Dear Sir... Readers' Views (23/11/16)
IT beggars belief - Garda chief used private Gmail for work
How can it be possible that a country that can’t bend over far enough for IT multinationals to locate there, has the head of its own police force using a Gmail account.
At least Hillary Clinton went to the trouble of getting her own server.
If the Garda Commissioner is so sloppy and unprofessional it beggars belief that she is the only senior public official who carries out her business in such a manner. How many government ministers communicate via personal e-mail and how are these communications archived. Are they disclosed under Freedom of Information? Are those records held in the National Archives? Who owns communications made through a personal account on a taxpayer-provided device?
What is most astounding is that, yet again, this stumbles in the public domain by accident and at no point in the last 20 years, not even at the height of the Celtic Tiger, did anyone at government, or across the public sector, make any effort to address this gapping national security flaw.
Is there no compliance function in the Gardaí or at State governance level? What does the head of public sector IT do? Did they know the gardaí communicate like this and if so, why did they do nothing, and who else communicates this way. Do Judges use g-mail accounts for official business? Do government ministers use them, do lobbyists? Does the IFSC lobby use them when lobbying politicians? What communication from government to the ECB and NAMA was through g-mail accounts and how is it tracked?
Just when you think you’d heard it all when it comes to governance and compliance failures at the most senior levels of the public sector, along comes another whopper. The reaction? Of course there is no reaction.
E-security poses a greater risk in the 21st century to the security of the modern State than any other threat. How can we have any faith that our State has any capacity to protect us from viral attack from rogue elements or that the private details of our personal health, lives and finances, held by the State is secure from criminal cyberattack.
Yet again, we are given a lesson, that we don’t need to go to Denmark to see with our own eyes, that plenty is rotten in our great little banana republic.
New Priory homes for homeless plea
The sale of six apartments from the first completed phase of New Priory homes by Dublin City Council (DCC) to private firms is utterly perverse. I proposed that DCC withhold the sale of these apartments at a North Central Area Committee meeting on Nov 21.
In response to the proposal from Dublin City Council that, out of the 41 apartments from the first phase of New Priory that are to be sold privately, six are to be purchased by private firms presumably as an investment Councillor, I have to say, the very fact that the original proposal from Dublin City Council was that only 35 out of the 162 apartments they own in this complex would be used for public housing is a scandal in its own right, given the scale of the social and affordable housing need in Dublin.
My proposal that all apartments be held by Dublin City Council for social and affordable housing was defeated at a full meeting of the council by the Lord Mayor’s casting vote in September.
I raised then the danger that private firms could buy up some of these apartments for investments and this is precisely what is happening. Three firms, Harley Holdings, Woodview Trading and Gaughran Homes Ireland have, between them, paid booking deposits for six apartments. It is a fair assumption that they hope to gouge an extortionate rent from private tenants for this.
You have a perverse scenario whereby Dublin City Council, via the Housing Assistance Payment, could conceivably fund the mortgage payments on apartments they sold.
Dublin City Council should not be acting like developers.
While wishing no ill on the 35 genuine home buyers who have paid their booking deposit for their home, I believe that housing stock and land in the possession of Dublin City Council should be optimised for dealing with the chronic social and affordable housing crisis.
I propose that the booking deposits be returned to these investors and the homes in question be made available to those who are homeless and/or who have been languishing on the allocations list for up to 14 years in some cases.
Sculptor of words
William Trevor, born in Cork, master of the short story, one of the world’s greatest writers has passed away. Trevor was a professional writer who liked to keep a low profile. A person who would rather listen and write than talk about his work.
He wrote instinctively, with material he would often acquire by listening to public banter. In life a very shy man. Writing allowed him express his emotions, and observations.
The Story of Lucy Gault was one of his finest novels, with this magnificent quote: “Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn’t do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.”
Trevor was a sculptor of words, a true artist. He could convey a complex situation with just a single sentence.
Has Micheál Martin forgotten crash?
You quote Micheál Martin calling for an ‘urgent national plan’ to deal with the ‘slow-motion crash’ that would ‘reduce the impact of a hard Brexit’. According to Martin that plan would prevent ‘deep, long-term damage’.
Is this the same Michéal Martin who was an elected member of government on successive occasions over a period of more than a decade when reckless decisions were made which caused the crash we have had already in 2009-2010 and which bankrupt the country?
During that time there was no urgent national plan to deal with the crash. In fact Martin and the other powerful people in charge of political, financial institutions etc were in denial right to the end. As a result we have been suffering deep, long-term damage and will continue to do so. Mr Martin is hardly the most appropriate person to be lecturing us at this point about the consequences of Brexit.
Making sense of Pence attack
Over the weekend I heard Irish Social Democrat politician Catherine Murphy berate Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, on national radio, for speaking to US vice-president, democratically elected, Mike Pence, in a 15 minute phone call. She criticised the Taoiseach for embracing the values of Mr Pence, rather than those of the Irish people, such as abortion.
Apart from that sweeping statement, I was shocked that abortion is now being referred to as a value, and I wondered what made her the interpreter of Irish values in the first place. Giving air time to pro abortion politicians with such views, and not balancing that comment from a politician of prolife persuasion, leads to completely biased reporting and distorted public opinion.
There are many Irish citizens who do not identify the killing of an unborn baby as a value. Research on abortion regimes internationally, highlight once abortion is legalised it becomes impossible to restrict and becomes normalised. Is this the value base such politicians strive for? Mothers and babies are precious and deserve a better fight for their lives from the political and media establishment.
Way to go Donald, in licking ‘liberals’
Although one shouldn’t be proud of it, I can’t help but be overcome by an inordinate feeling of schadenfreude, resulting from the ‘liberal’ reaction to Donald Trump’s victory. The entire ‘liberal’ commentariat came across as so stridently arrogant in their certainty of a Clinton win that they just will not accept the reality. Talk about bad losers. Like all bullies, they are now looking for scapegoats. How dare the US electorate dissent from the ‘liberal’ consensus. The main villains of the piece appear to be an amalgam of, wait for it, non college educated white males and ‘backward’ ( as Hilary’s team so charmingly described them) Catholics. White Catholics are about as low as you can go in the ‘liberal’ worldview. Of course the reason ‘liberals’ are so hung up on a college education, is because nowadays this largely guarantees a sound indoctrination in liberal/feminist dogma. Unfortunately most of the media went lazily along with this flawed analysis. RTÉ, in particular, didn’t cover itself in journalistic glory in its coverage. One is reminded of the observations of the eminent US journalist Heywood Broun; an atheist who converted to Catholicism. The reaction of his erstwhile colleagues led him to conclude that much liberalism was extremely illiberal. He concluded: “I discovered that freedom for them meant thinking as they did.” Plus ça change. Way to go, Donald!
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