Following on from
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Another angle being mentioned in relation to the Martin/Ahern story is the GFA anniversary. That's going to get a lot of favourable coverage and having Ahern as part of FF will remind people of FF's part in the GFA and how FG made a mess of things under Bruton. The problem for Martin and FF is that the electorate still associates Ahern with the Mahon Tribunal and the bursting of the property bubble. SF will also benefit from the GFA anniversary and FF needs the positive coverage if it is not to lose seats in the next GE and the Locals/Euros.
Regards...jmcc
You seem to thnk that you are qualified to lecture journalists on Journalism and now you are waffling about reading newspaper articles and drawing the "right" conclusions. To paraphrase the words of Ricky Roma from the movie "Glengarry Glen Ross", why don't you buy us a pack of gum so you can show us how to chew it. Your analysis of Journalism is, in my opinion, non-expert. Your analysis of politics is, to say the least, unthinkingly partisan.
This is a very serious issue for FF and it keeps reminding the electorate of FF's past. It wasn't bad enough that Martin left the whole Troy Story thing fester for weeks but now he wants to rehabilitate Bertie Ahern. FF has, under Martin's leadership, lost its identity and become subservient to FG. FF seems to be tearing itself apart with an identity crisis but all you FFG supporters are focused on is SF. And there's still the Donohoe/McGrath issue to be resolved.
I have a feeling this last budget is a give away spend for all we will be spending over 90Billion next year that is an incredible figure for a population of a little over 5 million with less than half of that working. I have a horrible feeling FF/G are greasing up the ball for a horrible side ways hospital pass to the shinners. I dont like the shinners always voted FG but I fear there will be a split engineered between these 2 parties in the next 12 months as the finances are blown this last budget will be the last nice one for a long time and Mary Lou will be the one left to give the bad news for the next number of years. If I wasn't so disgusted by our political overlords I would be very impressed by their political nuance.
It id worrying that it was in the Indo because, at times, it can be the Daily Blueshirt. However, it is Hugh O'Conell rather than one of the other Indo jouros and it is quite a scoop. FF, under Martin, has essentially lost its identity (apparently a topic at the FF think-in) and has become completely subservient to FG. This might be an attempt to gain headlines for FF and to assert some kind of non-FG identity for the party. What it will remind the electorate of is that when things went to Hell in 2008 and people lost their homes and businesses, these FFers didn't suffer at all and got big payoffs and pensions.
When will FG learn that Leo's fixation on Sinn Féin is borderline unhealthy and unhinged?
The Tánaiste is now embroiled in a growing row after he said that some of the commission's recommendations were “straight out of the Sinn Féin manifesto”.
After Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he did not agree with those remarks, John-Mark McCafferty, the chief executive of Threshold, said the Tánaiste's tone and response to some of its recommendations was not helpful.
"I am stunned am stunned and disappointed," he said.
The housing charity boss questioned whether people would be willing to serve on government-appointed commissions in the future if this was how senior politicians responded to their findings.
He is after rattling a number of cages today with that comment, he's a serious dead weight to the party. Varadkar will be the main reason FG will get absolutely obliterated in the next election. He's toxic.
Leo said FF have pulled their taxation and welfare budget straight out of SF manefesto. Interesting
https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2022/09/15/taoiseach-disagrees-with-tanaistes-sinn-fein-comment-about-taxation-report/
Ah I forgot about the president angle. Still very poor optics for FF.
The message to the electorate is that no matter what FF TDs do at the taxpayer's expense, they will eventually be welcomed back to the trough with open arms.
It is Martin and he had Troy standing beside him for those photo-ops at that FF think-in. This is a few magnitudes higher in terms of cluelessness. While Ahern might still have some support among a small group of FF supporters, this could be another stage of rehabilitating Ahern to be FF's candidate in the presidential election.
No. I was discussing housing not being built and a person referenced left parties blocking LPT. You responded in that series of comments.
The current and last number of governments have failed at housing. I'm glad some of them are aware the LA's play a roll. Progress.
The reason Revenue got to collect LPT is because it was blindingly obvious that LAs were incapable of it.
Yeah right.
The reason Revenue was brought in was because FG/Lab govt didn't cod enough fools with their "Free €100" registration sham for the then HHC, and because of a massive boycott of it, and LPT to begin with, it had NOTHING to do with the LAs being capable of not, of implementing the haimes created by the govt.
Bit of revisionism there if ever I seen it.
That last claim is really of your own making. LPT has always been for general council funding and they retain 80% of it. There are billions available for building now above and beyond council expenditure. BTW I agree on the Minister but what else can they do? I recall Kenny laying into LAs a good few years ago about this but if people are incapable or not minded you might as well be talking to the wall.
The latest shiny plan now acknowledges this problem and has split the responsibility between LAs at 53% and 47% from HAs for social and cost rental builds.
Here's a summary of what the government/department is responsible for on housing
The government is helping local authorities and developers to plan and build better and more houses for people to live in.
This involves working with other public, private and voluntary bodies to:
The reason Revenue got to collect LPT is because it was blindingly obvious that LAs were incapable of it. Rent is only one example, parking fines are haphazardly collected, at barely 50% in some places, and 30% of commercial rates can remain uncollected in some councils. TBH on rent we'd nearly be better off with private HA as they have very clear rules on non-payment!
As for the staff, most have not been exposed to that concept of KPI and how work matters and there is little sign that it will change any time soon in some councils. I disagree on the government input, apart from general policies, and unless a county proposes to turn out enough housing for a new Tallaght they are free to plan as they wish, they just haven't. They may have had funding complaints in the post-Troika days but there is absolutely no excuse now.
And another gentle reminder that councils are run day to day by an executive and CEO/County Manager. Councillors from the various parties just do other "important" things like rejecting permission for some housing and they seem more keen on defunding a council!
Both FF and FG can do what they like. They support each other in everything.
So if the LA's have a housing project they need the minister of housing and LA's who we hear tell isn't responsible for anything. Strange set up.
So LPT isn't used for large projects like building social and affordable housing as claimed. That's what I'd thought. Lack of LPT isn't why they don't build social and affordable.
The local government fund or LGF is part of what many councils largely use to fund themselves. They have no direct access to the Exchequer billions and the LPT Revenue collects is paid into the LGF.
80% of LPT is retained locally in 2015 and 2016 to fund vital public services. The remaining 20% is re-distributed to provide additional funding to certain local authorities that have lower property tax bases due to the variance in property values across the State. Councillors can agree to reduce the LPT by up to 15% so you can easily see where funding issues arise.
You can see the LA funding breakdown on this page.
Fianna Fail brought in regeneration, which meant 100% social housing estates were demolished and replaced with private builds 10% social. Then both FF and FG pretty much stopped building social and affordable. These are directives that come from government. An LA cannot simply decide to build a few hundred social houses, without heavy input and funding from government. Planning is rotten, always was.
The council administrative staff are not a special breed. They have to work within the boundaries set. The rent areas is not mostly people not bothering to pay rent, but household incomes having changed and the rent rate, (on these 'free' homes) not following suit. It's not as simply as the council being owed money and not bother to collect. Also the councilors are from FF/FG/Green/SF/PBP?Lab and so on. The government have a lot of pull and authority in how the LA's function.
Can you support that claim? Government keep telling us there's a surplus of billions.
Wow. What are FF thinking !!?? Self destruct mode?
I for one would welcome the move 😉
Did the Mahon tribunal actually happen in the FFG universe ???
New Politics
You might think so if you just read the headline and stopped there. However, reading further down and into the details of what he said, your conclusion is over the top.
Imaging being this out of touch with the common people. I imagine aul Bertie himself has no intention of leaping onto a sinking ship but this is treacherous stuff from the Taoiseach.
It's a more common spectacle to see councils reduce LPT every chance they get to the point that the CEO has to warn them not to because it will screw up the budget. Now, if councils would actually collect all the commercial rates and rent owed they might find their finances on a more even keel.
Woeful stuff.
Admittedly, it is the Indo and Hugh O'Connell but the story is quite mind boggling.
I suppose that after having Troy standing beside him for the think-in photos, Martin doesn't see anything wrong with Ahern rejoining FF.
The housing and homeless issues are larger in Dublin.
Limerick has the Civil War parties in power jacking on an extra 15% to the base LPT rate, yet the same crisis exists in Limerick as it does in Dublin... Can you explain that with your logic?
The government are the ones who have to take the final hit as there is really no sense in pointing the finger at the LAs.
We do have a certain level of devolved local government here and housing and housing planning is a core LA remit. Councils are both administrative and legislative. Personally have little time for the shape throwing councillors with delusions of grandeur. Few have any real ability beyond telling people who they are!
The administrative side of it is pretty poor in the vast majority of LAs and that's where the work is supposed to get done. It's not entirely their fault, it's a culture that has existed forever. One simple example of that is the €200m+ in outstanding rent for LAs, nationally.
How well they do things is down to the CEO/County manager and again here councils are not well served. One important function they do have is to enforce a budget when the squabbling councils just can't agree on anything. I know Keegan in DCC has had to do that a number of times and others have had to intervene too. One of the best functioning councils in the country is Fingal and that is because Paul Reid went in and reformed it entirely.
So are governments to blame? To an extent yes on overall public housing policies that date back to the seventies when we adopted the Thatcherite council homes sell-off and stopped building enough to replace them. Councils also began to lose any internal skills they had to make that replacement. In our current version of the problem we were starting from a very low base given that there was little to no building of any kind post-2008 until roughly 2016.
Money did begin to show up then in very large quantities for public housing construction but time and again LAs missed their agreed targets. I tend to see a lot of this current effort as a mismatch between what might be a good plan being assigned to people who just can't deliver it properly.
They certainly know how to waste money and corruption is widespread.
Council chamber secrets: Misconduct, falsehoods & waste (rte.ie)
Council chamber secrets: Misconduct, falsehoods and waste
Local government was a key focus of the Mahon Tribunal's work. The public was promised that political reform in this sector would be swift and emphatic.
The then-Minister for Housing and Planning, Jan O'Sullivan, said that the report's recommendations would be implemented "to ensure such behaviour can never, ever happen again".
Her government colleague, Phil Hogan, the then-Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, said he would examine the report and "take whatever further steps are necessary to restore and underpin confidence and transparency in the local government system".
The Mahon Report recommended various changes to legislation concerning local authorities, including the tightening up of rules about conflicts of interests, enhanced reporting requirements for councillors and public officials, and increased powers of investigation for the Standards of Public Office Commission.
Our investigation details failures in the local government sector, including allegations of employee fraud, false accounting, the misleading of other public bodies in grant applications, and the shocking waste of taxpayers' money.
In our analysis, two predominant themes persist in the local government sector.
One is the lack of accountability. Another is the persistent absence of real transparency.
In 2015, the prospect of ethics law reform was on the political agenda when a proposed piece of legislation, the Public Sector Standards Bill, was presented to the Dáil.
Under this legislation, a new Office of Public Sector Standards Commissioner was proposed, in addition to various other reforms that had been initially recommended in the Mahon Tribunal.
The commissioner would have the power to initiate investigations, even in the absence of a complaint. (Currently, the Standards in Public Office Commission can only initiate inquiries upon receiving a complaint.) It would also have powers to impose fines.
"For the first time, a uniform framework of ethical regulations will apply at national and local level in Ireland," said Brendan Howlin, the then-Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, in a Dáil debate in January 2016.
"There will now be a consistency of approach to ethical obligations across the public sector and, in a new departure, overarching integrity principles for public officials will be enshrined in legislation."
Of course, all of this sounded promising. But progress on the legislation later ground to a halt.
In August 2017, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe wrote to the Oireachtas Finance Committee to warn that it was "essential that the Committee now quickly moves" to schedule the completion of thecommittee stage of the proposed legislation.
Mr Donohoe said that this was necessary because of the "public interest in implementing the recommendations" of the Mahon Tribunal.
But this request had little impact.
When asked for an update on the legislation in June 2019, an Oireachtas official replied that the Dáil term was due to finish the following month and that "All our remaining meetings are fully accounted for, and there are no plans to deal with this Bill in the remaining time".
The delays continued, and once the 2020 General Election was called, the bill died.
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The FFG governments completely to blame for lack of reform and accountability.
New Politics.
The problem in the Dublin authorities is that the left-wing parties keep voting down the LPT so the councils don't have enough funding.
That's my point, so you always hold the LA responsible I take it, good or bad?
The councils are made up of the same political parties. I don't believe FF and FG councillors operate in a vacuum separate from government. Stock fell over a long period. It's government policy that drives social and affordable. They have been pushing the private market route. They even have lower taxation for build to rents. There's a lot of cash available but it's not going towards social and affordable builds. The last four governments created the housing crisis. They failed at housing.
Governments create policies, strategies and plans but their implementation often depends on a lot of parts working together. If it's working well the government will claim all the success, if it's not they just have to take the hit for the poor outcomes from the likes of LAs.
The government, in this case, provide the cash and there really is lots of it available, LAs are otherwise autonomous. Their problems are multitudinous from poor planning ability to lacking the skills to actually build very much. Even if or when they get on top of this they'll have to keep at it to maintain the stock levels.
I'd rather monkeys and computers do it tbh.
