Fergus Finlay: Privatisation, Irish style, has robbed us of our most precious assets

Call it what you like, privatisation is wrong  — morally and economically — and we should always have resisted it

A cost of living protest in Cork at the weekend, where up to 2,000 protesters marched through the city.

I’VE always been a marcher. I’ve marched most for disability rights. But I’ve marched for equality rights, gay rights, and women’s reproductive rights too. I’ve marched to celebrate the survivors of abuse, and I’ve marched against abusers and the institutions that protected them. I’ve marched in taxpayers’ protests way back when, and I’ve marched for homeless people and in support of the demand for radical new housing policies. I’ve marched for the rights of children.

I’ve been involved in more or less every referendum campaign, at one level or another, since I was a lad. We’ve had success and failure — in several cases, bitter failure followed by success, proving that nothing ever remains the same. I’ve learned, and I’ve preached, that you should never give up, and you should approach every campaign as if it was the thing that mattered most in the world.

But I’ve never marched against privatisation. Now I find myself wondering what the hell was wrong with me?

I’ve written about the subject, here and elsewhere, for more than 20 years. Looking back at some of what I’ve written, I realise that I always tried to be reasonable. I’ve accepted the idea of a civilised mixed economy, with room for the private sector. But I’ve always underestimated the capacity for rapaciousness within that sector. You’d think the behaviour of big finance, big oil, and big energy over the years would have taught me a lesson.

It’s not enough, never was enough, to have doubts.

Privatisation of critical assets is wrong, morally and economically, and we should always have resisted it with everything at our disposal.

Right now, we desperately need to control the supply and price of gas and electricity. We used to own all the means of production and distribution. Now we only own a bit of it. We virtually gave most of it away, to a range of companies that are often massively profitable.

Ordinary people living in fear

Their profits are increasing exponentially while ordinary people are living in terror of their next gas or electricity bill. At the same time, there are people who may die if the electricity goes off in the middle of the night — people who depend on breathing devices while they’re asleep, for instance — and there’s nothing we can do to reassure them.

We do still own the ESB, as it used to be called. Its profits come from a share of the market — there are about 14 companies altogether selling electricity — and the ESB’s profits from that share alone have shot up to nearly €400m in the first six months of the year.

On one hand, we’re scrabbling around to try to figure out how to get some of that money back. On the other, we’re desperately trying to figure out how to rescue consumers from some of the mad ventures in electricity supply that never took off. Most are enormously profitable, one or two are broke.

ESB's after tax profit trebled in the first half of 2022 to €390m. Picture: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

That’s just electricity. Because the profits are divided so many ways, we have failed to generate the revenue to invest in adequate transmission. So adding new generation capacity is going to be essentially the responsibility of the State. If and when it’s built, that additional capacity will be sold to the private distribution companies, whixh will increase their profits further by selling it back to us.

The gas market is just as broken. We used to own it all, and we sold it when we were bust. You can bet we sold it at a knockdown price, and now we’re suffering.

We’ve always done privatisation in the weirdest possible way in Ireland. For a start, we don’t even call it that. You can’t find a single public policy document or proposal that uses the word, privatisation.

They all use words like outsourcing, flotation, deregulation, or the nicest one of all, liberalisation. They all mean the same thing, taking what’s ours and giving it away.

When we can’t give assets away, we give tax revenue instead to people who already have loads. There was a time in Ireland — you’ll remember it because it was just before the great crash — when it seemed to be the only job of the Minister for Finance to give money to the better off. Billions were invested in a “saving scheme” called SSIA.

Billions more were invested in putting massive tax breaks into the law of the land for people who wanted to build private luxury hospitals, or student accommodation, or car parks where people can leave their cars to get on buses. They all made their money — buckets and buckets of it. Now we have a health system that’s utterly fractured , a lot of the car parks are empty a lot of the time, and students can’t afford anywhere to live.

And there’s the horses and greyhounds — never forget them! In a speech to the Dáil last November, the Minister for Agriculture revealed that in the last 20 years or so, the Irish people have donated €1.46bn to the horse and greyhound racing industry fund. No, I’m not kidding. That’s €1,460,000,000. Imagine the houses we could have built with that if only we ever felt we needed to build houses.

To add insult to injury, nearly €300m of that money went to “support” the greyhound industry, perhaps the most dubious “sport” that exists anywhere in Europe (outside the bullrings of Spain, anyway). And the great majority of that largesse was given away in prize money. Mostly to people who didn’t need it.

And of course we did the same thing with all the telecommunications and broadband capacity that used to be ours. I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about how Eir, a company we used to own, has just paid a dividend of €300m to a French billionaire.

Enriching the rich

The policies of recent years have robbed the Irish people of critically important assets at a time when we need them most, and much of it has gone to further enrich already rich people all over the world. People who can’t afford it are paying through the nose to utility companies they used to own, to private hospitals doing what public hospitals should be doing, and to corporate landlords benefitting from some of the most generous tax arrangements to be found anywhere.

There will, of course, be those who argue that it is this devotion to the private sector that has made us a rich and successful country. But we’re on the cusp of decisions that will hugely add to our already enormous national debt. They are decisions we must make because otherwise people will suffer deprivation and hardship throughout the winter.

But even those decisions, because so few of them will be targeted, will support the wealthy disproportionately. We haven’t even developed the capacity to figure out who needs less support and who needs more. So if you have two or three houses, you’ll get two or three energy credits each time they’re given out. And you’ll be able to help the privatised utility companies to make even more profit.

This whole mess comes from privatisation, Irish style. There’s only one conclusion. If we go on this way, we really need our heads examined.