Stephen Collins Champions Greyhound whilst comparing those against the Household Charges to Tax Cheats like Haughey February 18, 2012
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Uncategorized.trackback
Stephen Collins in todays Irish Times is as bad as it gets. He writes about those unhappy with the privatisation of bin services in Dublin (and elsewhere) and totally misses the point…
The attack by a variety of politicians on the private refuse company Greyhound for its refusal to collect the bins of defaulters is a bit rich. The reason the service has been privatised in the first place is because politicians made it impossible for the public authorities to enforce payment. Some openly encouraged householders not to pay, while others opposed the enforcement of the law by councils for fear of the bad publicity that might ensue.
The issue of Greyhound was covered on Pat Kennys radio show last week (you can listen here)
Is the problem with Greyhound (aside from the bigger fact that Bin Services were privatised at all which I have a big problem with) not the service or lack of that they provide. Then there was the timing.
For South Dublin County Council the payment was due in the aftermath of Christmas. There had been no annual charge prior to privatisation and suddenly hard pressed householders had to fork out the bones of €100 euro. That was the standing charge as well as some money in the account to cover the cost of the bin being collected. Even for many in work a surprise bill of €100 euro is difficult to find in January.
For myself bin collection dates were changed without informing householders.
As for the privatisation of Bin Services in Dublin City council, it seems they failed to take into account the number of households that rely on buying a tag for bags of rubbish as they do not have the facilities to store Green, Brown and Black bins.
WBS will be more familiar with other issues surrounding the service but by all accounts its been a shambles with no communication at all from Greyhound in many areas. The phone number provided by Greyhound isn’t exactly the easiest to get an answer from and when happen to get through I’ve heard of them being less than helpful.
Another issue raised by Pat Kenny was that with the Dublin City Council Refuse Services now privatised, it means that should the incinerator eventually get the go ahead Dublin City Council (having agreed to provide a certain amount of waste for the plant) will then have to buy back the waste from Greyhound and other operators to feed the incinerator!
Sheer and utter lunacy.
Collins continues his tirade by linking the non payment of charges to the Tax Evasion in the 80s …
One of the reasons for the scale of our last recession back in the 1980s was the inability of the State to collect the income tax it was legitimately owed. The indulgent attitude to tax evasion was one of the problems. Charles Haughey and other wealthy individuals were able to dodge tax through offshore accounts partly because there was a level of tolerance for such behaviour. Attitudes to income tax evasion have changed considerably since then. Much tougher penalties and far stricter enforcement have been crucial in changing public attitudes. While nobody likes paying income tax there is now a sense that the system is broadly fair and people exposed as tax cheats are not treated with the same level of indulgence as of old.
Dreadful dreadful stuff.
We think alike! We should keep the two posts up, we’re both pretty pissed off by this I think. Certainly, I was out all day having read it early and I felt so incensed by the tone and substance of the piece I had to get it off my chest.
Just noticed your piece after I hit publish!
Collins guff was a turgid piece alright. I wouldn’t mind but Collins is actually OK when talking about electoral politics but his opinion pieces are shocking and getting worse.
They really are.
The galling part of it is that Collins sneakily elides capital gains etc. with the PAYE sector. Thus, the poor are tax cheats!
I am sure that if there was a *serious* effort to go after the Haughey etc. rich and super-rich, Collins would be first one up to cry about the unfairness of it all..
The neoliberal state in action:
‘it was Ernst & Young, the disgraced auditors of Anglo Irish fame, who were awarded the job of finding a waste collector; it chose Greyhound for both councils. We also know Ernst & Young received around €250,000 in both cases….
(Greyhound is) an outfit with convictions for law breaking; whose latest accounts are not available; owned offshore in the Isle of Man; which has been forced to cough up €1.3m for overcharging; whose charges “did not tally with the work done”; which demands payment upfront.’
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/shane-ross/shane-ross-bloodhound-or-greyhound-3024220.html
Clearly more privatisation is called for. Well no. What’s needed is a pragmatic, political decision that public utilities,-social and physical infrastructure-should be owned, controlled, and operated by the public,-and not by law-breaking privateers. But such reasonableness is contrary to the retrogressive ideology of the ruling oligarchy.
+1
> an outfit with convictions for law breaking
>law-breaking privateers
Greyhound haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity. CIE made that clear in their report to the joint committee on transport.
Greyhound haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity.
They have been convicted of offences under the Waste Management Acts. These convictions were brought by, and secured, by the Environmental Protection Agency. (See here:http://epa.ie/whatwedo/enforce/prosecute/name,30542,en.html)
Shane Ross refers to this in the third paragraph of his article. How did you miss that?
Does Shane Ross mention that various local authorities, including his own; South Dublin County Council were also prosecuted under the same act? I was referring to the €1.3 million.
I was referring to the €1.3 million.
Yeah. I can see that reference here:
Greyhound haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity.
Oh, wait. No, I cannot.
The statement you made is flat wrong and you are trying to move the goal posts.
Maybe the clue (you appear to need) lies here?:
> CIE made that clear in their report to the joint committee on transport.
Nonsense, Alastair.
Your statement was made directly in response to CL’s comment that Greyhound were ‘law-breaking privateers’. You responded with the general statement:
Greyhound haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity.
Had you meant that to refer to just the 1.3 million overcharging, where they were negligent and incompetent, the simplest thing would have been to add a qualifier like ‘with regards to the overcharging’ etc. Why did you not do this?
Rather you decided to post something that was demonstrably false or you decided to misrepresent the facts by using one example of when Greyhound were not breaking the law to argue that they ‘[had not] been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity”.
You were trolling and, true to form, you now try to roll out of it by claiming you meant something else.
Nope – I guess you need some additional help here?
>Greyhound haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of any criminal activity. CIE made that clear in their report to the joint committee on transport.
Let’s take a mad stab at context here – any guesses? Something to do with CIE or a certain €1.3 million maybe? It really shouldn’t need to be spelled out tbh.
The EPA prosecution is something of a red herring – Shane Ross presumably wasn’t advocating SDCC should be stripped of waste management responsibility for a prosecution fine twice that of the one Greyhound received, so it’s a moot point.
Keep trying to slip out of it, Alastair. You are fooling no-one; tactics like this have been tried by countless trolls on countless boards. You, personally, have form in this regard: we are still waiting for you to quote the part of Marx’s work that states workers and capitalists interests can be aligned and can get along just fine.
And the claim that no conviction arose out of the over-charging is jesuitical to say the least. It is extremely difficult to prove intent in such cases, so wronged parties are better off just suing for the money and leaving it. At the very least, it demonstrates that Greyhound are incompetent.
Should we ignore that when handing out a government contract?
The only one trolling here is you I’m afraid – by wilfully choosing to ignore the blindingly obvious context of my post. It’s not exactly cryptic now, is it?
I really don’t need to revisit the Marx thing again – as I said before – it’s simple logic that adversaries with common interests can indeed align for mutually positive gain.
As to the wisdom of awarding the contract to Greyhound – did I offer any support for them? I’m simply pointing out that they broke no law as far as CIE are concerned.
So, according to you, you arrive on to a thread that you agree with, but do not bother to say so.
Instead, you -apparently- decide to post a rebuttal to a point that no one had made. Said rebuttal – apparently – involved you pointing out that Greyhound were accused of a criminal act regarding overcharging Dublin City Council, which is a statement that no one had made or asserted at any stage.
Not credible at all. Even if we accepted all of this, its still trolling.
To top it off:
I really don’t need to revisit the Marx thing again – as I said before – it’s simple logic that adversaries with common interests can indeed align for mutually positive gain
…only to someone who has clearly not read any Marx. You are still moving the goalposts – it was you who claimed that nowhere in Marx did he contradict your assertion about common interests.
I arrive in the thread to counter the implication that Greyhound broke some law in relation to the CIE deal. The whole ‘an outfit with convictions for law breaking’ suggests multiple convictions, as does ‘the claim that no conviction arose out of the over-charging is jesuitical to say the least’ – which is it then? Not suggesting a crime happened here, or doing so by inference? You can’t have your cake and eat it.
The Greyhound EPA prosecution might be a little more compelling if it wasn’t directed towards the merits of Greyhound getting the SDCC contract. The same SDCC that had previously been issued with a larger fine on the back of the same act. As it stands you get the distinct impression that neither body were doing a stand-up job, with Greyhound the lesser of two evils regarding their adherence to the act.
> it was you who claimed that nowhere in Marx did he contradict your assertion about common interests.
Yes. He doesn’t.
Alastair, did you read the Ross article?
I arrive in the thread to counter the implication that Greyhound broke some law in relation to the CIE deal.
You agree that when you arrived on the thread no one had made that point, do you not? If you don’t, you may wish to read the above posts again because they are abundantly clear and it is blindingly obvious they do not say that.
The whole ‘an outfit with convictions for law breaking’ suggests multiple convictions
Greyhound do have multiple convictions. The EPA website lists a plethora of offences under the Waste Management Acts.
The story so far:
You are complaining that I have misconstrued a post by you which, in a context that was (according to you) ‘blindingly obvious’, was written to counter a point that nobody had made because you misconstrued an earlier post and believed it implied something that it does not say on a literal interpretation (or indeed on any interpretation).
This is classic stuff.
If I am eating my cake and having it then you are chomping on Battenberg, astride two horses, while blowing hot and cold.
‘the claim that no conviction arose out of the over-charging is jesuitical to say the least’ – which is it then? Not suggesting a crime happened here, or doing so by inference? You can’t have your cake and eat it.
That objection would make sense had someone made the point before you jumped into the thread to ‘correct’ it. I said this after you posted. Unless you are clairvoyant, you would not have been posting in response to me.
RE: Marx
If you still believe he does not say that, which beggars belief since it a major theme that runs through his work, then you may wish to look at:
- Grundrisse, p 307: “It is clear, therefore, that the worker cannot become rich in this exchange since…he surrenders its creative, like Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Rather he necessarily impoverishes himself…”
Aligned interests? I think not
- Grundrisse pp. 321 – 326: This is a long piece which effectively states this: Capital can only remain capital if it continually extracts surplus value from the worker, i.e. it pays the worker less than the value of his labour.
Common interest? I think not.
These are pieces I have pulled at random after a couple of minutes flicking through the closest book to hand. How could you miss these?
Of course, you may want to read them yourself to appreciate the context.
Where exactly are these multiple EPA convictions against Greyhound? There’s a single conviction – that’s the solitary one that Shane Ross highlighted while overlooking the more serious conviction handed out to SDCC. As to clairvoyance – no need for that when I’m responding to an implication that the CIE affair involved law breaking – an implication which you chose to confirm after the fact of my posts – which again, couldn’t be more obvious – even if you felt the need to edit to suit your own narrative. Honestly – stop digging.
WBS – yep I read the Ross piece.
No. You are convicted of each offence, thus you receive multiple convictions.
An example: if you are drunk on the street and you get into a fight you can be convicted of: public drunkenness, threatening and abusive behaviour, assault, breach of the peace, and a few others. Each offence, if found guilty, would count as one conviction. That’s why you can have 19 year old with 79 previous convictions.
As to clairvoyance – no need for that when I’m responding to an implication that the CIE affair involved law breaking – an implication which you chose to confirm after the fact of my posts – which again, couldn’t be more obvious – even if you felt the need to edit to suit your own narrative. Honestly – stop digging.
How the hell do you imply anything like that from ‘convictions for law breaking’?
Also, a different person cannot ‘confirm’ an implication that you allege was made by another. I simply pointed out that a finding of negligence does not preclude that there was criminal activity, merely that the criminal activity may be too difficult to prove, and that incompetence should surely be a factor militating against awarding such a body a government contract. You agreed with this point earlier. Are you now arguing against it?
You are really getting desperate.
No alastair, I don’t think you did… I only asked because it struck me that had you read it you would have realised that CL in his original comment was quoting verbatim the following from the Ross article. This is what CL wrote:
(Greyhound is) an outfit with convictions for law breaking; whose latest accounts are not available; owned offshore in the Isle of Man; which has been forced to cough up €1.3m for overcharging; whose charges “did not tally with the work done”; which demands payment upfront.’
Or almost verbatim, given that Ross wrote this:
So there we have it : an outfit with convictions for law breaking; whose latest accounts are not available; owned offshore in the Isle of Man; which has been forced to cough up €1.3m for overcharging; whose charges “did not tally with the work done”; which demands payment upfront.
When you pulled the line “an outfit with c convictions for law breaking” as evidence of CL’s making a connection between CIE and law breaking you never once mentioned that Ross was the direct source of CLs comments even when it was pointed out to you. So clearly you read the piece without recognising that CL was quoting from it, or you never read it at all. You could check that here, and perhaps read the article in full for the first time.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/shane-ross/shane-ross-bloodhound-or-greyhound-3024220.html
Now you’ve spent a day taking CL to task because you’ve continued to accuse him of writing those words and again in doing so making a connection between law breaking and CIE. But he couldn’t do any such thing since he was just quoting Ross [albeit he admitted to doing so and even linked to the original article,and his own innovation 'law breaking privateers' which you quoted seems on the money to most I'll bet] and Ross wouldn’t do any such a thing because he sat on the Oireachtas Committee that interviewed Dick Fearn of CIE and heard directly from Fearn’s lips that ‘it wasn’t fraud’ – though he and Tommy Broughan (and indeed the Committee chair) both seemed gobsmacked trying to work out precisely what it was. And both CL and Rosencrantz said as much in comments had you cared to read them [and again, you clearly didn’t do either of them the courtesy of reading Ross, otherwise you’d have realised immediately that you had completely misunderstood all this].
And since your subsequent point about originally arriving to counter the “implication that Greyhound broke the laws in relation to the CIE deal” is based on that complete misunderstanding and misreading and indeed misrepresentation of what CL wrote: if any imputation could be made about law breaking and CIE it would have to be addressed to one Shane Ross – not CL nor Rosencrantz. Both of whom by the way continued to try to disabuse you of this notion across a day.
Yet despite their best efforts you continue to this point to assert that CL/Rosencrantx were on the one hand linking CIE and law breaking [to the nonsensical extent that you took the word ‘convictions’, again used by Shane Ross in his original article - twice as it happens, and try to pin it on CL as evidence of same] and on the other that CL/Rosencrantz were misinterpreting your own response.
Given that both of those assertions are entirely incorrect, and that your response was wrong from the off, and indeed is open to the charge of complete spoofing, timewasting – particularly for myself having to moderate stuff that shouldn’t need it, if not indeed trolling [because you're coming into this accusing CL and Rosencrantz of some supposed slight, when truth is you couldn't be bothered to go to the source material - that makes your bona fides very very shaky, knee jerk is the term that springs to mind], I think the very least you could do is to offer them an apology.
Not sure where you think you can get off calling me a liar, but I read the Ross piece, I read the committee transcript, and I read the EPA reports. I’m quite clear that there’s an attempt to smear Greyhound with the lable of law-breaking with regard to the CIE incident.
Quite what is the distinction between ‘privateers’ and any other private company, other than sounding that bit more ominous and lawless btw?
An unconvincing response, Alastair. I’m simply taking your words on this thread and pointing out where you are factually wrong, resting on assertions with no evidence and making inappropriate responses to others.
Rather than engaging with my critique of your approach you resort to accusing me of calling you a ‘liar’ and then restate what you’ve said previously, and ad nauseam, about “smears” “law-breaking” and “CIE” as if that somehow that addresses the points made.
I’m entirely comfortable to characterise your activities on this thread as misunderstanding, misreading and misrepresentation of others. As regards the use of the word ‘liar’, I think that your attempt to introduce such an emotive term is very telling.
I will reiterate this just once more, in order that everything is crystal clear.
You say you read the Ross piece…
What I have done is demonstrate that you couldn’t possibly have responded in the way you did to CL if you had bothered to read the link to Ross that he provided. At least you couldn’t have done so if your response was genuine and not simply baiting him for the sake of it. You couldn’t have done so because CL was quoting Ross verbatim.
Since Ross never argued that the CIE issue was linked with law-breaking either in that quote or in the totality of his piece it is impossible to see CL’s use of the quote arguing that. And yet above you continue to do so.
And despite your claim above that you did read the Ross article, in your second comment on the thread you effectively admit that you hadn’t read it at that point because you say: ’Does Shane Ross mention that various local authorities, including his own; South Dublin County Council were also prosecuted under the same act?’. If you’d read the article you’d have known the answer to the question.
I have no idea if you read the Committee transcript, and haven’t mentioned it as an issue one way or another because since Ross quoted the salient point himself verbatim it’s actually irrelevant whether you did or not. The fact that Ross did not argue that the CIE issue was law-breaking is contained in his own article. He’s perfectly clear. He writes:
Especially, as they had previous form. Their experience when they were forced to return €1.3m to Iarnrod Eireann for overcharging, as revealed in 2009, should be sufficient to eliminate them from any future State contracts — local or national.
If that alone was not enough, the devastating words of Dick Fearn, chief executive of Iarnrod Eireann, that “basically the money charged [by Greyhound] did not tally with the actual work done” should have sealed its fate for future contracts.
No mention of law breaking there. Unusual and questionable business practices, absolutely.
CL could not possibly read the Ross article and arrive at the conclusion that the CIE incidents constituted law-breaking.
No one could possibly read CL’s piece and come to the conclusion that he was making any such linkage between law-breaking and CIE. Not unless they had thoroughly misunderstood what he was saying, or were misrepresenting it.
You say you read the EPA reports…
You then should revisit the EPA site and look at the fines for Greyhound and SDCC, respectively “Greyhound: €3,000 and EPA costs of €4,963 were also awarded – total €7,963” and “SDCC: fine of €300 for each charge [there were two] and awarded EPA costs – total €10,450”, so no, not ‘a prosecution fine… twice what Greyhound received’ as you stated.
Another misreading. Another misrepresentation. All part of the pattern of engagement on this thread with others.
I’ve also demonstrated that you didn’t bother to read the piece subsequently – unless you did but your intention was again just to bait him and Rosencrantz – and that when Rosencrantz, then CL and then I pointed directly back to you still hadn’t read it and still did not see that CL was quoting Ross verbatim.
So to sum up. On this thread you arrive and attack a fellow commenter by misrepresenting a quote that he used in his comment as meaning something it couldn’t possibly mean, without making any effort to actually read or understand what he had written. You then have continued to do so subsequently even though others including myself point to the central error in your original charge. It’s entirely obvious that you are relying on assertions made with certainty but no actual evidence − and indeed are now attempting to up the ante vis the ‘liar’ point.
None of this would matter a bit – it’s so trivial that it’s near-laughable – if you weren’t resorting to those unsupported assertions and making unfair and inappropriate claims about trolling on the part of others when it is your actions that clearly belong in that spectrum of online behaviour, but unfortunately all this has to be engaged with by moderators. As someone pointed out on another site if you come to my house and you start making accusations and being uncivil to people you will be asked to leave. It is no different here.
And yet despite that, all that is asked of you so far is to apologise to CL and Rosencrantz for making those misrepresentations, for accusing the latter of ‘trolling’ and retract the accusation of ‘smearing’.
>I’m entirely comfortable to characterise your activities on this thread as misunderstanding, misreading and misrepresentation of others. As regards the use of the word ‘liar’, I think that your attempt to introduce such an emotive term is very telling.
Really?
>Alastair, did you read the Ross article?
>WBS – yep I read the Ross piece.
>No alastair, I don’t think you did
Seems pretty straightforward to me. I won’t be holding my breath waiting for the apology you set such store by all the same.
>in your second comment on the thread you effectively admit that you hadn’t read it at that point because you say: ’Does Shane Ross mention that various local authorities, including his own; South Dublin County Council were also prosecuted under the same act?’. If you’d read the article you’d have known the answer to the question.
I was well aware that Ross never muddied the waters by revealing that SDCC were just as guilty as Greyhound regarding EPA prosecutions – that’s kind of the point. I’d have thought rhetoric wasn’t an alien concept to you, no?
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Well who cares whether you’re lying or not? And who cares what I think about whether you’re lying or not? It’s entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand. Whether you’re lying your head off or telling nothing but the purest of truth, whether you saw the link in CL’s comment and went ‘nah, not bothered’ or pored for hours over Ross’s immortal prose, the only relevance of the Ross article and whether it was read or not is that somewhere along the way you misread, misinterpreted and misrepresented what CL wrote.
But it’s notable that you’ve not rebutted any substantive aspect of the critique made. Look again at CL’s post and let’s strip out the Ross quote…
‘it was Ernst & Young, the disgraced auditors of Anglo Irish fame, who were awarded the job of finding a waste collector; it chose Greyhound for both councils. We also know Ernst & Young received around €250,000 in both cases….
Clearly more privatisation is called for. Well no. What’s needed is a pragmatic, political decision that public utilities,-social and physical infrastructure-should be owned, controlled, and operated by the public,-and not by law-breaking privateers. But such reasonableness is contrary to the retrogressive ideology of the ruling oligarchy.
How could anyone think there was any link between CIE and law breaking there? It is frankly impossible to do so.
And let’s look at Ross’s words as quoted by CL…
(Greyhound is) an outfit with convictions for law breaking; whose latest accounts are not available; owned offshore in the Isle of Man; which has been forced to cough up €1.3m for overcharging; whose charges “did not tally with the work done”; which demands payment upfront.’ http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/shane-ross/shane-ross-bloodhound-or-greyhound-3024220.html
There’s not even a mention of CIE in any of this. Not one. Nothing. And he has that great big link directly under the quote to the Ross article.
Yet your claim throughout is that CL is making a point- actually it becomes a ‘smear’ according to you – about law-breaking and CIE and yet you make no mention of Ross.
You see that’s where your ‘lying’ line falls down completely. It just points us back to the texts you wrote.
It’s all very well to charge me with accusing you of lying, but what conclusion is one meant to draw when one actually examines your comments on the thread?
If you had clicked on CL’s link and read the Ross article you would have realised CL had quoted it. It would be impossible not to. These are the main points that Ross makes. It’s effectively his summation of his piece. You can’t read his article without falling over it. But you sailed on through the thread apparently blissfully unaware that Ross had written it. You didn’t mention it once.
Every comment you made kept placing blame at CLs door. You kept referring to the context of your post. But that was meaningless in the context of CLs piece, because all CL was doing was quoting Ross. There was no context to your post. You’d imagined one up so you could go on a bashing expedition against CL and whoever was unfortunate enough to attempt to set you straight.
The logical conclusion for anyone to draw is that either you didn’t read the Ross article or – more charitably – that you read it but didn’t understand it. Actually is that more charitable? I’m not so sure. Was it lying? I don’t know, how could I, I have no idea if you read the article or not. All the evidence, though, points to you not doing so [at least not until very late in the day] and all we have is your word that you did. Given that that you were disingenuous from the off on the thread in relation to CL I’ll make no clear judgement either way, but I’d certainly argue that you acted at the very least in bad faith. But as I say I don’t really care about that.
What I docare about is when you come to this site and misrepresent other valued contributors views and that’s why I sought an apology from you to CL and Rosencrantz because truth is you are not adhering to the community standards – many of which you yourself demand vehemently of others in your contributions – on this site.
Standards which include not making assertions of certainty without supporting evidence.
Standards which include not attacking others and misrepresenting them.
Standards which include reading precisely and with effort what they’ve written, what they’ve quoted and what they’ve linked to.
Standards which include admitting and accepting mistakes, misreadings, misinterpretations and misrepresentations.
Standards which include avoiding evasion and diversion or seeking to exacerbate a situation.
Nothing is asked of you here on this thread by CL, Rosencrantz, or myself that you haven’t asked of us and others on numerous occasions. And yet you’ve consistently breached those standards, standards in part that you were responsible for seeing established here.
And for all the bluster and time wasting you can’t even make a stab at an apology and are seemingly unable to take responsibility for and admit to those misreadings and misrepresentations.
That in a way is what’s most dispiriting about this. Anyone who arrives on this site, interacts, and yet cannot admit of an error when made here isn’t engaging in communication. It’s simply baiting. What a waste of all our time.
Referring to the context: you’ll note that CL never said that Greyhound had been convicted of a criminal offence relating to overcharging.
Why bring it up?
Unless of course, you are now try to be evasive…
I was merely quoting Shane Ross, who was clearly referring to Greyhound.
‘On the 25th January 2011 at Dublin Metropolitan District Court, Greyhound Recycling and Recovery Limited (“the Company”) pleaded guilty to three charges brought by the Environmental Protection Agency in relation to offences under Sections 39(1) & 39(9) of the Waste Management Act (as amended) for breaches of its Waste Licence (Reg. No. W0205-01).’
http://www.epa.ie/whatwedo/enforce/prosecute/2011/name,30542,en.html
Ross is obviously correct and Alastair is wrong.
Being found guilty on three charges IS multiple convictions.
By the way, Greyhound also had their knuckles rapped by the ASAI over posting misleading and confusing brochures to clients in South County Dublin. ASAI found that Greyhound had advertised savings of ’41%’ relating to bin collections but had failed to highlight a series of qualifications and conditions which would need to be met in order for this to be true.
http://www.asai.ie/complaint_view.asp?CID=916&BID=44
Something more to add to the list.
As well as the lack of recyclable bag collection today in the part of East Wall I live in. Despite it being on their laughably termed schedule.
I rate Collins the worst, consistently worst, writer on politics in Ireland, so nothing new here then; by worst I mean he tows the status quo line. He should grow up on the household charge. He makes a nice career out of being close to, and relying on, politics for his ‘cake.’ He is hardly going to pour cold water on these people????
There’s that, of course. Certainly he appears to have been allowed to say pretty much anything since the beginning of the year. I’m always struck by which articles in the IT have comments enabled beneath them. This one doesn’t.
Dan O’Brien is quite similar, if not quite as bad.
The launch of the IT’s daily business supplement this morning is further evidence of the paper’s trajectory under its new editor (well under way under his predecessor, in fairness). Dick Walsh must be spinning in his grave.
Has anyone else noticed that the new IT editor seems to have a bit of ‘Cult of Personality’ thing going on? There were two pictures of him in Saturday’s edition, and on the way into work this morning he was beaming from a billboard.
The daily business supplement must mean a massive internal transfer of resources from other areas – the IT is not in rude financial health. A bit of a gamble as reading business ‘journalism’ operates within a very thin spectrum of language and is pre-disposed, I think, to relentless positivity. Will we see less ‘real’ news and culture from now on?
This weeks Phoenix claims their will not be “any increase in staff resources.”
When I saw the heading, “Stephen Collins champion greyhound,” I half expected details of Austerity Abu’s latest triumphs over 525 at Shelbourne Park.
Pearls amongst swine?
In Paul Mason’s excellent “Why It’s All Kicking Off” there is a good account of how the privitisation of the Cairo refuse collection radicalised the Copts and led them to help the students defeat the cops in Tahir Square.
Perhaps Greyhound will cause Ranelagh – led by Dunphy – to march on Merrion Sq
@CMK: Yes, sample headline from Monday’s business supplement:
‘Removing cap on size of shops could pose threat to food and drink industry.’ This turns out to be a re-write of an Ibec press release, rather than a piece of reporting. No inverted commas in the headline though – the words of Ibec are fact, it seems.
Compare and contrast with, say, the education section, which is more like a crusade against the sector and those who work in it than sympathetic to their outlook.
It was evident on last night’s whingefest on ‘The Frontline’ where the absolutely uncritical approach to business is taking us. One whinger was giving out that Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown council just wouldn’t give him a spot on Dun Laoghaire pier for nothing, he couldn’t believe that he’d have to pay for a prime space to do business.
If IBEC’s word equals fact (as it appears to be for the Irish Times) the it’s not a huge leap for the IT to deem anyone who opposes IBEC to intrinsically irrational. This will lead, inevitably, to even worse coverage of trade unions and industrial disputes than currently exists. After four years of neo-liberal economic depression it seems we still have a way to go before we hit the bottom.
It’s almost perfect. Significant portions of the private sector failed in the last five years, so now the private sector must now be given everything it demands so it can fail better!
It’s somewhat ironic that after all the years of Geraldine Kennedy being (not without reason) slagged off as a PD who had betrayed the (somewhat illusory) liberal tradition of the Times, her successor seems to be heading in a far more right wing direction.
It’s an odd one alright. The centre of gravity has certainly shifted rapidly in the last few weeks.
Is it even, eh, good ‘business’ sense for the IT to swing so far to the right? I mean, it’s not like we have a shortage of business friendly newspapers with a right wing editorial position on economic issues. A significant chunk of the IT’s readership are to the Left of it’s editorial position, possibly well to the Left. If a major element of that part of the readership walks away from the IT its circulation goes down and margins are tight in the newspaper industry (which I think is a separate entity from newspaper journalism). Like the Democrats in the US and their continual shitting on African-Americans (because they believe the latter will never desert them), this right-wing shift may well alienate a part of the IT’s audience that is, paradoxically, crucial for its financial survival. On a personal level I bought it every day for years but gave up when they started carrying opinion pieces from Charles Krauthammer and Mark Steyn.
That’s something I wondered about in relation to the SBP. The latest poll they did of readers showed something like 40 plus per cent were public sector. I mean they can bash the PS for so far and so long, but they’re going to lose readers they can ill afford to lose. And likewise with the IT which one would have thought was practically a bible for some in the PS at least at one stage.
Ah, the Steyn years. Best forgotten.
But maybe the public sector workers being bashed are not the public sector workers who read/buy the paper. There are public sector workers and there are public sector workers, after all. Class divisions within the public sector, as in real life?
Well the SBP has lost this PS worker. Not so much for the PS bashing, which I’m immune to, but more for the page after page of puff pieces for businesses, relentless ‘positivity’, SFA funded features etc, etc, week after week. The culture section was OK but that’s not saying much.
Business ‘journalism’ in this state is a contradiction save for one or two instances. The lobbying and law firms will closely police the IT’s new venture and the articles themselves will collapse into blandness.
It’s a bit like with the political parties who at election time all seem to be chasing the same mythical voter, a young middle class person of floating beliefs, while taking their core support for granted and presuming nothing they can ever do will lose them these voters.
Our fickle middle class voter on the other hand must be courted assiduously because in a strange way he, or she, is somehow the ‘right’ type of voter, someone whose support will reflect well on your party.
Papers also seem to lust after this highly coveted figure while presuming that the sections of their readership which are, for example, rural conservative, public sector trade unionist, left-wing student, can fend for themselves even though their shilling is worth as much as the floater. The floater is of course highly prized by ad agencies, perhaps over-valued because he’s the kind of guy who might work in an ad agency.
And, of course, to state the bleeding obvious, there’s nowhere else to go, no Irish paper that makes even a token effort at representing the employee’s view in industrial matters or the public servant’s against ‘business’.
Example : the OECD report last week that found that the single best way – and best value way – to improve a country’s education system is to raise teachers’ salaries. An item of more than passing interest to Ireland’s teachers, you’d think – but unworthy of a mention in the full two pages that the Irish Times gives to education each Tuesday.
Re odd shifts – it was curious that only person who raised an – instantly dismissed – objection to the idea of free business reign in the public domain was a former PD member, the head of 11890.
Last evening a union colleague was giving out to me about RTE, as you do. He remarked, and not without some cause, whether there might be something particular going on in RTE at this time to make it so much a propaganda arm of the government and bosses. Ingrid Miley’s recent report on Vita Cortex was mentioned, as were the volume of business reports and ‘enterprise’ programmes and the overwhelmingly neoliberal panels on Marion Finucine.
Then just this morning Rachael English was interviewing Ronan O’Sullivan about children on trollies in Crumlin Hospital. She casually said in prefacing a question, “we know that the resources aren’t there”. I heard almost the same politically-loaded-statement-as-fact-from-a-supposedly-impartial-journalist from ‘Morning Ireland’ before. Prompting me to mutter ‘Radio Berlin International 1980′ at my marvelous new Roberts internet receiver.
Far be it from me to give currency to far fetched conspiracy theories. And of course media ideology is a subtle and imminent thing in general. But I had to chuckle when, on the bus into work, I read the story on the front page of today’s ‘Irish Times’ which said:
“Minister for Health James Reilly has confirmed he is paying a public relations company for advice from a personal ministerial allowance that is outside of his department’s budget.
Dr Reilly said he had paid €15,000 last year to the Communications Clinic, whose directors are public relations consultant Terry Prone and Tom Savage, the chairman of the RTÉ board.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/0222/1224312172098.html
Of course any suggestion that this would cause a trickle down effect to news and current affairs in RTE would be outrageous.
From what I’ve heard, the chain of influence can be even more blatant than that. Apparently when Prime Time had their much-hyped special on welfare ‘fraud’ in 2010, much of the script was directly written by civil servants at the Department of Finance. I heard that from a media lecturer, one of whose students had been interning in RTE at the time, and I find it very credible given the history of relations between RTE and the state.
When you consider the fact that Prone and Savage can intervene to make sure the IT censors and slanders a dead woman, it’s hardly much of a stretch to imagine a line coming down from the top at RTE. And often there wouldn’t have to be an explicit line – you just have to add a few things up:
Jobs in print and broadcast media shrinking +
Jobs in PR increasing +
Big PR firms do work for FF / FG / IBEC but not trade unions or community campaigns +
Small country where everyone knows everyone in a given field =
Lots of journos who want to ingratiate themselves with people who could be giving them a job in 1, 2, 5 years time, and don’t want to piss the same people off.
Yeah, the Prone/Savage empire killed the Kate Fitzgerald story despite Broadsheet’s best efforts. And now Anton presents ‘good news’ crap on Sunday mornings in place of Sam Smyth (who was also completely on message…except for his work on Lowry/O’Brien).
In any rational society the power of these individuals would be subject to some scruitiny. Here we just reflect on their good fortune to be such multi-talented people.
My memory (possibly faulty) is that the RTE radio news became a propaganda agency for bosses some time in the early 1990s when they first appointed ‘business correspondents’, as opposed to ‘industry correspondents’. One of the first was Fintan Drury, later of PR, Anglo-Irish Bank and golf courses in Hungary fame. The favoured format for the first ten or twelve years was the item about the annual or quarterly results. It always went like this:
‘Mr Smith, your company’s profits are up ten per cent, to what do you attribute this?’
‘Well, we have a very superior product, we put the customer first, we are very competitive in our pricing etc etc.’
Pure advertising.
Witness the “report” on last night’s 9 o’clock news on Kerry Group’s annual profit of half a billion euro, pitched as wonderful news, but not a question asked in terms of increasing prices paid to the primary producers (farmers) or reducing shelf price paid by the end users (consumers).
That was followed by a prolonged advertising feature for an Irish dress designer because Kate Middleton wore one of her creations. Now, no disrespect to the the designer herself who seems a talented individual, but there shouldn’t be any room for these kinds of stories. I mean there is the current Stobart industrial dispute which seems a clear attempt at union-busting, from what I’ve read, I didn’t see it featured on last night’s news and it doesn’t appear on their website.
“And now Anton presents ‘good news’ crap on Sunday mornings…”
And there’s another thing, an almost palpable new effort from RTE to present a stream of good news or cheer up or ‘plucky individual overcoming the crisis’ stories.
That far fetched conspiracy theory gets a little nearer.
‘Irish Times’, Thursday, February 23, 2012:
“A second Government Minister has confirmed payments to a public relations company through a personal secretarial allowance available to Cabinet members.
Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Frances Fitzgerald said last night she paid €15,768 to the Communications Clinic in 2011 for public relations advice.
Yesterday, The Irish Times reported that Minister for Health James Reilly had paid €15,000 to the same company, whose directors are public relations consultant Terry Prone and Tom Savage, the chairman of the RTÉ board.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0223/1224312243054.html
Middle bit of tonight’s Week in Politics was a thing to behold.
[...] This is a dismal analysis. It ignores ability to pay, different life circumstances – anyone with babies or small children will know that quantities of waste increase rapidly in those circumstances and so on. It echoes Stephen Collins approach some weeks back on the same topic. [...]