Yes.

I’m afraid I can’t give you a URL because Dublin City Council has changed its website to use ASPX pages, which give me blank screens, but if you can search their site for “shannon” you will probably find the stuff. Essentially, it seems that folk in the greater Dublin area all have jacuzzis and swimming pools and lawn sprinklers (this isn’t actually in the scientific reports, you understand: I’m just filling in the background for you) and anyway there are more and more of them every year, so they’re going to run short of water soon. Dublin City Council, as the lead authority, has been investigating this for years and has produced two serious reports. Potential new sources of supply near the east coast would not be adequate and a desalination plant would be expensive, so the Council proposes to steal ^H^H^H^H^H take water from the Shannon and pipe it to Dublin, despite the antediluvian protests of the natives.

No serious alternative has been proposed and it seems that discussion focuses now on (a) where the water should be taken from: whether from Lough Ree or from Lough Derg and (b) whether there should be a reservoir (Navan suggests itself to me), so that Dublin can take the excess during floods without causing the river to run dry in droughts. (Dev would be proud of them: he himself never managed to drain the Shannon.)

If you can find them, there are fairly hefty documents available online. And there has been the usual sort of consultation.

bjg

I’m not aware that this has been identified as a potential problem and I live in Dublinland - but then I may not have been looking in the right place.

What I am aware of is that outside of Dublin, the water infrastructure is creaking badly - witness the numerous water shortages/outages during the recent cold snap in places like Donegal (I know, I was there for the past two weeks and what a godforsaken place it is) etc.

Leakage seems to be a big problem in places like the UK and Ireland where the original systems were built back in Victorian/early 20th century. I can’t speak for the rest of Europe. But leakage in a system is the kind of thing you can at least fix when push comes to shove. I can’t imagine rainfall in Ireland is ever going to go anywhere other than up.

One would have thought that if we actually paid for our water here that we might get a better service/less leakage etc. but that implies a road to privatisation of the service and paying for it would then just simply line the pockets of shareholders and directors rather than giving a better service I suspect. I presume privatising things like water has to be on the agenda sooner or later or how else are we going to start to reduce the mountain of debt our lovely government are building up if we don’t raise some money somewhere. Who knows? Maybe privatisation of these kind of things will form part of what happens in the Irish economy in 2010.

When you think about it though, water is more likely to cause a fight between nations (or even within nations) than even oil. You can’t drink oil and given the amount of water we ‘mainly made out of water’ humans need just to survive a few days…..

Here’s an old joke for you. Q: How do you know it’s summer in Ireland?
A: The rain’s warmer.

I really must go to bed. Some idiot has called an early breakfast meeting in the morning and I can’t get out of it. He had better bring the bacon sarnies or he is toast.

Gold is fine - am long Au since 2005! Have a small farm: growing trees.

Take your point about the ‘curve’. Its just that I have v-significant concerns about the future. That point about water - this is becoming a real problem. I read somewhere that Dublin may experience shortages in a few years time. Is this correct? Thanks again.

B Peter

you’re looking for an enquiry which yields actual answers, and apportions responsibility on people for the mess. Im all for that.

What others are looking for is actual heads on plates in the form of custodial sentances, massive civil fines, and possibly enforced job dismissal. You’ll note that most of the people looking for this don’t actually discuss getting answers along the way, though some say that we can get both without actually accepting the constitutional and practical problems that a joint-mandated enquiry would probably have. This is where my problem lies. My other issue is that no one has as of yet said what form they would like this enquiry to take? Everything is ultra vague in structure, but razor narrow in outcome - ie heads on plates.

That’s not a paradigm shift (a la Kuhn) then. That’s just global war to secure diminishing resources. I expect they (the winners) will use Ireland as a vegetable garden and a source of clean water by that point. Maybe they can use the various unused/repo’d buildings in the land to rear livestock in too?

I suspect the bubble-blowers are not quite finished or on their downward curve just yet. I suppose it’s only a matter of time though. The day I see Kalahari tribesmen buying 2 bed apartments off plan at €400,000 a pop I will start to worry though. We will be getting close to the end of days by then.

@BP Woods: “Should we open a Book on this event?”
- only if I can collect. Or buy gold …

When will a contemporary economist break ranks, Kuhnian style - and declare that Smithian Growth is over? That exponential population growth (an irresistible force) is totally incompatible with finite resource depletion (an immovable object). Our ‘growth’ has plateaued, inflected, and we are now on the downside of the curve!

Should we open a Book on this event? Perhaps not.

B Peter

ps: Krugman was not a worthy recipient: they just needed to keep it in the ‘club’. In fact the prize should be scrapped.

How did Paul Krugman qualify for the Nobel Prize? Note his even handed method of letting people know that those who say “excessive credit is always a bad thing”
are moralizers who do not realize that in Krugman’s world liberality, with OPM!, is the solution!

It’s all so simple!

And another! He is a democrat who was on the Clinton team.

When one is a member of a kleptocracy, it is very useful to put an intellectual gloss on BS that has to be swallowed by the slaves. That way they keep working, if they have jobs!, and do not try to find out what actually happened.

See if anyone is fully convinced by Quiggin’s argument?

i dont think we HAVE to choose between the two OUTCOMES, but (a) i’ve said we may need to accept that an enquiry, constitutionally, cannot be used to find criminal culpability, and (b) an enquiry, practically speaking, may not function particularly well if its express purpose is to find criminal culpability. I have always said that an enquiry, in reality, is going to have to function independent and external to the criminal and civil justice system. As YM has suggested, and i have agreed with, the normal workings of the justice system may actually end up turning up more ‘truths’ and lessons than any enquiry ever can.

However the other main purpose of my question is to figure out what people’s real motives are, or at least what the priority of their motives is, ie dishing out retribution to the bankers and developers, or actually trying to make the country a better functioning place in the future? The way people answer the question tells you more about their true mindset, in that some people would rather the country became a basket case just so long as some bankers have their heads put on plates.

Why do you believe we must choose between the two? I see no reason why we cannot have both.

@ Sporthog: ‘Some commentators on this forum have adopted fundamentalist opinions that all tax breaks are wrong.’ Wrong? They are just plain inequitable. Since when did inequity morph into fundamentalism?

No offense, but read Adam Smith on monopolies, cartels, other forms of ‘cronyism’, - including government support for the aforesaid - and their baleful affects on the public. I’m assuming you hold Permagrowth [aka: Smithian growth) as your economic Model-in-Use. If not, my apologies.

@ PL: Putting anything into public domain is an open invitation to critique same. ‘Nihil nisi illegitimii carborundum!’

Growth? Sustainability? Whence these come? Probability of 0.1 for some time. Competitiveness? If you mean wages and costs same as East Asia, yep, will do the business - but, considering Ricardo’s principle of CA: this won’t work! Ricardo had neither the knowledge nor foresight to envisage fossil-fuel powered FIRE* economies.

A very major economic re-think is required. The Permagrowth paradigm is completely discredited. But since many (but thankfully, not all) contemporary economists have such a massive ’sunk cost’ in a corrupted version of AS, a Kuhnian ‘economic revolution’ is improbable. If the academics do not reform and lead the way … ???

* Input; virtual money (credit). Output; real, growing debt. This requires an exponentially increasing population and a parallel consumption in finite resources. I believe this poses a significant problem.

B Peter

just so im not confusing what you’re saying - you would prefer an enquiry which yielded no answers or solutions or new ways to learns from our mistakes, but which saw a few handfuls of bankers/developers go to jail? I appreciate your honesty, but cannot but be dismayed, or perhaps even appalled, by your lack of forward thinking. If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we are unfortunately bound to repeat them again.

I would take sending even 10 bankers and politicians to jail anytime.

We know how shameless these people are even in the face of damning reports on their cupidity. They just laugh it all off - just look at Bertie Ahern who believes he is as innocent as the driven snow because there is no CCTV of Owen O’Callaghan passing him large wads of cash.

So send a representative sample of the b@stards to prison “pour encourager les autres”.

you actually raise a very important point - despite the banking industry being quite heavily regulated at an overall level, its only in the last year or two that the regulator has pushed for actual mandatory qualifications, training or skills for bankers to have, and there’s still nothing approaching the sort of “licence” that many other industries require before you can even work in them. I suppose we always figured that there was only so much damage a wayward banker could do, but we know better now, right!!?

Getting back to the case against individual bankers - Fingleton left with a pension of €27mn, but its highly probable that this has been significantly reduced as a result of exposure to financial sector and property assets. Sean Fitz probably had a net worth somewhere north of €100mn at the peak of it all. I’d wager that both of them have very little in relative real wealth now, and most of this would probably be in heavily protected forms such as a pension or the family home or trusts for their children. As i said, there’s no real money left to take, so any action would really be for principled or justice-seeking reasons only, ie looking to punish these guys for wrongs committed. Now i’m all for that, i’d really love to see these guys buried in legal action for the next decade or whatever, stripping them of what little they have left, but as i said above, who is actually going to spend the time and money to actually do that?

I was thinking more of cases against individuals rather than institutions, that is, individuals given a responsibility within an organisation, given a salary and bonus for performing the task, but, with hindsight, utterly failing in their responsibilities. Individuals who have walked away with significant sums, sums, even the taxpayer who net pays tax, could only dream of making in a generation.

“I want thorough investigations of all of our banks. I won’t be deciding who is guilty the courts will. Let’s hope they are as tough as they are on TV licence evaders. An enquiry is vital but we need thorough investigations across the banking system. It’s not a witch hunt it’s the justice process. Is investigating burglary or TV licence evasion a witch hunt?”

Again, whether deliberately or not, you are mixing up the calls for a normal criminal and civil investigation of the banks and their specific dealings, with a call for an outright ‘bank inquiry’. An inquiry is not, in fact, part of the ‘justice process’. Its seperate and very different. Up at the start, you chastise Phillip for not looking for a thorough banking inquiry, and then at the end you say how little the previous enquiries and tribunals managed to discover. What is the purpose of this “bank inquiry”? How will it differ from the criminal and civil investigation? How is it going to find out more than previous enquiries? The fraud squad is knee deep in files from Anglo, so what else do you want them to do? Is the purpose of the banking inquiry to find people guilty of crimes? Will it operate independently of or alongside the criminal investigations? As i said, people seem to be mixing up terms and concepts in all of this. At the very heart of it, as Concubhar noted, they seem to be mixing up sh1t banking skills, cronyism, and poor regulation, with criminality and acts of illegality.

@ YM

you are correct that civil cases are the best and most appropriate route for shareholders to get justice. However, there’s no money left to get, so do you really see a group of IRNW shareholders taking a case against Fingleton? Its sad that this is the likely scenario, but its also the reality of where we are. Ditto to some extent with AIB/BOI, where the situation is far more grey and, as i said above, more about incompetence than illegality.

What needs to be said is best said by Willem Buiter;

“Academics have no duty other than to state the truth as they see it - to ’speak truth to power’. This gives them the ability to be undiplomatic, blunt, tactless and outspoken in ways that are unacceptable in the wider world - the world of grown-ups. The joys of academic freedom and irresponsibility include the ability to participate in public debate using expressive, forceful language, strong metaphors, analogues and similes, to go over the top from time to time, to overstate the case and over-egg the pudding and not to worry about giving offense to the high and mighty. Because of their sheltered existence, academics can be reckless with impunity in their excursions into the forum of public opinion.”
.
John Cleese has some timely words for all those greedy bankers who have caused critical damage to our economy in 2009 and appear intent on magnifying the damage in 2010 through NAMA; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4beL8coMc2A

In the end, I will say total time in jail served won’t be more than 9 months.

@Eoin
I want thorough investigations of all of our banks. I won’t be deciding who is guilty the courts will. Let’s hope they are as tough as they are on TV licence evaders. An enquiry is vital but we need thorough investigations across the banking system. It’s not a witch hunt it’s the justice process. Is investigating burglary or TV licence evasion a witch hunt?

We have tried the enquiry first and investigations after approach before. It’s called the planning tribunal. It has gone on for 12 years, been vastly costly and resulted only in token sentences. It has outlived the property bubble that the corruption it was enquiring into caused. Still no final report either.

“Public hearings concluded in September 2008 and the tribunal is currently preparing its final report.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribunal_of_Inquiry_Into_Certain_Planning_Matters_and_Payments

After publication it will then be considered at length etc etc.

Here is an idea. Why doesn’t the Institute of Bankers take the lead in calling for full investigations and an enquiry and encourage its members to cooperate? It would give them some much needed credibility:

Recent Past Presidents
2008 Richie Boucher, Bank of Ireland
2007 Cormac McCarthy, Ulster Bank
2006 John Trethowan, National Irish Bank
2005 Donal Forde, AIB
2004 Ted McGovern, EBS
2003 Aidan Brady, Citibank Ireland Financial Services
2002 John G. Collins, Bank of Ireland
2001 Eugene J. Sheehy, AIB
2000 Martin J. Wilson, Ulster Bank
1999 Brian J. Goggin, Bank of Ireland
1998 Thomas P. Mulcahy, AIB
1997 Harry Lorton, TSB
1996 John R. Wright, Northern Bank and National Irish Bank
1995 Patrick W. McDowell, Bank of Ireland
1994 Eamon F. McElroy, AIB
1993 David Went, Ulster Bank
1992 Patrick J. Molloy, Bank of Ireland
1991 Gerald B. Scanlan, AIB
1990 Sam H. Torrens, Northern Bank
1989 Tim O’Grady Walshe, Central Bank of Ireland
http://www.instbank.ie/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12&Itemid=311

Nice to see they made someone from the Central Bank their president. All very cosy. I’ll bet they’re love bombing Honohan right now. Hopefully it won’t succeed.

Im not making a false dichotomy, or at least no more than the counter argument is - that if an enquiry doesnt yield heads upon plates, than whats the point?

I’m all for what you are proposing - letting the criminal and civil justice systems go to work and do their best to secure convictions where we believe wrong to be done. In the course of their proceedings they should unearth much of the truth. The problem is they probably wont unearth it all, and because of the rather grey areas surround the actual criminality, rather than immorality, of the actions of the bankers and developers, its going to be rather difficult to ‘force’ people to cooperate. As such, there has to be a fallback situation where we DO find out the truth, but perhaps don’t get to string up a neat set of convict-bankers for the crowds to throw fruit and/or stones at. As i said before, if the choice DOES come down to convictions vs truth/finding solutions, which would you prefer?

@ Concubhar

you’re way more succinct than i am. I need to start taking notes.

On a more serious note, happy new year to one and all. Lets all hope that regardless of how mediocre 2010 turns out to be/not be, that 2009 really is the low point in all of this.

Some of the Anglo shenanigans may be proven to be criminal breaches of company law (and I imagine that from a PR perspective, the government would be very happy for one or two prominent bankers to do the perp-walk) but for the most part, the sins that got us into this mess are sins of incompetence.

Eoin, I am at a loss as to why you continue to engage in debate with the more lunatic fringes on this blog - you’ll give yourself a hernia man.

“Unfinished estates in inappropriate locations for housing could be turned into ‘Cities Of The Dead’ on a European model with the unfinished houses reused as crematoria and chapels and the remains housed in semi-detached tombs,” FKL said.”
http://daftproperty.blogspot.com/2009/12/scarey-shadowland-ideas-for-ghost.html

Let’s hope the workers on these projects wear green geansais.

This is working from the agenda of those who want to keep the cake they have filched - enquire it away, no consequences ever.

A series of court cases might be a better use of inquiry time. Pick the usual suspects, see who Frank Dunlops… if that doesn’t work, move down the food chain. Repeat until you know what happened. At the end of the process, write it up. If there are any gaps, write some reports on them.

you see, the problem is you don’t actually read what other people say. Or rather, you read it, and then its gets all jumbled in your head. I’m not saying we shouldn’t send criminal bankers/developers to jail, what im saying is that that shouldn’t be the purpose of an enquiry. The purpose of the enquiry should be to find out the truth, plain and simple. If the truth leads to prosecutions and convictions via the criminal and civil courts, well super. But if it doesn’t, then i’d at least be happy that we got to the truth. If we don’t get to the truth, then the rosy glow that the convictions might bring to your cheeks for a few weeks are going to be scant use to the Irish economy. If the express purpose of the enquiry is to “jail bankers and builders”, then who in their right mind would even risk interacting with it in case they fell foul of something small, even without knowing it, somewhere in their past?

As i asked before, if the choice boils down to the truth and learning from our mistakes, versus sending a few hundred bankers and politicians to jail, which would you choose? Can your sanctimonious moralising create a better economy? But like a pig in sh1te, at least you’ll be happy with your lot, eh?

Happy New Year to everybody. Lets hope 2010 brings us some positive thinking on how to get out of this mess, as Phillip has done above, and less moral grandstanding from people who can’t actually provide even a scrap of realistic helpful solutions.