After discovering that in fact Coillte now owns the lands in Sralagagh, I wrote to them instead

Dear sir/madam,
I am writing to you in connection with lands owned by Coillte in Sralagagh, Ballycastle, Co. Mayo (folio 647f -the former of estate of John Mennis). Much of this land is under forestry, but there is also an area that is subject to turbary rights which are owned by many people in the locality. The roads in and out of this area are relatively busy for bogland -with turfcutting in the summer, heavy machinery passing up and down and also local tourists using the area for the "Sralagagh loop walk" and also deer spotting.

Unfortunately, one of the bridges into the bog has become dangerous. Despite some well meaning repair attempts by locals, the situation has not improved and the bridge is slowly crumbling. Please see pictures attached. This bridge has been dangerous for some time, and has gotten worse over the winter. I believe it is only a matter of time before there is a serious accident at this bridge and a vehicle will topple into a big gulley (possibly with a heavy cargo on board) creating a serious danger to human life. At the very least there is a risk to the property of visitors.

As the landowner in this location, and conscious of the Occupier's liability acts, and furthermore conscious that previous spontaneous repairs (in this location and elsewhere on the bogs) by locals have been counterproductive at times -I ask you to move quickly to repair this bridge. The rest of the roads on this land would also benefit from a general upgrade (and indeed they are relatively short and would be inexpensive to improve) -however, this spot is an urgent risk to human life and turfcutter's property, and regardless of whether the rest of the road is improved it is vital that this bridge is repaired ASAP..

I attach a map to identify the location of the bridge I speak of.

Submission to the Constitutional Convention

Dear convention members,

Article 15.14 states that noone can be a member of both the Seanad and the Dáil at the same time. However, it imposes no further restrictions on politicians crossing over from one house to the other. In practice, a great many senators/TDs have spent time in the other house. This movement of personnel from one house to the other has harmful effects for politics. It allows political parties to use Seanad seats as a publicly-funded promotional tool for future potential TDs. It also allows parties to preserve the political status of TDs who have been voted out of office by the people, but who may be reelected in future. Neither use is in keeping with the role of the seanad as a true second house.

 

Furthermore, the European parliament is used in much the same way, with candidates standing without any serious intention of dealing with EP business, but rather as a means of publicising themselves for future Dáil seat contests.

 

I propose a revision of 15.14 to extend it to the European Parliament and to impose a delay of 3 years for any politician leaving one of these bodies before they can take a seat in one of the others. In this way, candidates running for a Seanad or a European Parliament seat could not use it merely as a platform for a future Dáil election. They would have to commit to the house they seek election to and take the seat with the intention of performing that specific role for its own sake.

 

Here is my proposed text:

 

"No person may be a member of the European Parliament, Dáil Éireann or Seanad Éireann within 3 years of having been a member of another of those bodies.".

Further letter to Leo Varadkar about Aer Lingus

Minister,

the recent controversy about Ryanair proposing to sell off Aer Lingus' slots at Heathrow should underline the importance of these slots for Ireland. Michael Vaughan of the Hotels Federation made a strong case for their retention on Morning Ireland before Christmas.

I have written to you about this before, but to reitirate:

• we acquired these slots (and all our international slots) easily, at a time when airport slots were freely available and under a far sighted government policy of improving our flight connections. Because we acquired them so easily, we do not appreciate their value and the difficulty there would be in replacing these slots at any reasonable price once they are surrendered. If you recall my previous letter, I suggested that an oil rich state with lots of cash and poor connections would probably make a bid for AL to gain control of the slots. This appears to already be underway.
• a sell off of Aer Lingus will not be able to provide necessary surety that the slots would be protected. Safeguard clauses in the sale could lose their effect if the carrier was subsequently reflagged, bankrupted etc.. Allowing Aer Lingus to be sold with its slots is not an acceptable safeguard of our needs as an island to maintain connections.
• the slots should be returned to State ownership and held in a holding company which would ensure that they would be used for flights into Ireland. There are 3 steps necessary to achieve this:

1. A sale-and-leaseback agreement must be agreed with AL in regard to the slots. This agreement should take place as part of the overall deal on selling the State's share and settling the question over the pension scheme. The slots should be sold to the state and leased back on a long term lease to the airline.
2. The slots should then be transferred to a holding company within state control
3. Once (in the far distance) the leases have expired, the slots should be rented out to any airline (foreign or domestic) to service flights into ireland. This should be spelled out at the beginning as a long term commitment of the slots to AL would probably fall foul of State-aid rules. A mere sale and leaseback arrangement that brought assets within state control should be OK though -and indeed, the protection of transport links for islands is specifically provided for in EU state aid rules.

So Minister, I urge you, as part of the overall negotiations on pensions and the sale of the shareholding -please ensure that AL's overseas slots are held in the title of the State. Clever clauses in any sale agreement are no substitute for ownership and we should not lightly give away an incredibly valuable legacy of previous state policy -one of the few things we got right in the last century.

 

Further letter to Simon Coveney

Dear Minister,
I am writing to update you about the situation in Sralagagh, Ballycastle, where the road over your lands had become dangerous for people using the right of way.

As you you can see from the photos, some well meaning, but poorly conceived repairs have been done by people locally. They seem to have used gravel to fill up the cavity that had developed in the bridge and make it passable again. However, these repairs resulted in a blockage to the drain, which then overflowed and tore the side off the bridge on the downstream side.

Basically, what would have been a relatively minor repair a few months ago when I first wrote to you, has now become a more expensive job. The bridge is likely to deteriorate further with every heavy rainfall.

I urge you not to delay in doing something about this as the bridge is still dangerous and the side of it could give way under any vehicle at any time.

Letter to several European Commission staff on the topic of the Internal market for Services

Dear sirs/madams,

I am writing to urge you to bring forward a proposal for a new services directive.

 

 

In particular, I am urging you to bring forward a proposal based on mutual recognition of services between member States -as is already in effect for Goods -and which unfortunately had to be removed from the previous services directive.

 

 

Despite that earlier setback, I believe that now is a politick time to bring forward such a proposal again -for 2 reasons. Firstly, unemployment levels across the Union have been climbing and jobs are a focus for most of the Governments across Europe.

 

 

Secondly, and more importantly, the escalating talk of a British exit from the EU gives other Member States a powerful incentive to make EU membership more attractive to the UK. I believe that any proposal for mutual recognition of services will benefit from the desire of the other Member States to entice the UK to remain within the Union. A decision to deepen the services market at this time would be a powerful incentive for the UK to remain within the Union to benefit from access to the emerging services market and also to retain a voice as the rules of the services market are developed.

 

 

Furthermore, those British who are upset by the proposed Banking Union would also be among the main beneficiaries of a services market -thereby giving some political cover for the British Government to cooperate with the Eurozone Banking Union proposals.

 

 

I would suggest a Directive with a strong and universal principle of mutual recognition for services -with a long implementation period, possibly staggered across different sectors. Such a proposal, would be less intimidating to the MSs than immediate universal opening of services.

 

 

In any event, I believe we should use the present angst over a possible British exit to develop the services market. Whatever the UK's ultimate choice, the uncertainty created by their possible departure will be a powerful motivational tool for agreement. Agreeing to launch the services market will never be easy, but right now is as good a chance as we are likely to receive -I think the Commission should seize the chance.

Letter to Simon Coveney

Simon Coveney,

Minister for Agriculture

 

Dear minister,

I am writing to you as the successor to the Minister for Lands. In particular I am writing to you as the owner of lands in Sralagagh, Ballycastle, Co. Mayo (Folio 647f).

 

These lands are burdened by a right of way to allow for turfcutting by individuals. Unfortunately, the road through the land has degraded over many years and is in poor shape. I am not asking for the road to be upgraded to a high standard –however, the road has become quite dangerous in at least two locations, and I am concerned that if nothing is done to rectify this then it is really only a matter of time before a serious accident occurs. The lands are used by turfcutters and a handful of tourists/hunters. Though most are familiar with the road and the dangers of these 2 locations, not everyone is.

 

Therefore, as the landowner, I am asking you to take steps to make the roadway safe. It would not be a big job as there are only really 2 locations that are actually dangerous, and it could save a life someday soon (not to mention legal proceedings against the Minister as landowner). Perhaps also, someday in the future when finances are not so constrained, it would be possible to do a more general improvement on the road, but in the short term, I urge you to address these immediate problem spots.

A clarion call for sceptics of the current bank regulation system

Andrew Haldane, well respected expert in banking and bank regulation has recently delivered a devastating speech in the USA on the topic of complexity in bank regulation. In it, he says that not only has bank regulation become much more complex and expensive (by orders of magnitude) in recent decades, but these exceedingly complex analyses of risk within banks may in fact produce inferior results when compared to simpler regulatory strategies.

This echoes my own thoughts on the matter, and indeed I wrote to the Basel committee on this topic in 2008. The excessive complexity of risk analysis included within regulatory structures is unnecessary and only create loopholes for banks to exploit. Rather, blunt, robust regulation is what is needed.

Haldane goes on to give dozens of examples of risk analysis by banks and regulators where their complex models in key prudential areas are outperformed by simple (occasionally linear) assessments in predicting future outcomes.

This must be incredibly depressing for regulators and banks: they have employed hundreds of thousands of highly qualified staff, at massive expense, to conduct risk analysis within the current complex regulatory framework -and their outcomes are not just poor, but actually underperform simple linear models. To say that it calls into question the current, expensive prudential regime is an understatement.

Haldane is a senior figure in the Bank of England and a respected voice worldwide, his opinions have also been echoed in other quarters -including the former head of the FDIC (and of course myself -only 4 years earlier). His assessment carries weight and it is a welcome intervention in the ever expanding mess that is the current prudential framework.

Haldane is pessimistic that his advocated simpler approach to regulation (focusing on uncertainty itself, rather than pointlessly trying to measure risk to a certainty) will be adopted in international regulation. In particular, he feels the zeal for reform has been defused by Basel III (which is essentially Basel II with more capital). I hope he is wrong, because apart from too many loopholes, Basel II/III incorporate market influenced risk metrics that actively magnify financial crises. These should have been addressed instead of ignored (along with the absurd overcomplexity of these agreements).

My logic is simple. If Basel II did not cause the crisis, then what was the point of Basel III? If it did contribute to the crisis, then why is Basel III essentially the same thing only more-so?

Personally, I go further than Haldane. I don't believe that regulation should focus on trying to prevent bank failures (i.e. ensuring adequate capital for the banks risk profile). This is impossible given the size of the task and the uncertainty inherent in every lending decision. Rather, I think regulation should address the symptoms of bank failures and then simply let them happen. I would leave in place 100% deposit guarantees (for demand or short-notice accounts anyway) and have the deposit protection schemes administered and guaranteed by the Central Banks. In this way, depositors would be assured that their money was safe and bank runs would be averted. More controversially, I would also severely curtail inter bank lending or ownership. For many banks, this would mean a sea-change in their business models. Banking would still be international, but it would be banks themselves that would cross borders, rather than simply capital. The "distribute to originate" (sic) process of interbank lending would end.

This approach basically isolates every bank, leaving the only exposed parties to a bank failure as investors, investment lenders, and the future contributors to the deposit guarantee scheme (in that order). In such a situation, bank failures would cause investors to lose money, but no bank runs and no systemic crises. The cost of protecting depositors would be paid by all banks (and hence depositors) over the long term. Supervisors would withdraw from prudential regulation altogether and let investors worry about it. 

This approach basically abandons all pretence of prudential regulation -whether it is complex (as at present) or simple (as advocated by Haldane). In my view, regulation is more for the reassurance of society than any real positive impact it has on risks taken by banks. Indeed, regulation and compliance has become so expensive that it would need to deliver a high degree of safety to justify its own cost -clearly it has not done so, banking crises are just as frequent now as they were in the era before regulation. The only reason the recent crisis was any less worse than the 1930s was state intervention, not expensive prudential regulation in the pre-crisis period.

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/speech596.pdf