UK News

from Left field:

Both teams got the Euro 2012 playoff draw they wanted

By Philip O’Connor in Stockholm

It wasn’t just Irish eyes that were smiling when the Euro 2012 playoff draw was made in Polish city of Krakow - some of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) delegation appeared to be laughing out loud when they were drawn to face Estonia, with the winner heading to next year’s finals.

But despite the protestations of coach Tarmo Ruutli, Ireland probably represents the best possible draw for the Estonians, given that the other alternatives were Portugal, Croatia or the Czech Republic.

“I don't think the Republic of Ireland were the easiest of our potential opponents,” Ruutli said in a statement after the draw. “All the teams at this stage are strong and they proved it during the group stage. However, I won't deny the fact that we wanted to face Ireland more than the others.”

Former Ireland captain Kenny Cunningham didn’t mince his words, telling RTE TV that “everyone would have been leaning towards Estonia. They are the weakest of the teams we could have faced.”

But Ireland’s problem may be that, despite a plethora of players playing in the English Premiership, they don’t tend to do well against "weak" teams.

They struggled to beat lowly Andorra in their two qualifiers, and suffered the ignominy of conceding a goal to them at home.

from FaithWorld:

Ireland attacks confessional secrecy after Catholic sex abuse scandal

(A Roman Catholic Croat confesses to a priest during a pilgrimage in Krasno, some 150km (93 miles) south of Zagreb August 15, 2009/Nikola Solic )

Ireland's prime minister has said Catholic clerics would be prosecuted if they failed to tell the authorities about crimes disclosed during confession, the latest blow to the prestige of the once-dominant Church. A report this week found that the Church concealed from the authorities the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, and that clerics appeared to follow Church law rather than Irish guidelines to protect minors.

"The law of the land should not be stopped by a crozier or a collar," Prime Minister Enda Kenny told journalists on Thursday, referring to the hooked staff held by Catholic bishops during religious services. Kenny said his government would submit legislation to parliament that could jail clerics for up to five years if they failed to report to authorities information about the abuse of children.

The law will override the confessional privilege in Church law that prevents clerics from sharing information, he said. A series of revelations of rape and beatings by members of religious orders and the priesthood in the past have shattered the dominant role of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Ireland's Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore on Thursday summoned the Pope's representative, the papal nuncio, after the report said that the Vatican had undermined Irish guidelines on reporting sex abuse by referring to them as "study guidelines."

"We consider it absolutely unacceptable that the Vatican intervened here in a way which had the effect of undermining the efforts to deal adequately with the issue of child sexual abuse," Gilmore said. "We want a response from the Vatican."

from FaithWorld:

Irish Catholic Church concealed child abuse even after new prevention rules in 1990s

(Cloyne Cathedral, 7 May 2009/John Armagh)

A government-sponsored report said on Wednesday the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Ireland continued to conceal the sexual abuse of children by priests even after it introduced rules in the mid-1990s to protect minors.

Revelations of rape and beatings by members of religious orders and the priesthood in the past have shattered the dominant role of the Catholic Church in Ireland. But the latest report into the handling of sex abuse claims in the diocese of Cloyne, in County Cork, shows that senior-ranking clergy were still trying to cover up abuse allegations almost until the present day.

"This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era. This is not about an Ireland of 50 years ago. This is about Ireland now," Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald told a news conference.

The report, which focuses on 19 priests who allegedly abused children during a period from January 1996 to February 2009, lists how the diocese failed to report all sexual abuse complaints to the police and did not report any complaints to the health authorities between 1996 and 2008. The bishop formerly responsible for the diocese, John Magee, falsely told the authorities that he was reporting all abuse allegations to the police, the report said. He resigned in March last year after a Church investigation said his handling of abuse allegations had exposed children to risk.

The report also criticized the Vatican as "entirely unhelpful" in describing guidelines on how to deal with abuse accusations as "merely a study document." The government will decide soon whether to summon the papal nuncio, the pope's representative in Ireland, over the matter, Shatter said.

from FaithWorld:

FInancial crisis boosts European suicide rates, especially in Greece, Ireland

(Suicide hotline sign at telephone booth near Beachy Head, the chalk cliffs near Eastbourne, a leading UK suicide spot, 29 January 2009/Les Chatfield)

Suicides rates rose sharply in Europe in 2007 to 2009 as the financial crisis drove unemployment up and squeezed incomes, with the worst hit countries like Greece and Ireland seeing the most dramatic increases, researchers said on Friday. Rates of road deaths in the region fell during the same period, possibly because higher numbers of jobless people led to lower car use, according to an initial analysis of data from 10 European Union (EU) countries.

"Even though we're starting to see signs of a financial recovery, what we're now also seeing is a human crisis. There's likely to be a long tail of human suffering following the downturn," said David Stuckler, a sociologist at Britain's Cambridge University, who worked on the analysis.

Stuckler said he feared the social and health costs of the recent global economic downturn would turn out to be high. "We can already see that the countries facing the most severe financial reversals of fortune, such as Greece and Ireland, had greater rises in suicides," he said. "And suicides are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of mental health problems. Suicide itself is a relatively rare event, but wherever you see a rise in suicides there is also a rise in failed suicide attempts and in new cases of depression."

Analyzing data available so far, Stuckler and colleagues found that suicide rates were up 17 percent in Greece and 13 percent in Ireland. Unemployment increased by 2.6 percentage points -- a 35 percent relative increase -- between 2007 and 2009 across the EU as a whole, they said.

"The steady downward trend in suicide rates, seen...before 2007, reversed at once," the researchers wrote.

from FaithWorld:

Ireland eyes Catholic religious orders’ properties to meet abuse damages costs

(Irish clerical sexual abuse victims with a copy of a government report into child abuse, in Dublin May 20, 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

The Irish government asked religious orders on Tuesday to consider transferring buildings and land to the state to cover a 200 million euros shortfall in their contribution to a compensation fund for victims of abuse. The congregations agreed in 2009 to provide more compensation to victims of rape, beatings and slave labour in now defunct industrial schools they ran after the publication of a report into the abuse shocked the once devout Catholic country.

The government wants the congregations, including the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy, to contribute half of an estimated final compensation bill of 1.36 billion euros ($1.9 billion). The government has paid out around 1.3 billion euros in compensation so far.

"The congregations' total offers fall well short, by several hundred million, of the 680 million contribution they should bear towards the cost of institutional residential child abuse," Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn said in a statement.

To make up the gap, Quinn said he would seek the congregations' agreement to a legal deal that would transfer ownership of school buildings and properties to the state currently owned by them. "I recognise that there are complex legal issues to be addressed to realise the transfer of school infrastructure," he said.  "Nevertheless I believe that this approach affords the congregations involved the opportunity to shoulder their share of the costs of responding to the horrendous wrongs suffered by children in their care, while at the same time, recognising the legitimate legacy of their contribution to Irish education."

A spokeswoman for the Conference of Religious of Ireland, the umbrella group which represents the congregations, declined to comment.

from The Great Debate:

Ireland could use a little audacity of hope

By Marian Harkin

The opinions expressed are her own.

Barack Obama's infectious hope will help replenish the spirits of the beleaguered Irish people as we strive to emerge from recession, but more significantly his invoking our small nation's educational and entrepreneurial talents help to show us the way forward.

A once-in-a-generation economic crisis might seem like an odd time for Ireland to issue back-to-back invitations to Queen Elizabeth II and U.S. President Obama, but as the sun shone through the rain cloud, illuminating the President as he visited his ancestral home in Moneygall Co. Offaly, it seemed a masterstroke, for it is precisely an injection of Obama-esque audacious hope and “yes we can” positivity that Ireland needs to kickstart our long road to recovery.

One week ago as her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II bowed her head before a Memorial to Ireland's Republican dead, the message rang out to the high heavens – we work as equals and we can live in peace, and that peace can be the foundation upon which growth and prosperity is restored to this small island north and south.

So the feel-good factor was already firmly in place by the time Air Force One touched down in Dublin Airport.  Obama harnessed that upbeat mood by linking together the potential of youth, education and peace along with the power of dreams. As he himself is the embodiment of that dream, he makes it easy to believe, he makes it easy to hope and it is somehow easier to reaffirm his call “Is féidir linn” – Irish for “yes we can.”

Obama did not propose solutions to our economic problems on this visit, but for a little while he lifted our morale.  For the past two years Irish citizens have watched as enormous swathes of bank debt accumulated by the casino-like operation of Irish and European banks have been transformed before their disbelieving eyes into sovereign or citizen debt.  The sheer scale of the burden and the sense that the only light at the end of the tunnel is that of an approaching train has traumatized an entire country.  Our self belief is being sorely tested as we try to make sense of the madness that rewards the speculators and punishes the citizens.  The loss of our economic sovereignty is a huge body blow.  Yet somehow the events of the last week each in very different ways have helped to restore some national dignity.  As friends and equals with our nearest neighbors and bound by history, friendships and shared values with the US we can dig deep and find the resilience and the resolve we need to ensure that, as Obama said, “Ireland's best days are ahead.”

from Left field:

When rugby officials get it wrong

By James Illingworth

"Unforgivable", "embarrassing" and "indefensible" are just some of the descriptions of Jonathan Kaplan’s decision to allow Mike Phillips’ try for Wales in their Six Nations defeat of Ireland on Saturday.

But while the South African referee bears the brunt of the media glare in the aftermath of the match at the Millennium Stadium, assistant Peter Allan of Scotland must also take some responsibility.

Could the result have been altered if the pair had referred the decision to the Television Match Official as Ireland captain Brian O’Driscoll suggested? We will never know.

One thing we can be sure of though is that referees can occasionally mess up those big calls, even with the help of the TMO. Here’s a selection:

1. Mike Phillips (Wales) v Ireland – 2011 Six Nations

Irish replacement flyhalf Jonathan Sexton slices a clearance kick into the crowd and his teammates take their time to reorganise for the resulting lineout. In the meantime, Welsh hooker Matthew Rees is passed a new ball and throws a ‘quick’ lineout to Phillips who races into the corner to score.

A new kind of voter for post-crisis Ireland

By Padraic Halpin

The Irish financial meltdown has turned Ireland’s politics on its head, prompting nuns to consider Marxism, plumbers to track debt markets and the Irish people to abandon the party that has ruled them for most of the last 80 years.

Ravaged by austerity and embittered by years of feckless government, voters who descended upon polling stations on Friday are unrecognisable from those who seemingly sleepwalked to the polls four years ago to re-elect a Fianna Fail party despite decades of corruption allegations.

In post-crisis Ireland, the common man is more engaged by the high interest rate imposed by Europe on the country’s EU/IMF bailout than the weekend’s football action.

“There is no way we can afford to pay back all the debt,” says Alan Pinder, a 49-year-old plumber, father of two and advocate of sovereign debt default. “We have to realise that we are broke, that we can’t afford it. It’s Europe’s problem as well.”

“This government have shamed us, the whole country is shamed by them,” he said.

While voters have second thoughts about the joys of pan-European social democracy, some are casting a jealous glance at the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia for tips on how to tame their corrupt elite.

from Felix Salmon:

Ireland’s lessons for Spain

It almost goes without saying, but you have to read Michael Lewis's tour de force on Ireland in Vanity Fair. It's long -- over 13,000 words -- and it's beautifully written, giving both a big-picture perspective on the Irish economic boom and bust, and a credible account of the fateful meeting at which the Irish government decided that it should go ahead and guarantee the debts of all Irish banks. That move was the single worst decision among all the policymaker actions over the course of the global financial crisis, and Lewis is right to be astonished at how meekly the Irish population has accepted its devastating consequences.

Ireland was unfortunately yet predictably being run, at the time of the crisis, by the business-friendly Fianna Fáil party, full of lawyers and other pillars of the establishment with a tendency to make decisions on a narrow, legalistic basis. The government paid Merrill Lynch €7 million, at the height of the crisis, for a seven-page report saying that "all of the Irish banks are profitable and well capitalised" and that the government guarantee would therefore cost nothing. The result was an immediate overnight windfall for anybody invested in Irish bank debt:

The bondholders didn’t even expect to be made whole by the Irish government. Not long ago I spoke with a former senior Merrill Lynch bond trader who, on September 29, 2008, owned a pile of bonds in one of the Irish banks. He’d already tried to sell them back to the bank for 50 cents on the dollar—that is, he’d offered to take a huge loss, just to get out of them. On the morning of September 30 he awakened to find his bonds worth 100 cents on the dollar. The Irish government had guaranteed them! He couldn’t believe his luck.

Lewis does a great job of presenting the back-story to the way in which the Irish government chose Merrill to be its CYA mechanism: Merrill was the bank which had recently bowdlerized a prescient report from its own analyst, Philip Ingram, which had cast doubt on the quality of the assets at Irish banks. It was unthinkable that Merrill would be honest with the government, and it wasn't.

Ireland's bank-debt guarantee was a bit like AIG's CDO guarantees, only much, much worse. The CDO guarantees were issued when the CDOs were trading at 100 cents on the dollar, and AIG stopped writing them in 2006. The bank-debt guarantee was issued as markets were plunging, at the end of September 2008, after Lehman Brothers had already gone bust. AIG genuinely believed, when it was writing its guarantees, that there was a negligible chance that any of them would result in payouts. Ireland, by contrast, knew full well that its banks were in trouble -- the guarantee was a bit like offering free health insurance to someone who's just been rushed to the emergency room, on the grounds that a Merrill Lynch report says the patient is in fine fettle.

Lewis makes another important point, too: substantially all those bonds which Ireland guaranteed have now been paid off, in full, at par, using money from the European Central Bank. There is no longer a pool of government-guaranteed bank bonds alongside another pool of government debt; everything is now pure government debt, and as a result Ireland is mired in a fiscal crisis from which there is no way out.

All of which is an important cautionary tale for Spain, which needs to work out what to do with its undercapitalized cajas. A blanket guarantee of caja debt wouldn't be as disastrous as the Irish guarantee, but it's still a bad idea. On the other hand, letting them go bust doesn't seem very attractive either. The ideal solution, as Mohamed El-Erian says today, would be to somehow recapitalize them with private money -- but there's understandably little appetite in the private sector to come up with the tens of billions of euros needed to do that. And forcibly merging the cajas doesn't help much either: as the cliché has it, you can't tie two rocks together and hope that they'll float.

No-one comes out well in Ireland’s political posturing

Poker, chess, chicken. Pick whichever analogy you like: there’s a high stakes game being played in Irish politics and it’s not a game their international partners much like. Since Ireland said on Sunday it would be asking for help from the EU and IMF –  little more than  two days ago, though it seems like a lifetime — the pieces of the political game have moved almost without cease. Ironically, though, the net result may be little different to what was forecast before the tumultuous events of the past 48 hours: a four-year austerity plan outlining 15 billion euros in savings, a by-election Fianna Fail are set to lose, the harshest budget on record on December 7, and an election in early 2011.

It started with the government’s bailout appeal. What should have led to a few weeks of EU/IMF negotiations was immediately overshadowed by the surprise move of the junior coalition party, the Greens, who stunned voters – and, it appears, their partners Fianna Fail themself, itself, when it announced it would not continue to be part of the government once 2011 budget measures were implemented.

Next move came from two politicians that few knew were even playing in the game: the independent lawmakers on whom the government relies for parliamentary majority. Jackie Healy-Rae and Michael Lowry threw the success of the budget – and the immediate future of the government – into doubt after saying they might not back the budget after all. This threw the ball to opposition parties Fine Gael and Labour who took it, ran with it, and demanded a snap election.

Back to Prime Minister Brian Cowen, whose poker face kept everyone guessing for several tense hours. He was to make a statement, the government reported. The Twittersphere ignited with rumours he would resign, markets wobbled. But no, Cowen stood firm and swatted the ball  back to the opposition. I’ll call an election, he said, but not before the budget is passed and implemented — effectively daring Fine Gael and Labour to vote it down and so be branded unpatriotic and self-interested in the process.

Then, stalemate. The opposistion went strangely quiet as they mulled what to do. Fine Gael disappeared into a huddle for over three hours to devise a plan. Then Fien Gael’s Enda Kenny showed his hand: ‘Bring forward the budget date’ he demanded with a flourish. Cowen stood up, paused for a few seconds, and simply said ‘No’.

There may be no more hands left to play, if you choose to view this as a high stakes poker game, or moves to make, if you’d prefer chess. The budget looks likely to go ahead on December 7, it looks likely to pass since Fine Gael have now also started trotting out the national interest line. And an election will follow in early 2011. But the net result of the last few days’ political posturing has been to add to international uncertainty about Ireland, and raise the ire of political partners, who have been at pains to stress that Ireland must get its four-year plan and budget out as planned if it wants aid. No-one has come out well, nerves are shredded, and Irish people appear fed up and frustrated by the gaming. The four-year plan may put a halt to the manoeuvres for now – expect plenty more before the year is out.