Saints and Ladders

“Crowded” is a word that aptly describes both the recent Irish Presidential election and the on-going race for the Republican Party's nomination. On October 27^th a total of 7 candidates vied for the support of the Irish people making it the most heavily contested presidential poll in the country's history. Republicans have faced a choice just as varied and their allegiances have shifted wildly as early favourites have been brought low by gaff and scandal only for once doubtful candidates to capitalise and see their poll numbers swell.

The past month bore witness to the implosion of Republican hopeful and pizza mogul Herman Cain. No less than 4 women have come forward to accuse Mr. Cain of sexual misdeeds, leading to a plummet in support among the Republican's conservative Christian base and his subsequent exit from the race.

Sexual misconduct also spelled the end for Irish independent presidential candidate Senator David Norris, when it emerged that he had written several letters to Israeli judicial and political figures seeking clemency for a former partner, Ezra Yizhak Nawi, who was convicted of the statutory rape of a 15 year old boy. Cain's withdrawal means he will avoid the eventual fate of Norris, who faced down public ire to contest the national poll but ended up with a mere 6.4% of the vote down from a high of 40% in pre-election opinion polls.

At the other end of the spectrum Newt Gingrich has risen, phoenix like, from depths of 4% in July to top opinion polls in many early voting states. This remarkable turn-around has stunned political commentators, many of whom wrote Gingrich off after the mass resignation of his campaign staff over the summer. This late stage surge bares comparing to that of Sean Gallagher, a sprightly 49 year old entrepreneur and TV host, who saw an 18 point leap in his poll ranking over just 9 days in mid October.

Gallagher maintained a commanding lead in the run up to the election with polls conducted the weekend before hand putting his support between 38 and 40%. His luck ran out when fellow nominee Martin McGuinness accused him of soliciting a donation for the now disgraced Fianna Fáil party in 2008.

Bank records later appeared to exonerate Mr. Gallagher but the polls were just 3 days away and the damage had been done. He went on to poll a respectable 28.5% but was swept away by the Labour Party candidate Michael D. Higgins.

The long suffering Mitt Romney, whose campaign recently launched a targeted counter attack on the resurgent Gingrich, may come to regret his course of action. The temperate Mr. Higgins took his place as Ireland's head of state by refusing to indulge in mud slinging and staying the only consistently scandal-free candidate. Even Mr. Gallagher acknowledged this, congratulating him on running a “positive” campaign as the results came in confirming victory for the 70 year old poet. As the Iowa caucuses draw ever closer Mr. Romney may wish he had left the hatchet job to another in the crowded field on nominees.

Syria: In Search of a Tipping Point

With the death of Moammar Gadhafi behind us the world is now eyeing the teetering regimes of other autocratic rulers in the Arab world and wondering who might be the next to fall. Syria, whose uprising began in earnest in March, makes for an interesting candidate but there are several key differences between it and previously toppled Governments which could result in a softer landing for the regime and its president, Bashar al-Assad.

First and foremost Syria is a diverse place. President Assad described it as the “hub” of the Middle East in a recent interview. The country contains significant Christian, Kurdish and Alawite Muslim minorities. The Sunni Muslim majority, which forms the bulk of the protest movement, campaigns for social justice and an end to Alawite domination of the security services. President Assad, himself an Alawite, plays on the minority's fears of mob rule by the Sunni majority and also of the possible Islamification of Syria should his secular Ba'ath party be deposed.

Syrian geography also distinguishes it from somewhere like Libya where miles of open desert between towns gave intervening NATO forces an advantage when targeting regime loyalists. The relative proximity of Syria's population centres would be a liability to any foreign forces seeking to minimise civilian casualties, something bitter experience in Iraq and elsewhere has taught the West to value above all else.

No side is yet calling for direct military intervention. For his part, President Assad has said that interference in Syria would destabilise the entire region. The protest movement at first opposed any kind of outside influence but elements are now calling for a Libyan style no-fly-zone to be imposed which would negate one of the regimes key advantages in the conflict. At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan, US Senator John McCain gave a similar line saying that “The Assad regime should not consider that it can get away with mass murder.” and called for a renewed focus on “partial military operations” which “might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria.”

The Syrian uprising has been striking for the sheer bloodiness of the regime's response to the protests. The UN estimates that over 3000 have been killed so far and the Government has put military vehicles on the streets of several towns it sees as particularly troublesome including Daraa, Jisr ash-Shughur, Hama and Homs. Violence shows no signs of abating with the death toll reaching 40 in a single day recently for the first time since May.

Responses to the crack down from international institutions have varied. A draft resolution put before the UN security council in October, which would have condemned the crackdown, was vetoed by China and Russia, ever the forces of non-interference. Four other council members abstained from voting even though sanctions and an arms-embargo were dropped from the resolution in order to give it wider appeal. A letter penned by the Arab League calling for an end to violence against the protesters, removal of military vehicles from the streets and the release of political prisoners delivered to the Syrian foreign minister on Sunday has gone unanswered at the time of this writing. Speaking in Tripoli, where he was announcing an end to the campaign there, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen ruled out military intervention in Syria but personally condemned the crack down.

It is the lack of political will to interfere that, more so than any other factor, will give Bashar al-Assad the time he needs to draw a bloody line under the protests. The people of Syria need the support of the international community if they are to follow in the tentatively hopeful footsteps of Libya and Egypt. If they don't receive it they will be dragged down the bleak path trodden by Yemen and Bahrain.

The Vote Behind the Vote

 Like a local building society collapsing simultaneously with a multi-billion euro financial institution, the referenda taking place this October have garnered shockingly little media attention and inspired little debate outside the sullen chambers of the Oireachtas. On the face of it a direct competition between seven outsized personalities all competing for a single prize will obviously garner more public interest but when you dig a little deeper the referenda have some very interesting personalities of their own standing behind them.

The twenty-ninth amendment to the constitution is about the pay of serving judges. Currently article 35 section 5 of the constitution states that “The remuneration of a judge shall not be reduced during his continuance in office.” The inability of the Government to reduce a judge's pay means they cannot use the threat of a pay reduction to influence judicial decisions. This independence is seen as sacrosanct and is enshrined in the constitutions of most developed countries. While judicial independence is undeniably essential to the functioning of a free and fair democracy, this blanket protection has resulted in judges being spared the public sector wage cuts and pension levy applied to every other public sector worker.

In November 2009 Fine Gael's then Justice Spokesperson and current Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, put forward a private members bill that would have called for a referendum similar to the one taking place this year. The Fianna Fail – Green Party coalition at the time declined to give the bill a hearing before the Dáil but the referendum issue went on to form part of Fine Gael's election campaign. Speaking to the Seanád in advance of their vote on the issue Mr. Shatter said “this amendment is not primarily about money. It is all about fairness and the need to ensure that judicial independence is no longer undermined, through no fault of its own, by the perception of judges as an elite group who are not contributing their fair share at a time of unprecedented economic difficulty.”

The bill passed unanimously in the Dáil and was opposed by only two senators in the Seanad, one of whom was presidential candidate David Norris. Part of the reason the bill passed so effortlessly is that the little opposition there was were divided over their concerns. The judges for their part were never opposed to the idea that their wage packets should decrease due to the worsening state of the public finances. In fact some 85% of them reduced their wage in line with the pension levy voluntarily and, when appointed Chief Justice in July, Susan Denham chose to forego the €38,000 pay increase the promotion entitled her to. What the judges did have a problem with was the ability to reduce their pay being handed to the Irish Government in any shape or form. Safeguards in the articles' sub-sections were not enough to satisfy their concerns for their independence and they expressed these concerned in a memorandum which was at first partly leaked to the Irish Times and later published in its entirety on the court services website.

Opposition senators also expressed concerned but theirs were understandable different to those of the judges. Judicial independence did feature among the questions put to Alan Shatter in the Seanad debate but they took a back seat to concerns over the haste with which the legislation was brought to bear and wider concerns about the current (un)competitive state of Ireland's legal profession. Without a unified opposing ideology to the bill the referendum looks set to sail through with a Irish Times commissioned poll conducted on October 8^th showing 88% support for the legislation.

What's wrong with FPtP?

On May 5th Britons will go to the polls to decide whether or not they wish to change the system by which they appoint legislators to the House of Commons. The current system, First Past the Post (FPtP), is disparaged as "broken" by policy makers from across the political spectrum but its mooted replacement, the Alternative Vote (AV) system, has its own flaws which is why the current Conservative government is campaigning for a no vote, putting them at logger-heads with their Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

So what's wrong with the current system? On paper it sounds fair, the country is divided into districts of similar population, every citizen gets one vote and the candidate who receives the most endorsements goes on to represent her district in the national legislator. But this system has a number of flaws and over time political scientists have come up with some pretty interesting solutions to address them.

The first problem with FPtP is that it's entirely possible for a candidate that represents a minority of the voters in her district to be elected. Imagine 4 political parties field candidates in a particular district. The Green, Yellow and Blue parties each receive 24% of the votes and the Red party gets 28%. The Red party wins the seat and a person with the support of less then 30 in every 100 people in her district goes on to represent said district in parliament. Two systems have been proposed to help eliminate this problem. The first is two-round voting. Under this system a preliminary election is held after which all but the two most popular candidates are eliminated. The two remaining candidates then face each other in a run-off. With only 2 choices possible the winner will, by definition, have majority support. Elections can be costly though which is where the AV system comes in. It guarantees majority support and voters only have to go to the polls once. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives an objective majority of the votes cast the least popular candidate is eliminated from the race and their votes are redistributed to the candidates that their voters had indicated as their second preference. This process of elimination and redistribution continues until someone passes the 50% threshold.

Both these systems solve the problem of minorities controlling legislation on the local level but there is a further problem that plagues both systems and it becomes apparent when you look at things on the national level. Imagine 2 districts; District 9 and District 13. Both have a voting-age population of 700. In District 9 the Blue party tallies 400 votes and the Yellow party receives 300. In District 13 the Red party gets 400 votes and the Yellow party again polls 300. In the national legislator these districts will be represented by one Red and one Blue candidate even though the Yellow party has more support in the region then either of them. The system suggested as a cure for this is Proportional Representation (PR) in which a party that received, for example, 15% of the votes nationwide would receive 15% of the seats in the legislator subject to a minimum threshold.

So if PR is known to solve the problems inherent in both the FPtP and AV voting systems why isn't it widely implemented? Their are two very bad outcomes that can result from a pure PR system. First, small parties can multiply leading to rainbow coalitions without a clear leadership structure incapable of taking immediate action in times of crisis. Second, minorities with diffuse geographical support are not always the kind of minorities that deserve representation. Indeed deserving minorities such as those based on religion, culture or ethnicity tend to be geographically clustered and are thus no better served by PR then by AV or FPtP. Minorities with diffuse geographical support tend to represent the fringe of political ideology, the far-left and the far-right. In the above example switching to a pure PR system would hand the Yellow party a clear a majority. If the Yellow party is of an extremist bent that country may never see another election.

In light of the fact that each of the voting systems has its flaws contemporary commentators favour a mixed system with a certain fraction of the seats in the legislator being decided on a traditional FPtP or AV basis and the remainder awarded to parties on the basis of their nationwide performance (i.e. on a PR basis). To see how this would improve matters imagine the election results in districts 9 and 13 above were repeated in a further 48 districts. Under pure FPtP this would result in a government composed entirely of Reds and Blues, quite unfair for all those Yellow voters. But say we added 40 seats on a PR basis as they do in Scotland. 16 would go to the Yellow party, 12 to the Reds and 12 to the Blues. The Yellows would now find themselves capable of taking part in a coalition government, giving them the recognition they deserve, while the Red or Blue party would have a clear political mandate to govern, controlling 37 seats in a 53 seat coalition.

The Rise and Fall of The Quinn Group

 

In August 2010 Sean Quinn became the latest in a growing line of Irish business tycoons to part ways with that most ubiquitous of status symbols, his helicopter. The €4 million Agusta 109 was of course the property of the Quinn Group, not Mr. Quinn himself, but when it was leant to family friend Bertie Ahern during the former Taoiseach's re-election campaign the distinction seems to have hardly mattered. The helicopter's history is as much a window into the incestuous world of Irish business and politics as the news of its sale was a dangerous portent of turbulent times ahead for the Quinn Group and it's founder, dubbed the 164^th richest individual on the planet in 2008 by Forbes magazine but who now faces bankruptcy.

The Quinn Group started out as a small quarrying operation supplying washed gravel to the building industry in 1973. The business soon took off, expanding into manufacturing, hospitality, property and has even taken a faltering step into the energy market, applying for planning permission to build two gas-fired power plants in 2007. The market for which it is best known however, and which seems to have been its undoing, is financial services. It began with the launch of Quinn Direct Insurance Ltd. in 1996 which specialised in non-life insurance products and followed up with the launch of Quinn Life in 2000 which would go on to acquire the Irish operations of Bupa. Throughout these years of dynamic growth the Quinn family remained very much in charge of every business under the Quinn umbrella. Their dealings would eventually lead to censure and downfall.

The Irish financial regulator handed down a record €3.25 million fine to the Quinn Group over disclosed internal loans that enabled the Quinn family to acquire a 15% stake in Anglo Irish Bank. The bank's nationalisation by Irish government after it went into a tailspin in 2008 saw these shares all but wiped out. Unconvinced of their ability to repay bank loans, Anglo recently moved to oust the Quinns from their management positions within the Quinn group and, in a joint-venture with American insurer Liberty Mutual, looks set to snap up Ireland's second largest insurer which is now in administration.

As the appointed administrators have set about unravelling the shady inner workings of the Quinn Group's most important company the Government has proposed a levy on home and car insurance policies in order to make up the €620 million of obligations that Quinn Insurance's new owners are unwilling to meet. This has provoked a harsh reaction from Irish consumer advocacy groups which feel the Irish consumer should not have to bear the cost of the Quinn family's misconduct. With €2.9 billion in outstanding in outstanding loans to Anglo Irish alone, Mr. Quinn may soon have to sell more than the family helicopter.