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Harry Todd is senior research executive at Get Britain Out, previously worked as campaign manager for Conservative Party. He was also the national ground campaign manager for Leave means Leave.
I fact-checked some of the things that Harry said in the interview including that the EU required member states to maintain a VAT rate of a minimum of 17 per cent. In fact the UK VAT rate is 20 per cent, much higher than the minimum standard VAT rate that the EU allows, which is 15 per cent. It is the UK government that chooses to set it at a higher rate.
But that is the minimum standard rate, EU rules also allow member state governments to set lower rates for specific items, as low as 5 per cent, and that female hygiene products can be included in this much reduced rate, and there is a specific proposal in the works to set this to zero.
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I don’t like knocking other podcasts, particularly other Irish podcasts, but I heard one thing a while back that I’ve been thinking about, and just have to comment. You’ll probably remember the Maria Bailey swing case against the Dean Hotel. The Fine Gael TD sued the hotel because, she claimed, in 2015 she hurt her wrist when she fell off a swing there. It’s clear that she had drink taken at the time, and was holding drinks in both hands, this was confirmed because the hotel had CCTV footage of the incident.
However, Bailey claimed that the hotel was negligent because the hotel had not provided staff to supervise her drunken antics. Maria Bailey is certainly an idiot, but there are lots of idiots in Ireland, so that’s not really worth commenting on.
In Bailey’s legal submissions she illustrated her injuries by claiming that she had not been able to run at all for three months after the fall. In fact she ran a 10k race in less than 54 minutes, a pretty impressive time, less than three weeks after the fall. And on a subsequent interview with Seán O Rourke on RTÉ, she claimed that she had only sued to recover €7,000 to cover medical expenses. In fact, she had claimed €20,000 from the hotel. Maria Bailey is certainly a liar, but there are lots of liars in Ireland, and that’s not what I’m focusing on in this podcast.
Getting towards what I am interested in here, Bailey is a liar, sadly we expect that of politicians, but sometimes lies have consequences. Bailey lied in the legal submissions she made to take her case. In particular she exaggerated the extent of her injuries, presuming she had any injuries at all, in the statements she gave, obviously to increase the amount or the chances of her getting a payout.
That’s a criminal offence.
Specifically that is perverting the course of justice. And it’s not some esoteric, technical offence either. Let’s look at our nearest neighbour, particularly because they have pretty much the same law on their books.
Jonathan Aitken, the corrupt British politician made false statements in an effort to sue the Guardian newspaper and ITV. It’s important to note here that the case never went to court, the defence lawyers exposed the lie before it got to that point. What he did was lie in his legal submissions, submissions that he knew were intended to be used in a court case, and that was perverting the course of justice.
Aitken went from being a government minister to being sentenced to 18 months in prison in 1995.
Jeffrey Archer’s lies went further before he was caught out. In 1987 he sued the Daily Star for saying he had paid a prostitute for sex. He won half a million pounds sterling, a massive fortune at the time. Years later people who had given him false alibis recanted and in 2001 Archer was convicted of perjury as well as perverting the course of justice, and sentenced to four years in prison, barely a year after he had been the conservative party candidate for mayor of London.
Chris Huhne was the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, and a senior cabinet minister in 2011 when his ex-wife told journalists that penalty points for speeding that were put on her driving licence while they were married, in fact, related when he was driving and should have gone to him – which would have cost him his licence. That seems like small beer compared to the industrial scale penalty point fraud in Ireland, but the British police took it seriously.
They charged Huhne with perverting the course of justice. He resigned from cabinet, he resigned as an MP, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to eight months in jail. He went, more or less directly, from her majesty’s government to her majesty’s prison in Wandsworth.
I want to compare those three to the case of Maria Bailey who, information in the public domain makes clear committed the same crime. Bailey has not been convicted or charged; and she won’t be, she has not even been questioned let alone arrested. She hasn’t lost her seat in the Dáil, she hasn’t been kicked out of Fine Gael or even the Fine Gael parliamentary party – so called ‘losing the whip’. But, the poor diddums, Leo Varadkar had to show some mark of disapproval, so he removed her as chair of the Oireachtas Housing Committee.
Because the Irish elite just takes a different attitude to crimes committed by their own. That’s where I get to the Irish podcast, the Irish Times podcast in fact, where Irish Times journalist Pat Leahy asked Irish Times journalist Harry McGee what he thought of the penalty imposed on Bailey by Varadkar.
Full disclosure, I did record an interview with Harry a while back, but I didn’t put it on the podcast because it just wasn’t very good. But that statement is gobsmacking. An elected politician commits a serious crime, and respected journalists on a major national newspaper are happy to say that losing her little add-on job as chair of an Oireachtas Committee is fitting punishment.
Why is that enough punishment?
So, basically, because people are angry at her for committing a crime, she couldn’t suffer any real punishment for it. Think about that for a moment. If the public is angry at a criminal because of the crime they committed, then the criminal should escape the punishment for those crimes.
A respected Irish journalist sat down in front of a microphone and, I presume hadn’t had a stroke that morning, although I can’t be sure, and he said a politician who committed a crime should not alone escape prosecution and conviction, she shouldn’t even lose her political career because she has to put up with the anger of the public.
This segment is not about Maria Bailey. And it’s not about Harry McGee either. This segment is about a class of people in Ireland who really don’t believe that the law applies to the people they mix with in the same way as it applies to the rest of us. It’s not that they think they should be able to get away with it. It’s that they believe that there is no it there that they’re getting away with. They genuinely believe that it’s right.
On this podcast I’ve tried to cover a variety of issues, but one theme is to the challenge insulated power structures and the most frustrating response is not hostility, it’s indifference; it’s the ‘what are you going on about’ attitude. I’ve challenged the CSO in manipulating questions to get a desired response on religion, I’ve challenged RTÉ on them giving almost unlimited free airtime to the motor lobby in the form of the AA, I’ve challenged the Department of Communications on giving taxpayer billions to a private broadband provider and my overriding feeling is that they just don’t get it.
They really don’t see what is wrong with what they are doing.
The problem with Ireland is not that a third-rate politician committed a crime, that happens everywhere. The problem almost isn’t that she escapes punishment for a crime, and let’s remember that the case of Jonathan Aitken is identical to hers, in both cases false statements were made preparing a lawsuit that never ended up going to court. He lost his job as a minister, lost his political career, was bankrupted and served seven months of an 18 month sentence.
The real problem is that people – influential people – think that this is OK, think it’s normal.
We live in a country where a cardinal bullied and threatened child rape victims to prevent them from going to the gardaí. That’s bad, but much worse is that the people in power don’t see fit to arrest him for questioning, let alone charge and convict him. That just wouldn’t be good form.
We live in a country where we know for a fact that a businessman paid a bribe to a politician to get a radio station licence; a high court judge ruled that had happened, but neither the politician nor the businessman were charged, again they were never even questioned. We live in a country where the garda computer system has criminal intelligence files on Traveller children before they are 10 years old, but I would guess that a file was never even opened investigating those crimes.
And I would guess that the people responsible for investigating would be outraged at even the suggestion that they were derelict in their duty. They can’t imagine leading cardinals, politicians or businessmen away in handcuffs. It’s just not what they do. Prison is for single mothers who can’t pay their TV licence, or drug addicts who snatch a handbag.
Like Harry McGee, they think that just the fact that their crimes were exposed is enough punishment in itself. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one who’s had a stroke.
