Fine Gael admits: ‘We’re broke’
the Perry trial, a €1.8m bill for its HQ and the general election have drained the coffers
SENIOR Fine Gael members have told the Irish Mail on Sunday that the party is broke.
The comments come as the fallout from the pre-election John Perry trial continues – with correspondence sent to HQ in recent weeks by a local party member alleging that an attempt was made to intimidate him from giving evidence in the controversial case.
The settlement of the case to Mr Perry’s benefit is understood to have cost the party in the region of €500,000 – almost the entire total that the Fine Gael annual national draw raised prior to the election.
The impact of the legal costs have been magnified by – the rising costs of the refurbishment of Fine Gael’s Mount Street HQ (which sources told the MoS was up to €1.8m); the bruising cost of a hard-fought general election campaign; and a subsequent reduction in taxpayer funding due to the loss of 26 seats.
The situation has now been exacerbated by the aftermath of the Perry case, which has raised its head once again due to a series of letters to headquarters in recent weeks.
One of the letters was written by failed general election candidate Mr Perry, who was only put back on the ticket after the court challenge, having initially failed to be selected at convention, while the other letter and emails were sent to the party’s Mount Street headquarters by the public representative, who made the intimidation claim.The former junior minister took legal action against Fine Gael after he failed to be nominated as a party candidate for Sligo-Leitrim. But Mr Perry was subsequently added to the ticket after a letter written by Fine Gael General Secretary Tom Curran emerged describing the controversial selection convention at which Mr Perry failed to be elected as ‘chaotic’.
This letter was only belatedly disclosed to John Perry’s legal team and shortly after it emerged, the case was settled, leaving Fine Gael with the €500,000 legal bill and its officials red-faced. Mr Curran’s role in the controversy, and the delayed emergence of his criticism of the convention in particular, caused a lot of annoyance throughout the party – given the ultimate cost. Mr Perry’s recent letter to HQ refers to the intimidation allegations being made in the letter from a local party public representative and asks what is being done about them.
The public representative’s letter, and a follow-up email suggests that the representative was approached numerous times via telephone by a party member in the days leading up to the trial, in which it was suggested that, despite being under subpoena, he didn’t have to testify.
This weekend, a source with knowledge of the sequence of events told the MoS: ‘The calls were made by a third party and the third party told the public representative that senior Fine Gael people had said “you don’t have to attend the case; you can ignore the suboena’’.
‘He was told that it would not be in his political interest to give evidence at the case. He has been a member of the party for about 35 years and he felt under immense pressure. He panicked a bit and got legal advice from a friend.
‘He sent in a letter with an e mail about two weeks ago, and he got a reply from headquarters.
‘But he is not satisfied with the reply and he has sent in another e mail. He questions whether it was appropriate.’ Asked for a comment on the intimidation allegations, a Fine Gael spokeswoman said: ‘This case has been before the courts and has now been concluded. As such, we have no further comment to make on the matter.’
But a Fine Gael HQ source source insisted that the continuing fallout was simply ‘shenanigans’.
‘I don’t know who’s behind this? We will [go] through the legal routes on this. If he wants to go that way, we’ll be going that way.’
The resurrection of the controversy could not come at a worse time for Taoiseach, Enda Kenny.
Sources within the Fine Gael rebel camp opposed to Mr Kenny’s continued leadership of the party have described the letter recently sent by John Perry as a Trojan horse that could take out a taoiseach.
One source warned: ‘No-one wanted to discuss the Perry letter at the parliamentary party meeting last week. A senior FG TD warned: ‘The allegations in this letter are grave; they involve the fundamental issue of co-operating with the courts; it can’t be brushed under the carpet’’. It is a sword of Damocles hanging over Kenny’s head.’
They added: ‘At a minimum, if he looks as though he is planning to hang on for too long in the autumn, this will be another wound to weaken him. The problem is made
‘The Perry case cost the party €500,000’
worse due to the impact on the bottom line – something which party trustees will find hard to ignore.
The coffers of political parties are traditionally low after general elections. However, Fine Gael is said by party members to be in particular trouble due to the significant payments in recent months – the costs of the doomed Perry High Court case and the escalating costs of renovating party headquarters. ‘We’re broke, we haven’t a penny left,’ said a a Kenny loyalist. Now, after redoing these offices we’ve laid off a lot of staff, so the place is like a really well appointed ghost ship.’
When questioned about the state of the party’s finances, a Fine Gael spokeswoman said: ‘There has been a reduction in funding to the Fine Gael party in the aftermath of the general election.
‘In response to this, Fine Gael initiated a process of rationalisation. A number of redundancies have been affected in Fine Gael headquarters.We will not be making any further comment.’
IT’S hard not to like Simon Coveney. He seems an intelligent and enthusiastic young man who earnestly wants to fix our housing crisis. As Minister for Housing, he’s going to spend €5.35bn providing 47,000 social houses in his new plan – Rebuilding Ireland.
He seems like such a nice guy that we’ll overlook the fact that the same Government launched similar plans a couple of years ago that seem to be failing miserably to hit their targets.
In 2014, it envisaged building 25,000 homes a year – the same as Mr Coveney’s latest plan. We are currently at half that level. And social housing targets have been pie-in-the-sky. Last year, local authorities built 75 units.
The Government had to up its ante after the great pre-election social housing auction – which was won by Sinn Féin’s bid to provide an extraordinary Corksized 100,000 homes.
It’s a sign of the times that the Government’s latest plan mirrors Fianna Fáil’s pledge to spend €5.4bn on 45,000 homes.
But no party seems to have researched the concept of social housing, on which they propose to spend so much of our money. They seem interested only in an ever-increasing headline-grabbing number on which to tag the magic sound bite – social housing.
Yet this programme is like building a new city. It’s fraught with social consequences.
Mr Coveney’s plan is more nuanced than most, with a reduced role for local authorities and more input from housing agencies.
He also wants to see mixed developments of social and private housing, which is vital if we’re to avoid creating ghettoes.
But the massive scale of the project, the still significant reliance on local authorities, and the pressure under which it’s being implemented, places us in danger of repeating the terrible mistakes of the past.
COUNCILS have been lambasted in recent years for not building more social homes when they were needed most. But, like State bodies across Europe, they had good reason. They just weren’t very good at it. They are unsuited to managing housing schemes, where social problems often multiply.
Despite the perceived urgency of the housing crisis, up to half of social housing offers are rejected – often with good reason. Almost 2,800 social housing units lie vacant – enough to house the more than 6,000 people in emergency accommodation.
That’s not the only flaw in this model. If a local authority tenant’s financial circumstances improve, many will stay put. So a valuable home is lost to the public housing stock.
Meanwhile, the council has to pay to maintain the home and meet legal liabilities. It’s no wonder local authorities have to be dragged kicking and screaming into building more social homes.
They offload those they own as fast as ever they can to tenants at whopping discounts.
Council homes can be bought for as little as 40% of their value. In the past some changed hands for less than €1,000.
Is this what’s going to happen to many of the council homes we’re going spend €5.35bn on?
Is it fair? The income threshold for the Dublin City Council housing list, for example, is surprisingly high at €35,000 for a single person rising to €42,000 for a large family.
This creates an income trap. Earn €34,999 and you can get cheap rent or a 60% subsidy to buy a house – but earn €1 more and you’re thrown to the wolves of the private rental sector.
Other European countries have come up with nuanced and successful approaches. Almost none of them involve largescale housing projects.
Socialist Greece has no social housing sector at all. Instead the State pays rent supports.
Sweden’s public housing has no income restrictions. Anyone can rent a council flat, with higher rents for higher earners. The result is social housing for all, indistinguishable from private schemes.
Holland has more social housing than any other EU country, built by non-profit making private housing associations. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer a cent and is well managed by local groups with the democratic involvement of tenants, who take pride in their areas.
Denmark also relies on housing associations. Tenants must join, which again means involvement in maintaining and developing neighbourhoods.
Britain, like us, abandoned big public social housing projects decades ago in favour of going through non-profit making housing associations.
Most countries can’t spend large amounts of State money building housing anyway or they risk breaching EU rules on spending.
So do we, although Mr Coveney hopes to wriggle around this with funding from agencies such as Nama. While we won’t win any awards for social housing policy, neither are we the laggards of Europe.
We used to have many great housing associations, whose legacy is still there today.
GAELTACHT Park in Dublin’s Whitehall, for example, was created by a group of Irish speakers who wanted to form a mini-Gaeltacht and formed a housing group. The Gaeltacht didn’t work out, but the development is sought-after today and one (five-bed) home is for sale there at €585,000.
There were housing bodies for soldiers, sailors, bus and tram drivers and civil servants. In five years during the height of the 1930s depression, such groups built nearly 2,000 homes in Dublin alone – 27% of noncouncil housing.
These co-ops sadly fell by the wayside as mortgage finance and huge council schemes took over in the 1960s and 1970s. But the tradition lives on with bodies such as Clúid, Ireland’s biggest housing association with more than 5,000 of the 27,000 housing agency homes.
Like many countries we also moved towards rent supports. We have several schemes that worked quite well until rents soared due to the scarcity of new housing. They should work a bit better now that rent supplement and the Housing Assistance Payment have been increased – surely a cheaper and better option that provides a mix of council tenancies and private-sector homes.
Although not centre stage, housing agencies are an important part of Rebuilding Ireland.
Last year they built more than 400 homes here. That’s 20 times more than local authorities. But it’s still a long way short of Mr Coveney’s target and it’s hard to see how these agencies, most involved in small schemes for special groups, can expand their output by so much in such a short space of time.
Like much of Rebuilding Ireland, it’s very ambitious and a little vague.Will the plan be able to circumvent EU spending rules? Where are we going to squeeze 47,000 homes into the packed residential areas where people want to live?
At the start of this article I said Mr Coveney ‘seemed’ a young man. He’s actually 44. But he exudes youthful enthusiasm and breezy optimism. We can only hope that this doesn’t stem from the same naïvety that saw him come such a cropper recently on bin charges.
Hopefully, it will lead us to a promised land of Scandavianstyle social housing. If that’s the case, anyone on low or average income in need of accommodation should put their names on the housing list.