Winners & losers
As years go, 2011 never even reached the level of middling. It was one to file away under ‘could have done a hell of a lot better’.
It started off with new hope. The Government was seeing out its notice, and we were promised a brand new day. Once the coalition had settled down, it became obvious that it was same as it ever was. New faces, throw in a few bells and whistles, Enda Kenny walking to work instead of being driven, it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Fine Gael and Labour promised change, but they never let on that they just meant the faces.
The economy was supposed to have turned a corner. Didn’t happen. Austerity continues to pounce and kill any green shoots that pop up above ground. Beyond these shores, the euro spent the year tottering about the place, one minute being dissed by Merkel, the next being fed and watered by Sarkozy, and finally making itself at home through the good offices of Merkozy. Where once Ireland’s main worry was out of synch interest rates, now all that matters is kicking Armageddon down the road.
There was no let up in senseless violence last year. The spectre of gun killing sprees is not new, but it was taken to a new level in Europe with the attacks in Oslo and the island of Utoya in which 77 people lost their lives at the hands of the latest lunatic.
The year passed without the nations of the world agreeing on how to save the planet before it becomes uninhabitable. A climate change conference in Durban did hatch a protocol for countries, but within 48 hours, Canada became the first to with draw.
In the Middle East, an Arab Spring bloomed for a time. The thirst for democracy was driven by huge youth unemployment, which rings a bell in these parts. However, some of the despots were deposed, while others cling on, most notably in Syria. And don’t hold your breadth for democracy just yet.
So it went last year. But as always the human condition persevered through the doom and the gloom. Some didn’t have a bad year. Some even had a great year. How was it for you?
There were winners and losers, a random selection of which feature in these pages. For many though, it was the year of living fearfully, and let’s hope that the year to come will be better all round.
THE WINNERS
What a year Mr Delaney has had. The Republic of Ireland qualified for the Euro Championship Finals, the first major finals for the team since Delaney took over as chief executive of the FAI.
When the team beat Estonia in November to qualify, Delaney (left) declared that the victory had made, “not my day, not my week, but my life”.
Qualification means that the football association can expect a windfall in the region of €8 million, which will be a big boost, particularly as the chief executive is paid in the region of €400,000 a year.
And that is what makes Delaney a winner of note in 2011. As many among the elite were forced to squirm and take pay cuts from their obscene salaries, John has encountered practically no resistance from within the association to his huge wedge.
He oversees an association that doesn’t even have a professional league. He is paid more than the combined salaries of the head honchos in the IRFU and the GAA, and the board which sanction his wedge think he’s a man for all seasons. Because he’s worth it.
One master falters while another steps up. Just as the star of Tiger Woods went into decline, another young buck comes of age. On June 19 Rory McIlroy won the US Open golf tournament. He was 22 years of age. By any standards it was a phenomenal achievement.
Since soon after he could walk he had been practising his game at the local Hollywood golf club in Co Down and was down as a prodigy from an early age.
But nobody in their wildest dreams could have imagined his flowering as a golfer would come at such an early age.
By the end of the year he had ascended to Number Two in the world, with some observers saying he could out-Tiger Tiger in the coming years. Along the way he stayed glued to the tabloids as he ditched his girlfriend Holly Sweeney and hooked up with tennis star Caroline Wozniacki. Together the young twentysomethings are believed to be worth €15m. They are very happy.
In the realm of Irish theatre and film, 2011 could hardly have been a better year for writer/director Winters (below). Her play B-for-Baby won and Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Play, and went on a nationwide tour where it was extremely well received wherever it went. The movie she wrote and directed, Snap, was equally well received and debuted last April.
Both works deal with difficult topics, the play concerning itself with fertility and sex among people with disabilities. Snap was shot in and around Cork city and follows the tale of the abduction of a young child.
Kanturk-born Winters has dismissed notions that she is an overnight success as she has been writing for years, but 2011 certainly represented a major breakthrough for her work.
Who would have thought it? For decades, if not centuries, the English monarch was a figure of hate in many parts of this island, but times change, and when the old bird landed here on May 17, she was well received, and the reception got better and better over the following four days.
Queen Elizabeth had much to do with this in the manner in which she conducted herself. Primarily attending at the Garden of Remembrance, her head bowed in recognition of all those who had fought against the Crown, she silently acknowledged the wrongs that had been done to the dead generations on this island.
The respect was mutual thereafter. Apart from an embarrassing incident in which Mary McAleese breathlessly said, “wow!” in response to the Queen’s attempt at Irish, the visit went off without controversy. In Cork, she broke with her schedule and engaged in a spontaneous walkabout. Word has since leaked out from the Palace that she was over the moon with the trip. We thought you were alright too, Ma’am.
In the face of a democratic deficit that is now apparent across the continent of Europe, the north Cork village has been a quiet outpost of resistance.
On March 6, a group organised by Irish Examiner sports journalist Diarmuid Flynn took to the streets of the village after Sunday Mass to make their feelings known. They were protesting about the great giveaway that involves the citizens of this state forking out to pay the gambling debts of bank bondholders throughout Europe and beyond.
Flynn, writing on a blog at the time, set it out thus. “We’re told we have no choice — well, when you haven’t been asked, when you’re not going to be asked, then certainly that is one way of making sure we have no choice.
“But of course we have a choice; as a nation, we can either accept this grossly unjust burden without protest, or we can take to the streets. That process started last Sunday, in Ballyhea; it will continue.”
And so it has right through the year. It hasn’t caused ructions in Leinster House. No boots are quaking in Frankfurt or Berlin. But as a means of articulating the quiet desperation of a people who’re being hung out to dry, it serves a cultural and historic purpose.
It could be you because it was them. In late September, the McIntyre family in a remote farming and fishing community on the outer reaches of the Erris peninsula in Co Mayo, hit the jackpot.
The family won €11 million in the weekly National Lottery draw. They were the biggest winners of the year, and their good luck was mentioned the morning after the night before by the local priest at Mass.
Without naming the lucky couple, Fr Kevin Hegarty said that he had heard that a big one had been landed in the locality.
“I am sure all of us will rejoice in the great news,” he said. “I hope it will bring them joy throughout their lives.”
The other major winner of the year was postman Pat Broderick from Kinsale, who won €7m — half of a €14m jackpot in March.
Yet more winners played cards close to the chest by remaining anonymous. By this time next year, there will be plenty of pain, pestilence and heartbreak in many lives, but there will also be more Lotto winners. It really could be you.
He began the year in quiet anonymity, despite his elevated role in the national finances, and he ended it under a cloud of controversy which was not of his making.
Cardiff is the outgoing Secretary General of the Department of Finance. Prior to his appointment in 2010, he was in charge of the department’s banking division. That’s banking as in the prime driver of delivering the country to the state it’s in.
The new coalition wanted him out, and the only way out for top civil servants is up. He was nominated by the Government to take up Ireland’s position on the European Court of auditors (nice €276,000 package), but it looked like his goose was cooked when a committee rejected his nomination. Irish MEPs had opposed him and it later emerged that the current Irish auditor Eoin O’Shea had sent the committee members an email dissing poor Kevin.
In the end, he got his nomination. At a time when austerity is biting deeper, one of those at the helm during the mad years has just moved onto great financial reward.
John Michael McDonagh
Having lived for over a decade in the shadow of his brother Martin, John Michael McDonagh (below right) came into his own in 2011, writing and directing one of the year’s biggest hits, The Guard.
The script of a local country guard in Connemara joining forces with a black FBI agent to take on a band of drug dealers was enticing enough to get Brendan Gleeson to weigh in the title role. But what really brought the flick onto a different place was the inclusion of acclaimed American actor Don Cheadle.
The movie played to packed houses on both sides of the Atlantic and was the subject of some glowing reviews from the notoriously cranky critics in Los Angelus.
Gleeson, recently nominated for a Golden Globe Best Actor award, has already signed up to play the leading role in McDonagh’s next movie, Calvery, based around a priest in rural Ireland and expected in screens in the coming year.
THE LOSERS
Poor Dom. When he woke up on May 14 DSK was on top of the world. He was the head of the IMF, and hotly tipped to return to French politics by running against Nicky Sarkozy for the presidency in upcoming elections. Within hours, he had sex with a chamber maid and was charged with sexual assault, locked up and disgraced.
The 32-year-old hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo from Ghana, received huge public support when she was interviewed in print and on air. She described DSK as a “crazy man” who attacked her when she entered the hotel room. He said they had consensual sex.
He was forced to resign from his post in the IMF and kiss goodbye to tackling Nicky in the polls. He had more serious issues to consider. He beat the rap when the charges against him were dropped in July, but by then a lot of damage had been done, including further allegations of sexual misconduct in France.
His political career is now over and there’s no way back at the IMF where Christine LeGuarde is doing a good job. Dom won’t forget 2011 in a hurry. His wife won’t let him.
Could it have got much worse than 2010, when his government handed over the economic sovereignty of the state? Actually, it could. On January 16, Michael Martin called on Cowen to step aside, but the man was not for turning. He won a leadership vote three days later, but then went and spoiled it all with a cackhanded attempt to reshuffle his cabinet that sealed his fate.
On January 22, he announced that he was stepping down as Fianna Fáil leader and staying on as Taoiseach until the forthcoming general election. It was a sad end to a sad premiership, in which he had found himself weighed down by events and his own past as Minister for Finance.
He could have been a contender, but he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least his resignation relieved him of the duty to stand in the election.
Later in the year his reputation was further trashed by former cabinet colleagues in a TV documentary.
What everybody from the chairman of the authority down described as the worst incident of libel made in the broadcaster’s history certainly blighted the year for RTE.
On May 23, the station’s Prime Time Investigates broadcast a programme alleging that Fr Kevin Reynolds had raped a girl in Kenya and fathered a child by her. The allegation was completely false. Despite entreaties from the priest prior to broadcast, the station did not ask for a paternity test. When one was undertaken after the broadcast, it showed that Fr Reynolds could not have fathered the girl in question.
RTE fought it all the way, and the failure to concede defeat immediately only added to the wrong.
Fr Reynolds settled for what is believed to have been at least €1 million. In RTE, Prme Time Investigates has been suspended, and two of the top news executives have stepped aside until completion of an investigation in the New Year.
The affair has left a cloud over a current affairs programme that has over recent years been to the fore in exposing wrongdoing in a whole range of sectors within the state.
Prior to 2011, Gay Mitchell stood in 11 national and European elections, and got elected on each occasion. He is regarded as a highly efficient operator in his local constituency in Dublin, and in both the Dáil and European Parliament. Like many others of his status, his ability is matched by his ego. So the experience of the presidential election must have come as an awful shock to him during the autumn.
He was nominated by his party to run in July, but even then the omens weren’t good. The party faithful decided that he was the best of a bad lot, the other two contenders being Mairead ‘Johnny came recently’ McGuinness, and Pat ‘where’s me parachuse’ Cox.
Despite his attributes, Gay was never going to cut it in the touchy feely department, which is seen as a vital component in the make up of presidents these days.
He distinguished himself by attacking Martin McGuinness while all other candidates preferred to ignore the IRA man’s record. In the end, Mitchell suffered an electoral humiliation, garnering just 6.4% of votes. He returned to Strasbourg with his tail between his legs.
He’s bad. Or so said the jury in Conrad Murray’s trial for involuntary manslaughter of the king of pop, Michael Jackson.
Murray was Jackson’s personal physician for little more than a few months prior to the singer’s death on June 25, 2009. He was charged because he administered the powerful anaesthetic propophol to Jacko as a sleeping aid, although the drug is normally provided under supervision in hospital.
A number of witnesses gave evidence that the doc was an upstanding character, but the jury wasn’t buying it.
“Conrad Murray looked out for himself and himself alone,” one of the jury members said afterwards. On November 27, he received the maximum four year term and he loses his licence to practice. In the great tradition of these things, he probably has a book in him, which he will set loose on the public for a few million.
At the beginning of the year, the distant rumble of thunder may have been heard in Frankfurt, but nobody thought things would ever get this bad.
The euro is having a torrid time of it, with conditions worsening as the year went on. Conceived in the fertile imaginations of politicians more than 20 years ago, it was a symbol of the unity of a continent which has suffered its fair share of division.
When it came into being in January 2002 there were dire warning from economists that it was a disaster waiting to happen.
It waited for nearly a decade, but as the debt crisis mounted and the bailout boys visited Athens, Lisbon and Dublin, the foundations began to crumble.
The last in a series of crisis summits on December 9 was supposed to be make or break, but in the great tradition of these things, the can was kicked into the New Year. As of now, whatever the outcome, it appears that the euro as we knew it is gone.
‘Tis with pounds, shilling and pence in the grave.
The problem about being a long standing dictator is that you can end up being the author of your own downfall. In February, during the Arab Spring uprisings, the people of Libya decided to rid themselves of the man who had ruled them with an iron fist for 40 years.
They were no match for Gaddafi’s forces, and were driven back into the east of the country. And that was when old Muammar made his fatal mistake. He vowed to hunt down and kill all who had anything to do with the rebellion. NATO was unwilling to stand by and watch yet another massacre unfold. Air strikes were launched against the regime, weakening Gaddafi’s hold on power and providing a platform for the rebels.
In the end, the colonel died an ignominious death on October 20 beaten by a mob and summarily shot in the back of a pick up truck. Hopefully, we’ll not see his likes again.
On the morning of July 23 Amy Winehouse was found dead in her bedroom. The news that filtered out was not surprising but still managed to shock.
She had flown like a comet through British music for nearly a decade, a beautiful voice crying out from a fragile psyche and tortured mind.
The public was accustomed to her picture in tabloid pages looking anywhere from under the weather to out of her mind, but she still had a lot of life left to live.
By the time of her death she appeared to have won her battle with illegal drugs, but she still had major issues with the bottle, which led to her demise.
She was 27 when she died, joining what Kurt Cobain’s mother called, “that stupid club” of famed musicians who checked out at that age; Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and way back in the days before rock ‘n’ roll, Robert Johnson. The music will live on, but the tragedy is that Amy Winehouse won’t be around to enjoy it.
