‘I’m thrilled to get it. This has given me a big boost psychologically’ — Sil Fox
Trade unions and the business lobby should not be allowed to run the country as they did before, writes
ENTERTAINER Sil Fox has told of his joy after receiving his first Covid vaccination, saying he is now looking forward to “living without fear”.
The 87-year-old received his jab alongside his wife, Laura (86), at the Orwell Surgery in Dublin’s Templeogue on Friday.
“I’m thrilled to get it. I have a chance again of living without fear. I’ll feel much happier now to go out and about a bit more. I’ve been stuck inside for a year. This has given me a big boost psychologically,” he said.
“I already have Christmas shows booked with Show Tours. I can’t wait to get back to cabaret. I’ll be getting my second vaccine in one month’s time.
“This is the first step in getting back to normal. I really hope the vaccine is going to help me get my life back now. I haven’t worked in two-anda-half years and I can’t wait to get back to the stage.”
Aside from performing, what he has missed most during the pandemic is playing golf.
“I’m hoping and praying that the Government will reopen the golf courses soon. I love to play, and it’s a great outdoors sport. It would really help thousands of people all over Ireland if we could all get back to our beloved golf.”
It emerged a fortnight ago that the veteran entertainer has sued the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the State for damages over a decision to prosecute him for sexual assault. He was cleared of the allegation last year after a judge found the complaint was contradicted by CCTV footage.
Mr Fox has initiated proceedings in the High Court, claiming the prosecution was taken without reasonable or probable cause.
“The DPP should have seen from the footage I was innocent, but they put me into court and ruined my life,” he said.
“It was very wrong what the DPP did to me. I knew I had done nothing wrong, and yet I was dragged before the courts for almost a year. Why did they put an 86-year-old man through that?
“Covid was rampant at the time, and I still had to go to court. It was in all the papers. I lost a lot of friends and lost a lot of work.”
In the proceedings, Mr Fox has claimed his constitutional right to a good name was breached and he suffered serious reputational damage.
“I am taking this case because I don’t want to see another innocent person having to go through what I did,” he said.
Mr Fox’s lawsuit could lead to scrutiny of decision-making in the Office of the DPP. Civil actions against the DPP following an acquittal are extremely rare.
Instead, the claim is based on his constitutional rights to liberty, privacy and his good name.
‘I lost a lot of friends and a lot of work’
ABLAST from the past called Social Partnership, the fall-back system for running the country behind the curtain, is making a comeback. Never waste a good crisis.
The familiar partners are Government, the trade unions and the business lobby and they have been cosying up to offer salvation to the distracted country.
The partners have ‘previous’, in the lingo of crime reporters, and are trading on the short memory of the mainstream media. While the banks were fuelling the property bubble during the Bertie Ahern period, the unelected partners were happy to offer consensus leadership, and surrendered the stage to hapless politicians when the chickens came home to roost. This coalition of the unconvicted is gearing up for a reunion.
European governments have struggled with the timing of public health interventions since early last year and the Irish Government has done no better. It has been slow to introduce restrictions, too quick to relax them and the result has included repeated lockdowns and avoidable economic damage. More recently, EU vaccine roll-out has been sluggish and co-ordination ineffective.
If all goes well and 2021 sees the end of the Covid emergency, the challenge of economic recovery is again about getting the timing right. Economic policy has been in wartime mode: fight the war with deficits, finance them at the central bank if needs be, and worry about the consequences when the war is won.
But the recovery will be botched if governments rebalance the books too quickly, or if they delay adjustment and run up debt to levels that cannot be financed.
At some stage, possibly in 2022, the EU will reinvoke the debt and deficit limits of the Stability and Growth Pact and the ECB will begin to scale back its support for eurozone sovereign bond markets.
There are early signs that inflationary expectations are rising from low levels and debt market interest rates have begun to creep up. Last week, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe outlined a coherent approach to Ireland’s exit from wartime finance in an address to a virtual audience at the ESRI.
The eurozone countries with the heaviest debts are the most exposed whenever that happens, and Ireland is one of them.
Donohoe put it like this: “Indeed, it is notable that inflation rates in many countries have picked up in recent months; this has been accompanied by increases in inflationary expectations as market participants have priced-in higher inflation rates in the coming months. There are two things which we do know. Firstly, the higher the stock of public debt which you are carrying, the more painful any increase in borrowing costs will be. And secondly, the more carefully a national deficit is managed the better the prospects for more affordable costs.”
It is the Government’s intention to phase out the huge fiscal deficit and to restore budget balance in due course. Since Ireland does not have a currency and its central bank is not free to support the government bond market unilaterally, if rebalancing is not done at the pace best suited to Ireland’s recovery it will be done at a pace dictated by somebody else.
Too fast an adjustment will dampen recovery, but failure to adjust will provoke conflict with the European Commission and the ECB and will spook the bond market. Should things go wrong, as they did in October 2010, there will be no Troika of official bailout lenders, including helpful and knowledgeable economists from India, since the International Monetary Fund has vowed never again to partner with the eurozone authorities. It will be just the folks from Brussels and Frankfurt.
The political pressures are threatening the Government’s ability to execute a budgetary adjustment that supports recovery.
Actions already taken, especially the embrace in the Programme for Government of permanent non-Covid expenditures, will make adjustment harder. Promises not to increase various headings of taxation do not help either.
Two interventions last week, from wannabe partners in the trade unions and business, illustrate the pressures. Trade unions in Ireland nowadays represent mainly the public service interest for whom they have secured an across-the-board pay increase. There are additional demands for concessions to several groups of public employees. Public officials, in terms of job and income security, have been one of the groups least affected by the Covid emergency. Most have not been affected at all.
On Thursday, Ibec, the main business lobby group, released its contribution to the public consultation on the National Development Plan. This is being revised to reflect the investment priorities of the Programme for Government, and ministers have, commendably, indicated that they wish to preserve the public capital programme, a major casualty after the last crisis when capital spending was slashed as part of the budget adjustment following the 2008 banking bust. It was slashed because politicians declined to control current spending and there has been an epiphany on the need to protect the capital programme after Covid.
Ibec has had a bad pandemic, an enthusiastic vocalist in the Reopening Choir last October, along with assorted sectoral business lobby groups bad-mouthing the public health officials to the ultimate detriment of their own members, predictably locked down again after the ‘meaningful’ Christmas. The Ibec document gets off to a bad start with the following: “While the plan for economic recovery must address multiple evolving aspects of both the Covid and Brexit crises, the experience of the past year has shown that Ireland now has unprecedented wealth-generating capacity to ambitiously resource this plan.”
Anyone who believes that the experience of the last year has improved Ireland’s wealth-generating capacity has not been paying attention. The State debt is higher, was excessive to begin with and continues to expand. Every downturn casts a long shadow: business units fold, employees lose skills and career confidence. Trading partners suffer too and Ireland’s wealth-generating capacity declines. The long-term prospects for the Irish economy would have been better had the microbes stayed away.
It is quite a jump to assert that the country can now afford indulgences not on the agenda this time last year, like a permanently higher public pay bill, or Ibec’s public investment wish-list. Ibec’s list includes, without analysis, enormous and uncosted multi-billion schemes like Metro North. It is reckless and irresponsible for the country’s principal business lobby group to endorse any megaproject in advance of an estimate of costs, never mind benefits.
Neither the ICTU nor Ibec will have to stand for re-election, but Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party will have to account for their stewardship.
Be choosy about partners.
‘Neither ICTU nor Ibec will have to stand for re-election’