Dublin Opinion

Lovely weather we’re having, is it? I was up at 6:30 this morning to feed littlest his good morning bottle and as I opened the bedroom curtains I was elated to see the empty street bright with early morning sunshine. Not a cloud in the sky, a clear Californian blue. It’s the sort of weather I associate with the summers of my childhood and my time sat trapped indoors swatting for state exams.

I turned on Morning Ireland to catch the weather forecast but instead of hearing about continuing sunshine o’er the weekend I heard that Bertie is “still struggling to get from under the cloud that is dogging his campaign”.

It seems that the Irish Times is not a national newspaper with a grandiose sense of its own self worth. Rather, it is a cloud seeder generating the change in the weather for Fianna Fail by sprinkling small cloud enhancing particles of information relating to how the Mahon Tribunal has concerns about his association with business man Michael Wall; about that £30,000 stg handed to Ahern in his constituency office, with Celia in attendance; about the loss that Mr. Wall endured on the sale of the house despite it being sold for a ‘reasonable price’ and about the argument that the only reason why Bertie wanted to use the house was because, on the cusp on becoming Taoiseach, he was of no fixed abode.

According to Christine FF reacted aggressively when the story appeared on the Irish Times website early this morning, claiming that the leak from the Mahon tribunal was part of “a carefully orchestrated campaign to cause mayhem and confusion during the General Election”. The statement appears added on to Colm Keena’s report about the Tribunal in the print edition this morning.

Its curious that they should use those words, because, as Ben has said in the comments to Christine’s post, they’re doing a fine job of causing mayhem and confusion themselves. The FF campaign so far has been so badly handled that it seems the main responsibility for the cloud generating remains with the man who is at the center of the storm – Bertie Ahern.

Two things have become clear in the last couple of days. One, Bertie is not a very smart man and two, most journalists prefer to ignore this fact and in so doing are willing to let him away with bungling everything up for the country through his incompetence.

He is the only one who could have called the election early yet he chose to leave it till the end of May despite the INO giving him months of notice that they were going to bring about an industrial dispute at around the time the election was due to be called in May.

He knew that the Mahon tribunal was scheduled to sit at the same time as he’d called the previous general election in 2002.

He also knew that information about the 50,000, Mr. Wall and the house in Drumcondra was floating about and considering that information has already leaked from the Tribunal and been published he must have been aware that there was nothing to stop it coming out, especially at election time.

Had he calculated that the opposition would be cowed by the bounce he received last time? Did he plan that the public would warm even more to him when they saw him once again stoically weathering yet another storm generated by a veracious media fixated, not on the public good - like him - but on circulation figures, advertising wealth and the perverse desire to poison the bloody wounds inflicted on a popular politician by their foul printer’s ink and grubby recycled paper.

Did he fuck! There was no calculation. There was no plan. The cloud has descended and he is rapidly getting lost in the political fog.

And the only reporter who was willing to stand up to him was Vincent Browne. Browne’s shutting up of PJ Mara at the Mansion House yesterday was perhaps the highlight of the over-priced penny opera, where with a single phrase he made the connection between the dark legacy of Charlie Haughey and the petty larceny of Bertie Ahern.

Of course, the show piece of the election manifesto launch was the news that Fianna Fail are going to cut Stamp Duty, contrary to what Brian Cowen 10 days ago called a ‘reckless attempt by the opposition to destabilize the housing market’.

Curiously, Vincent Browne himself had a very interesting article recently, in the Sunday Business Post all about Stamp Duty (thanks WorldbyStorm of Cedar Lounge for the link).

In the article he points to a report provided by the Tax Strategy Group, now available on the Dept of Finance’s website, which indicated that despite significant reductions of Stamp Duty in the 1998 budget “the measures have not increased liquidity in the second-hand housing market. Any further reductions (in stamp duty rates) may not alleviate the main problem in the housing sector - that of supply (and therefore the price of houses).”

He asks:

“So what is it with the parties and stamp duty? Why are they so keen on diverting revenue from the state to the coffers of developers or the owners of existing homes, who are often fairly wealthy people? Isn’t the point of the exercise to reduce the price of houses for first-time buyers? How can that be done by reducing or abolishing stamp duty? Stamp duty is not a bad idea. First, unlike Vat, the tax that now yields most revenue for the state, it is progressive, and affects rich people more than poor people. Second, it diverts to the state revenue from already over-endowed sellers. It makes no difference to the price of houses, except perhaps at the margins.”

He points to the Bacon report that said the best way to reduce house prices is by developing higher density housing – designing house so that more people can live closer together, reducing constructions costs and providing better infrastructure for more people and improving (indeed providing) shared ownership schemes.

But still Browne is scratching his head:

“So what are the parties on about? Why has stamp duty become such a major issue in the election campaign?”

Ben in an earlier article made a good case about why this should be.

Now that the housing market has expanded as far as it can go and the rise of interest rates (at the behest of the CEB) has made it even more difficult for house buyers the vested interests, in this case principally, the Auctioneers and Estate Agents, are looking for a new market – the empty nesters. They are encouraging people to downsize their properties and making money on the difference. The problem about downsizing however, is that part of the profit goes in Tax. Abolish stamp duty and you’ll have another short-term housing boom, those who wish to take advantage of current high prices before the whole thing goes belly up.

But again in the Irish Times today there is another answer to Vincent Browne’s question and it is provided by none other than Stephen Collins in his opinion piece(sub req).

“The real surprise, though, was that this concession [in relation to stamp duty] has been backdated for seven years, which means that anybody who bought a house over that period will stand to net a tidy lump sum if Fianna Fáil returns to power. The concession is clearly designed to appeal to a wide swathe of people who have bought a house in recent years.”

They bought the last election and they’re trying to buy this one too. Charlie always thought that what was good for him was good for the country. Browne, by making the link between Charlie and Bertie yesterday, reminded us that Bertie thinks the same way. If he could get a kickback through the sale of a house in Drumcondra then everyone else in the country should get one too.

Oh let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.