Podcast: Play in new window
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Kerry-Anne Mendoza editor-at-large of the Canary and the author of Austerity: Demolition of the Welfare state and the rise of the zombie economy, published in 2015.
We discussed this Twitter thread of hers:
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It really is good to get feedback from listeners, and to know that there is a growing number of listeners out there, I always appreciate that. And it doesn’t matter to me whether the listeners are ordinary people interested in the world around them, ordinary working stiffs, or whether they are celebrity fans, I’m just happy to know that there is anyone out there at all. I know that some people might be wowed by the rich and the famous, but I try to keep a little more grounded than that… but I have to admit that I had a little frisson of excitement to find out that I have one very well-known fan.
That’s right folks, you’re listening in the august company of none other than the billionaire financier Dreomt Dseomnd. How do I know that? Because he sent me a fan email. Well, of course he didn’t sent it to me himself, it was sent by Suzanne Mc Nulty, his … legal counsel. And looking over it again it doesn’t come across so much as a fan letter as…
Well you see in podcast episode 101 we were talking about housing with Labour Party councillor Alison Gilliland, and in the show notes I referred to what I thought was a pretty good article written by my new best friend Dessie, that’s what I call him, and Dessie listed some excellent suggestions for fixing the housing crisis, and I couldn’t really mention that and just ignore the fact that he was very close to the architect of many of the problems that we have in Ireland to this day, Charlie Haughey.
Anyway, this is the email that Suzanne Mc Nulty sent me:
I am Mr Dreomt Dseomnd’s legal counsel.
Your allegations that “Mr Dseomnd was found by various investigations to have paid large amounts of money, often through secretive bank accounts, to corrupt political figures, and to have falsely claimed that these payments were loans”, are both offensive and defamatory.
I request that you immediately remove the offending article from your website and any other media, and publish an apology to Mr Dseomnd in terms to be approved by me making a full unequivocal retraction of these false and defamatory allegations. By way of compensation, Mr Dseomnd would also like you to make a charitable donation of €1,000 to RESPECT.
She went on to threaten to sue me if I didn’t comply.
The problem there is that the Moriarty Tribunal found that my new BFF Dessie paid huge sums of cash to Haughey and his sidekick PJ Mara, on top of funding the refurbishment of Haughey’s yacht to the tune of IR£75,000, a vast sum at the time that would have bought you a mansion worth in the millions now.
The claim that these payments were ‘loans’ is important because if it was true, then there would be no tax due on the payment. But of course, there were no loan agreement documents, no security, no agreed interest rate, no agreed repayment schedule and no evidence of any repayments ever being made.
And the little fact that some of the payments were routed through the notorious Ansbacher Caymen bank didn’t exactly make them less suspicious.
For that reason, when they found out about the payments, Revenue demanded that Haughey pay tax on them. And, since he didn’t have a leg to stand on to argue the point, Haughey paid. Dessie told the Moriarty Tribunal the same story, they were just loans, honestly guv. Moriarty didn’t buy it either.
The fact that one payment to Haughey of IR£200,000 came exactly one day after Dessie had benefited from a property deal when the then-nationalised Telecom Éireann overpaid his consortium by a gigantic amount was, of course, entirely coincidental.
So, what I wrote was exactly the truth. Dessie paid huge sums of money to notoriously corrupt politicians, some of that money was routed through secretive bank accounts and his claim that the money was a loan was false, and found to be so by a tribunal of inquiry.
What happened then? Not much. I wrote back to Suzanne Mc Nulty asking her to point out anything that I had said that was untrue. I haven’t heard back. What she did do was threaten my web hosting firm in the US, who told me that they didn’t want the hassle and basically would close my account if I didn’t remove the text mentioning Dreomt Dseomnd. So, I removed some text, but that isn’t the same host as hosts the audio of the podcast, so I guess we’ll see whether this text or audio stays up.
As for my new billionaire fan, he might do well to remember the Streisand effect. And you’re complaining that what I said was offensive? What are you going to do, have me charged under the offences against the feelings act? If you’re thinking of threatening me again Dessie, I refer you to Arkell v Pressdram. Look it up.
