a case where a rape took place at a party I attended. It saves the police time in considering me a suspect and from my point of view eliminates me as a suspect saving me time and grief. Yet though I gave my DNA for this specific reason, my DNA can be stored indefinitely. With increased EU level legislation around the sharing of data held by police and security forces such as the proposals on air passenger data retention, it is likely that at some point my DNA could be transferred to police forces outside of this jurisdiction if they felt it was necessary. Indefinite retention of DNA samples is not the international or European norm. And if, by the way, I choose to exert my right not to give a sample, does this make me more of a suspect? One assumes it does in practice whatever about in legal theory. Yet rights not exercised can fade away, overtaken by the ‘practice’ on the ground.

The second is that under the Bill the Forensic Science Laboratory can out-source or delegate responsibilities around the creation of the database to other parties inside or outside the state. In theory my DNA in the above case could be sampled by a person working for a private company hired by the Gardaí to carry out the taking of samples, sent to another private company who carry out the analysis and then stored with another private company who are responsible for the storage. There’s just no end to the gravy train for private companies being fattened up with the people’s money. Would these private companies be most concerned with ensuring my rights are protected or with maximising their profits by cutting corners? I think history can answer that for me.

And even if the proper safeguards are in place, what price incompetence? In November the British lost two computer discs with the personal details of every family with a child under the age of 16, containing the bank account and insurance details of a mere 25 million people. What price corruption? As we reported here in August Gardaí and other government officials routinely access confidential information which ends up in the hands of insurance companies, private investigators and the media.
The DNA database debate will, in all likelihood, be one that is ill-informed and hysterical in much the same way as the one on Anti Social Behaviour Orders, on which I remember no less a luminary than Gerry Ryan giving his two cents arguing that anyone opposed to them was supporting anti-social behaviour. But the IHRC, who are not opposing the idea of such a database, deserve to have their call for an informed debate heeded.

Beginning with a public apology to WBS for leaving him so long to carry the site by himself, something he is more than able to do I should point out. But the strains of moving house in December caused more than a little difficulty in the Little household.

It’s a pity, because when I read this fantastic story  where, as I’m sure people already know, Sinn Féin’s former Unionist Outreach official Martina Anderson argued that immigrants were the wrong sort of Catholics I would have given a great deal for a good broadband connection. Beneath the lunacy there is a serious point that nationalist areas continue to be more economically deprived than unionist areas and there is, I suppose, a legitimate concern that Polish immigrants might skew the numbers due to their ability to get jobs when the Sinn Féin voters of West Belfast cannot. But the manner in which it was made, and Anderson’s failure to realise that it is Sinn Féin’s habit of thinking along sectarian lines (Not the same, before the crypto-provos that I was amused to see inhabit the site descend on me, as saying it is a sectarian party) that created the problem in the first place.

It is difficult to think back to the position Sinn Féin enjoyed in the second week of March. They had just achieved another triumph at the ballot box in the Northern Assembly elections, managing to give the SDLP a kicking on one of their flanks, and a motley crew of alternative republicans a kicking on the other side. The party leadership had delivered an endorsement of policing by the members little short of unanimous and they faced into an election here in May with every chance of doubling their seats in Leinster House and livening up their Dáil team. There was an expectation of a dividend from Southern voters for the Assembly being re-established and the image of Paisley and McGuinness sitting down together drawing a line under so much of the negotiations impasse. If there was a slight cloud on the horizon political anoraks might have noticed Adams’ appalling performance on A Week in Politics the night of their Ard Fheis, but few people watched that show and surely they would have sorted out the problems, such as not knowing what tax rates his party was proposing, by the election.

And then, it all went horribly wrong and has been continuing to go wrong since. The election result in May has already been analysed to death but the party has lost a number of councillors since then in the South. Some for political reasons, some for personal ones and some for ‘personal’ ones. I reckon a number of people saw the bandwagon was running out of steam and decided to get off before it collapsed altogether. The DUP have bitch-slapped them around the place on the Irish Language Act, which the Shinners concentrated their attentions on while ignoring economic issues. Caitríona Ruane has proved an unmitigated disaster in education with her handling of the classroom assistants dispute set to enter the textbooks of administrations on both sides of the border about how not to handle an industrial dispute. Her proposed alternative to the 11+ is confused, scanty on details and poorly thought out. There is no sign of any momentum for devolution of policing powers and indeed the resignation of their Fermanagh/South Tyrone MLA and former Agriculture Spokesperson Gerry McHugh along with the refusal of Sinn Féin councillors in Strabane to sit on the Policing Boards shows that the anti-policing section of the party retains some pull. Conor Murphy hasn’t done a bad job on water charges, approaching it in a sensible fashion regardless of what the far left thinks, and Gildernew has managed to hold the fort in Agriculture as well, but there has been nothing spectacular from Sinn Féin in the North. Except for attacks on Margaret Ritchie of course, which seems to have a lot more to do with attacking the SDLP regardless of what they’re doing than anything else.
Down here, the party has reviewed itself thoroughly and decided that it did nothing wrong, or at least its leaderships did not. It is telling that despite Fine Gael’s success Kenny fired Phil Hogan and a question-mark remains over Kenny’s leadership. Rabbitte and the authors of the Mullingar Strategy in Labour have been cast aside. Sinn Féin’s upper leadership remains intact and the move of key northern activists like Declan Kearney into positions of authority in the party in the South suggests that Adams, having listened to the opinion of Southern members for the last six months has decided to ignore it and continue to centralise control in the mistaken belief that someone other than him, and he alone, is responsible for the party’s disastrous election campaign. The murder of Paul Quinn brought out the standard Sinn Féin approach of blackening the name of the victim with accusations of criminality that seem unproven. What seems more clear is the eager desire among their political opponents to hi-jack the Quinn’s case to attack Sinn Féin, but they would have no campaign to manipulate were it not for Quinn’s murder and how Sinn Féin handled it.

WBS has already looked at the coverage of the Sinn Féin conference and the only thing I would add to that is McDonald’s comment that Sinn Féin does not have an ‘open door’ policy on immigration is no policy shift. The Shinners, despite the accusations of far-right lunatics on Stormfront, have never had such a policy but the party’s strong support for immigrant rights has often seen them cast that way, though like WBS I don’t think it affected their election performance. What interests me is the conference in Dublin Airport, at which the press were not welcome, held a couple of weeks beforehand. Criticism of the leadership, and of Ruane’s performance in education in particular, was much in evidence and my Southern SF based source who attended was slightly surprised to see the extent of the internal criticism of Ruane from Northern colleagues.

For the Shinners, they have two opportunities to get themselves back in the game in 2008. The first is their Ard Fheis in March. The reality is that the party is still shaken and still lacks energy. The Ard Fheis is also the most likely time and place for leadership changes to be announced with members of the current leadership not contesting positions and newer, probably Southern, people being put forward for one or two of them. It will also be interesting to see if there are candidates against leadership choices for the main positions from the grassroots. If there are to be some of the serious internal reforms the party needs and have yet to appear, this is the place for them.

The second is the EU Reform Treaty. This brings me neatly to a favourite topic, which is the madness of Vincent Browne who argues at the back of the current edition of Village that Sinn Féin has not made its position on the EU Reform Treaty clear and it is his opinion they are likely to back it. Ahh Vincent, take thy head out from the Mahon Tribunal and read a paper. Sinn Féin’s party leadership, and McDonald & Adams in particular, have been making clear their intention to not simply oppose the Reform Treaty, but to lead the opposition to it. Most recent press statement from the party on it is here. What makes Browne’s error all the more mystifying is that the former Sinn Féin European Director Eoin O Broin now writes for his magazine. This referendum campaign gives Sinn Féin the opportunity to portray itself as the ‘real’ opposition to establishment centrist politics and even the possibility of fighting a winning campaign, which would be a massive boost to a party going into Local Elections in 2009, and European Elections where only a miracle will save their seat in Dublin.

As for the party in the North, it’s not my area of expertise but I suspect the DUP and the Northern Ireland Civil Service will be allowed to continue to drive the agenda on important issues while Sinn Féin shout about the Irish language or wrestle with the conundrum of whether Polish Catholics are ‘real’ Catholics or some sort of ‘provisional’ Catholic. There is an old saying that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King. Lacking such a person, I suspect for Sinn Féin in the North it will be whichever one of them has the stick.

A long way from the heady days of March 7, 2007.