Corruption And The Irish State

Why are there so many corruption scandals in Ireland? Here we publish a chapter from James O’Toole’s “The Irish State and Revolution” that gives a history and analysis of the role the Irish state plays using legal and illegal means to enrich the capitalist class.

When Covid-19 hit Ireland the government, led by Leo Varadkar, put out a call for health workers to return to the public service. They were asked to be “On Call For Ireland!” People who had emigrated came back home. But how many of those brave people volunteering to go ‘on call for Ireland’ realised they’d be working for private firm CPL? Most assumed they’d be working for the Health Service Executive (HSE) and employed as public service workers with the rights and pay rates that came with public employment.

James Connolly once said that: “Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

The Irish government, our “committee of the rich”, was using the Covid-19 crisis to put cheap labour into the hands of one of the richest people in the state. CPL is a recruitment agency run by the millionaire Anne Heraty. She and her husband are worth over €100 million and she earned a wage of €575,000 from CPL in 2019 alone. She also got a “dividend” of €800,000. Not bad eh?

Shockingly she also owns Trinity Care Nursing homes. The privatisation of nursing homes was a vital factor in the excessive level of coronavirus deaths among old people in Ireland during the pandemic. Anne Heraty was also on the board of Anglo Irish Bank and on the board of the Irish boss’s club IBEC. “On Call for Ireland” was being used as a money making racket for the rich Irish. By October 2020 people who contracted Covid were being asked to do their own contact tracing because the system was overwhelmed. Most people who replied to the call to join our health workers on the front line fight against the pandemic weren’t even hired.

“Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

The wealthy are connected to the Irish state by a thousand strings. The rich have many mechanisms through which they guarantee the state operates in their interests despite the claim we live in a ‘democracy’. Sometimes those connections are hard to see, but in Ireland it’s quite crude and obvious. We have a small tightly knit ruling class. How many times has billionaire Denis O’Brien won a state contract?

From the installation of water meters to his participation in the Granahan McCourt consortium that won the contract for the national broadband roll out, he’s always there with his hand out. He’s not the only recipient of corporate welfare. The Irish state has a long history of starting the careers of millionaires and billionaires; all at the expense of the working class taxpayer. The economic elite, people like Denis O’Brien and Larry Goodman, and the political elite form one ruling class. It’s a Golden Circle and it will do anything, using bribery, criminality or any other form of corruption, if it protects their wealth and their rule over the rest of us.

And you don’t get to be part of the club. For most of us, the class we are born into is the one we’ll die in. Capitalism likes to hold out the carrot of social mobility, that you can work and work and work and eventually become a billionaire, but it’s a myth. It is rubbish and bears absolutely no relation to reality. It would take 150 years for most poor, working-class people to earn the average income in Ireland. It would take an Irish worker on the 2020 minimum wage over 140,000 years to have as much wealth as Denis O’Brien and that’s without paying rent or eating anything. Now unless you’re going to live for centuries you’re never going to join the elite.

The small savings workers do accumulate are wiped out by a single case of family ill health or a period of unemployment. The areas where the rich live have the schools that produce people for their class. As Margaret Kennedy and Martin J. Power of the University of Limerick have shown in a paper on the myth of meritocracy:

“Research has long identified that, in Ireland, children from the upper socio-economic groups get a disproportionate number of the more valuable educational qualifications. Yet Irish policy in this area has not significantly concerned itself with eliminating the inequalities of wealth, power, and status that reproduce educational inequalities from one generation to the next.”

The exclusion of the working class, and the development of a tightly knit and corrupt ruling class, was there from the beginning of the Irish state.

When the state was first established the economy was backward and mainly agricultural. The British Empire had smashed industries whenever they began to compete with their own. They forced us into a state of dependence as the breadbasket of their industrial centres. By the time of independence the Irish elite hadn’t the centuries of theft behind them that our neighbours in Britain had. The British aristocracy had pillaged the whole world and had vast wealth with which to seed their capitalist companies. When Ireland broke from the British Empire, the Irish state treasury was the one place where there was a chunk of capital that could help you get your business going. All envious and greedy eyes were focused on gaining access to that money.

The people who first ran the Free State, like Cumann na nGaedheal minister for Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, were already connected into the wealthy classes. They were courted for help from their own class. They also wanted to impress on the rich that they were the people to come to; Cumann na nGaedhal made a point of trying to recruit rich businessmen and wealthy farmers. Those that didn’t join the party directly would meet ministers for a meal or a pint and coax them into policy decisions that favoured the rich.

The Cumman na nGaedhal government were preoccupied with the consolidation of their counter-revolution and tried to present themselves as clean cut, but they represented the interests of the rich and brought their family members and cronies into government employment; all to empower the upper classes that people like Kevin O’Higgins came from. It got even worse under Fianna Fáil.

In the 1930s, Ireland was rocked by the ‘Wicklow Gold’ scandal. Fianna Fáil tightly controlled every aspect of the economy. Government licences, leases, export quotas and permits were required for all types of business activity. The Irish rich knew that courting the local politician could win them access to the state treasury and valuable state contracts. Seán Lemass, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, wielded huge power.

He granted a valuable mining license to fellow Fianna Fáil party members, Senator Michael Comyn and TD Bob Briscoe. Comyn and Briscoe immediately sub-let their lease to a British mining company. They got £12,000 worth of shares and would get royalties on any gold that was mined. The case triggered an inquiry that cleared Lemass of any wrongdoing because he didn’t personally benefit from the dodgy deal.

The rabidly anti-working class Archbishop McQuaid wasn’t above cashing in either. Honesty was just something for poor people, subdued enough to listen to men on golden thrones preaching poverty as a virtue. A tribunal was set up in 1943 to deal with insider trading. Great Southern Railway and the Dublin United Transport Company were to be merged to form the new Corás Iompair Éireann (CIÉ). Key figures in the ruling class were tipped off that this deal was going to happen before it went public.

The list included the notorious Archbishop, Bank of Ireland and the Representative Body of the Church of Ireland. A tribunal was set up. The tribunal found that they had all made financial gain from the insider trading but surprise, surprise, no action was to be taken against any of them. Why would there be? McQuaid wrote the 1937 Irish constitution. He had Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party in his pocket. He was untouchable.

Seán Lemass and his friends in Fianna Fáil were in hot water again in 1946 when Fianna Fáil TD, Dr. Francis Ward, was accused of replacing a political rival’s son with his own at his meat factory. He’d got his pig producing license from Seán Lemass. He was also accused of stealing £12,000 from the company and of using state money to build a Fianna Fáil hall on his land. Although a tribunal found him not guilty of most of the allegations made against him, it did find that he was guilty of tax evasion. He became the first Irish politician to resign after a scandal went public. He wouldn’t be the last.

The 1963 Planning Act put huge power into the hands of local officials, it was supposed to end corruption but it only made it worse. By the end of the 1950s, protectionism had reached an impasse and the Irish establishment began opening up the Irish economy to international corporations. They set up special economic zones to attract in US corporations, for example the ‘free trade zone’ at Shannon was the first in the world. The Shannon zone soon became a hub for US corporations, with special tax incentives and grants from the Irish taxpayer to tempt them in.

Corruption in the early years of the Republic was about a new ruling class raiding the state treasury to get their hands on the initial capital required to set themselves up in business. The tight and secretive IRA networks that had led the fight for independence became networks of power and privilege. When Fianna Fáil came to power the cronyism continued and deepened. Fianna Fáil presented themselves as a ‘national movement’ and developers would go to them to get a lucrative state contract and access to state funds, while a state deprived of welfare and supports left working people to beg at the feet of the local politician for a few crumbs.

This emerging relationship of ‘clientelism’ meant that the establishment that deprived us of supports then used that lack of supports to make themselves the centre of each community. The corruption grew out of the very soil of Irish capitalism, as it grows out of the soil of capitalism in the USA or any other nation. Generations of millionaires and billionaires were created on the back of the Irish taxpayer from the foundation of the state to contemporary rich people like Denis O’Brien.

In later years, the opening up of the economy to international capital saw powerful global players with unheard of resources come in and literally sweep the Irish establishment off their feet. The wining and dining of politicians was already endemic in the corrupt political culture, but now the corporations increased the rewards available to the political elite and a compliant media would never point out that the jobs created by these global giants were paid for by subsidies from the Irish taxpayer. The Irish elite became like a pathetic small mafia gang begging to be allowed to play at the big boys table. They signed us up to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1957.

The IMF was set up in 1944 to act as a global ‘debt cop’, tying international economic policy to the interests of US corporate power. Ireland suffered at the hands of the IMF when we were ‘bailed out’ to the tune of €22.5 billion in 2010, which in reality meant taking a massive loan with austerity strings attached. We took the loan to fund the banks and working class people picked up the tab. The economic turn in the late 50s, from a protected economy built behind tariff walls to an open economy dependent on multinationals, compounded the already corrupt culture of Irish politics. The Irish elite weren’t oppressed by international capitalism, they were willing minor partners. They bent over backwards to offer the most lucrative tax breaks.

The Industrial Development Authority (IDA) was set up to ‘help’ the foreign corporations set up here, which in reality meant offering them a raft of grants and tax breaks. By the time of the Celtic Tiger in the 90s, the interests of the big multinationals and our own elite had become so entangled the establishment allowed no questioning of the tax-haven economic model Ireland had adopted. When the EU found that Apple corporation had been given illegal, preferential tax treatment by the Irish Revenue Commissioner, the government spent millions on expensive lawyers to prevent us from taking the billions in unpaid tax revenue.

Apple’s effective tax on EU profits declined from 1 per cent in 2003 to just 0.005 per cent in 2014, the equivalent of an individual earning €100,000 paying just €5 in income tax per year. The EU had no particular problem with the tax evasion, they were just worried that Ireland was allowing more of it than anyone else and would get ahead of the competition! Apple had first set up here in the 1980s because we had an English-speaking workforce and they could apply the latest corporate management techniques with ease. They’d also have access to EU markets from within the EU. The first special tax deal between Revenue and Apple was signed in 1991.

In the end we failed to get the €13 billion from Apple because the EU couldn’t prove we’d given Apple a ‘preferential’ deal. In other words, the Irish government had given so many big corporations sweetheart tax deals that Apple couldn’t be singled out. Despite the enormity of this figure, it actually excludes the profits made by Apple from 1990-2003 when this agreement was first set up. The final figure owed by Apple to the Irish people could have been billions higher. (As of 2024 the Irish government was forced to take it after spending millions on lawyers!)

Far from proving that Ireland wasn’t a tax haven, the government had proven the opposite. In 2015, Apple funnelled over €300 billion through Ireland, which is greater than our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is, greater than the entire economy of Ireland. It was the biggest profit shifting in the history of the world. We were the laughing stock of the world when, due to these type of profits being included in Irish accounts, Ireland recorded 34.4% growth in GDP that year. ’Leprechaun economics’ it was called by news media.

The close relationship between the economic and political elites continued decade after decade. Today, one third of TDs in both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are landlords, while we suffer the worst housing crisis in recent memory. Former Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, rolled out the red carpet for the international vulture funds who were making the housing crisis worse. He met them 65 times in 2013 and 2014. That’s a lot of food and drink.

In contrast, groups representing mortgage holders were only met 5 times and Noonan didn’t make himself available to meet them himself. Access to the political elite is reserved for the economic elite. One of the US vulture funds, Apollo, was represented at the meetings by Brian Goggin. He was formerly the chief executive at Bank Of Ireland when it was bailed out by the Irish taxpayer.

On September the 14th, 2016, the Federal Department of Revenue in Brazil issued Normative Instruction (NI) 1658, unexpectedly added Ireland, Curaçao and Saint Martin to the global ’tax haven’ list. When 70 jurisdictions joined to sign up to anti-tax haven measures in 2017, the Irish Times reported:

“Global legal firm Baker McKenzie, representing a coalition of 24 multinational U.S. software firms, including Microsoft, lobbied Michael Noonan, as [Irish] minister for finance, to resist the proposals in January 2017. In a letter to him the group recommended Ireland not adopt article 12, as the changes ‘will have effects lasting decades’ and could ‘hamper global investment and growth due to uncertainty around taxation’. The letter said that ‘keeping the current standard will make Ireland a more attractive location for a regional headquarters by reducing the level of uncertainty in the tax relationship with Ireland’s trading partners.’”

The Guardian newspaper leaked Facebook memos that revealed their EU-wide lobbying network. Interestingly, they described former Taoiseach Enda Kenny as a ‘friend of facebook’. Data protection campaigners were furious at the close relationship between the Irish government and the corporation, especially as Kenny offered to use the “significant influence” of Ireland’s stint in the EU presidency as a means of influencing other EU member states to oppose new data protections, “even though technically Ireland is supposed to remain neutral in this role.”

There was talk of Ireland being a “captured state”, but what that definition failed to realise is that every state under capitalism is a “captured state”. As Connolly so neatly put it, governments are nothing but “committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.” In a so-called ‘democratic’ republic, The German socialist thinker, Friedrich Engels, had said 50 years before Connolly, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” and secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange”.

The Irish state is captured because it was always captured, first by native capitalists and later by a coalition of native and global corporate capitalists. The Irish state was built as a counter-revolutionary machine, to maintain the power of a new elite and to keep workers and the poor in place. The state serves these capitalists and not working class people. There are countless other examples of the close links between capital and the Irish state.

Over half of the world’s leased aircraft are currently managed from Ireland. The foundation of the Irish aviation industry dates back to the formation of Guinness Peat Aviation in Shannon in 1975, but the industry in Ireland has now grown to manage between €83 and €113 billion in assets. These companies can write off tax every 8 years and we provide a complex series of ‘double tax’ treaties with 70 countries, which helps these companies avoid paying tax here. The Finance Act of 2011 allowed many of these firms to set up as ‘Special Purpose Vehicles’ (SPVs) and avoid tax altogether.

The top executives at Dublin-based aircraft leasing company, SMBC Aviation Capital shared a pay-pot of €17.4 million in August 2020. Aviation entrepreneur Dómhnal Slattery and his managerial colleagues at Avolon Aerospace Leasing Ltd shared pay of €27.44 million in 2018. Then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar personally opened Avolon’s new global headquarters in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

Gombeen politician, former Fine Gael minister, Michael Lowry, is a clear example of the “direct corruption of officials.” Two months after the Irish state handed over the mobile phone licence worth billions to Esat Digifone owned by businessman Denis O’Brien, he made payments to Fine Gael Communications Minister, Michael Lowry. The billionaire and the politician used offshore accounts and the purchase of a house to try to disguise the transaction between them. One of the witnesses to the Moriarty Tribunal was O’Brien’s accountant and financial adviser Aidan Phelan.

Phelan told the tribunal that in July 1996 he opened an account in his own name with AIB’s Isle of Man subsidiary, to receive money belonging to O’Brien. He never told the bank that the money was O’Brien’s. £407,000 was transferred from an account with Woodchester Bank in Dublin (which belonged to Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp) to the Isle of Man AIB account. As the new account wasn’t ready, Phelan stuck the cash in another account belonging to Diest Trading (Pakistan Ltd) through which Phelan imported clothes into Europe. A week later the cash went into the AIB account which immediately made payments to businessmen and to the Minister of Communications Michael Lowry.

When the Paradise papers leaked, revealing the worldwide tax avoidance of the global rich, O’Brien and Lowry’s names turned up. A document from the Appleby law firm mentioned payments to Lowry. On the 21st of October, 1996, £147,000 was transferred from businessman David Austin’s account in Jersey to an account with Irish Nationwide in the Isle of Man, in Lowry’s name. Previously, money had been transferred from the Isle of Man account to Austin’s Jersey account. A cheque for £50,000 was written from the Isle of Man account and given to the businessman, obviously acting as an intermediary in these dodgy dealings.

When Lowry set up the Irish Nationwide account in the Isle of Man he told them he didn’t want any correspondence in the mail, he also told them he was a ‘company director’, better than the more correct ‘corrupt politician’. Lowry later told the Tribunal that he’d ‘borrowed’ the money. In the end the Moriarty Tribunal reckoned O’Brien had given Lowry £420,000 in various ways. The Esat Digifone license was the most valuable license the Irish state had ever issued. It became the basis of Denis O’Brien’s billions. The neo-liberal privatisation process, handing over state assets to private companies at knockdown prices, is disgraceful enough in itself, but this deal was even more disgraceful because the private capitalist in question had just paid off the politicians to give him what he wanted. O’Brien made €200 million when Esat Digifone was sold off.

On Saturday 13th July 2013, Denis O’Brien’s brand new Gulfstream 650 M-GSIX private jet, costing $60 million dollars, was delivered from Gulfstream Aerospace HQ in Savannah, Georgia to the Isle of Man, to complete the legal paperwork before continuing onto Dublin on the same day. The Isle of Man functions as a tax haven for these rich parasites. By bringing the plane over through the Isle of Man he avoided paying VAT and duties.

O’Brien’s move of his private residence to Malta also saved him millions of Euro in tax on the sale of his mobile network to British Telecom in 1999. He had first moved to Portugal to try offsetting any tax that he was liable to pay on the sale but ended up fighting tooth and nail with Ireland’s Revenue to prove that he didn’t live on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin because he had ‘no kitchen’ there. Forbes magazine said of O’Brien:

“Despite coups, corruption, and kidnappings, Denis O’Brien keeps pouring money into the world’s poorest, most violent countries. His bet: Give phones to the masses and they will fight your enemies for you.”

The Irish taxpayer was cheated to give O’Brien his start; a base upon which he built a global empire. O’Brien’s Jamaica headquartered company, Digicel Group, began offering a cheap cell phone service from Papua New Guinea. Razor wire and a half-dozen guards carrying shotguns and pistols protected the Digicel office in Papua New Guinea.

Ireland’s state-owned, bailed-out banks did deals with O’Brien too. The Irish Bank Resolution Corporation Ltd (IBRC) was established in 2011 to take over and wind down the already state-owned and bailed-out banks Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide. IBRC sold the company, Siteserv, to Denis O’Brien’s “Millington” for €45 million in 2012. Siteserv owed IBRC €150 million. IBRC reduced the loan by €119 million, effectively cheating the Irish taxpayer by giving O’Brien a massive handout.

The money he did owe to the bank was charged to him at a tiny interest rate. GMC Sierra, part of Siteserv, was awarded the water meter installation contract by the Irish government in July 2013. Speaking in the Dáil, Catherine Martin, TD, said: “We are now aware…that the former CEO of IBRC made verbal agreements with Denis O’Brien to allow him to extend the terms of his already expired loans…I understand that Mr O’Brien was enjoying a rate of approximately 1.25% when IBRC could, and arguably should, have been charging 7.5%.”

O’Brien took the TD to court: “For me this was an intrusion too far. Over the past several years, some of the media in Ireland has become more and more vicious and invasive and this was a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my personal banking relationship.”

O’Brien was infamous for throwing lawsuits at those who “defamed” him. Controlling the media line wasn’t too difficult for him as he owned most of it. In 2017 the Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, said the “highly concentrated nature of media ownership in Ireland poses a major threat to press freedom”. O’Brien owned 29.9% of Independent News & Media, which in turn owned dozens of local papers. Communicorp was fully owned by O’Brien and included right wing talk stations like Newstalk as well as Today FM and 98FM.

But having billions in itself is a threat to democracy. Having that much money allows you to set up companies and control the labour of thousands of people. In any capitalist company the boss dictates and workers must obey; there’s no democracy in the workplace. A billionaire like O’Brien controls the lives of thousands of people; he directs a huge chunk of production. No matter who’s in parliament, that production is his to do with as he sees fit.

That is inherently anti-democratic, even before you add in his control over the media and connections to the political elite. No person should have that much power over others. It is inherently corrupting. When the economic fortunes of a nation depend on the whims of a few billionaires the entire political system is bent to their will. But every company is a social process, where lots of working people cooperate to produce the wealth of the company.

Socialism is the argument that democracy should apply to that socially produced wealth, it shouldn’t be limited to the sham parliament. The British socialist Paul Foot wrote the following about the supposedly sacred principle of “one man, one vote”:

“An industrial magnate has one vote, and so does each worker he can fire or impoverish. A millionaire landlord has one vote, and so does every person he evicts. A banker has one vote, so does every person impoverished by a rise in [interest rates] or a financial takeover. A newspaper proprietor has one vote, so does each of the readers he deceives or seduces every day of the week. Are all these people really equally represented? Or does not the mighty, unrepresentative economic power of the wealthy minority consistently and completely overwhelm the representative power of Parliament?”

O’Brien wasn’t the only rich man to grease Michael Lowry’s palm. Lowry was accused of “breathtaking corruption” when he asked a party insider who was also a partner in a leading estate agent to influence a dodgy deal on Marlborough House in Dublin. Coke fiend and retail millionaire Ben Dunne bought the building in 1995 for £5.4 million. Lowry was trying to double the rent on the building which would have valued the building up to £12.5 million. Subsequent tribunals found numerous payments from Dunne to Lowry.

The building was being rented by the state-owned Telecom Éireann, meaning Lowry was trying to help Ben Dunne scam the taxpayer out of the rent as well as fleecing any future buyer of the building. In 1992 Dunne had been found guilty of possession of cocaine and ‘soliciting’ while in Florida, losing him his Dunnes Stores job, but, of course, if you’re rich you don’t get sent to jail. He did a stint in a rehab clinic instead. The family gave him a £100 million pay-off to leave the firm. Dunne had given cash to other politicians, he’d previously paid Charlie Haughey £2 million when Haughey was running the country. The McCracken Tribunal found that Ben Dunne had knowingly helped Lowry evade tax. Dunne now runs a chain of gyms which he promotes by slagging off rivals on Irish radio.

In 2007 Lowry had to admit to some of his tax evasion. His company Garuda had to pay back €1.2 million to revenue. Not content with being a capitalist company owner, corrupt politician and tax evader, Lowry also hid land ownership from the Dáil register of interests. The politicians are supposed to let us know when they are landlords or own a business. That way the public can see if there’s any conflict of interest, not that it stops them from being landlords or capitalists. Another of Lowry’s companies ‘Vineacre Limited” owned a 25-acre site in Wigan in Britain. In 2013, a number of tapes leaked to the public revealed Tribunal and was trying to hide another €250,000.

“I’m asking you, Kevin, for fuck’s sake will you protect me just a small bit. For jaysus sake don’t land me in it. I’m destroyed as it fucking is. … I can’t bring out that 200 – that 250 – again. If that comes out again I’m fucking ruined, I’m bankrupt. … They can’t find that 200. I never declared it. Now, the 2500 – the 250 – that I gave you, I paid that directly. I never put that through my books or my account of anything, nobody’s going to fucking get it, so I’ve got, you, know, I mean, I’m not even bringing that into it.”

In any other capitalist country this would be grounds for calling in the cops. But Lowry just left the Fine Gael party and still sits in the Dáil as an Independent TD, courted by the main parties when they need support to pass right-wing measures in the Dáil. Former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, refused to reopen the Moriarty Tribunal, never mind calling in the Criminal Assets Bureau. Lowry’s connection to his former party leader came in useful when he passed Kenny a note asking him to appoint Lowry’s press advisor, Valerie O’Reilly, to the board of the National Transport Authority. The note read:

“Taoiseach, would you please consider reappointing Valerie O’Reilly to the board of the NTA. A woman, bright, intelligent and not bad looking either!”

O’Reilly owned her own PR firm and lots of our politicians like to surround themselves with PR gurus to better sell themselves to the public. Having people like her run the NTA as a quango is one of the reasons Ireland has such poor public transport. The Moriarty Tribunal report revealed that Michael Lowry had personally pocketed £34,500 which Ben Dunne had given as a Christmas bonus from Dunnes Stores for staff of Lowry’s refrigeration company, Streamline, based in Thurles. So much for representing the people of Thurles. If they worked for him he was willing to steal from them.

In May 2019, 5 members of Lowry’s “Team Lowry” were elected to Tipperary County Council and the team included his son Micheál. Lowry himself topped the poll in the 2020 general election with 14,802 votes. Irish politicians are experts at detaching themselves from association with the political elite “up in Dublin” and playing on local concerns. In Tipperary North, Michael Lowry plays the role of a victim – persecuted by the liberal “Dublin media”.

Lowry claims there is an “organised, concerted and vicious media campaign” waged against him. Lowry takes credit for everything he can in the local area, from Thurles Park to a new Lidl going in. But these right-wing chancers also rest on a social base. When he was in Fine Gael he built up a network of connections to local business people. He acts as their voice. He was also opposed to the repeal of the 8th amendment, pitching himself to a conservative, Catholic voter base. He was one of 32 TDs who voted to deny the Irish people a right to vote on the issue. It wasn’t even a vote on abortion, it was a vote about whether to let the people vote, and he opposed it.

Small beef farmers and their families took to blocking the entrances of the big meat processing plants. The militant mass movement emerged in the Winter of 2018 as small farmers were growing tired of poverty and the control of the industry by giant companies. The small farmers were sick of being treated like garbage by the big meat barons like Larry Goodman. At €3.42 per kilo of beef, Irish farmers were making the least compared to the EU average. Half of Irish beef farmers earned less than €10,000 in 2017. The ‘Beef Plan Movement’ recruited over 20,000 of Ireland’s 80,000 beef farmers and began to fight back. C&D Petfoods, a company owned by beef baron, Larry Goodman’s ABP Food Group, was one of a number of meat processors to secure injunctions during the summer of 2019 after farmers blockaded a number of factories in protest against the price they were receiving for cattle.

Talks between the farmers and government couldn’t start unless Larry Goodman lifted the injunction, which he refused to do. The meat barons started laying off plant workers, using them as pawns to force the small farmers to surrender. Shamefully, instead of arguing for workers and small farmers linking up, the SIPTU leaders spoke out against the farmer’s protests, effectively helping the barons. The small farmers and plant workers had a common enemy, the billionaire Larry Goodman.

The small farmers were facing an existential threat to their living. The neo-liberal ‘Mercosur’ deal would see the EU sign up to trade with Brazil, meaning the Germans got a market for their cars while Brazilian beef got access to EU markets. Irish right-wing politicians usually court the small farmers for votes, but when it came down to it would always put the corporations before the people. Just three companies ABP, Dawn Meats and Kepak had become the biggest beef processors in Europe. Larry Goodman dominated the industry and had huge political influence. He could phone meat processors and dictate the prices at which they buy from small farmers.

The unspoken rule was: do what Larry says or get cut out of the industry. Goodman, who was worth €2.45 billion in 2019, owned the giant ABP meats. He owns 51 meat processing plants across Europe but has also branched out into property speculation and private hospitals. He made a killing from the covid-19 pandemic as the state paid millions for the use of his hospitals. In April 2020 he became the sole owner of the Hermitage Clinic and also owns the exclusive Blackrock clinic and the Galway clinic. The Irish state was paying Goodman over €44,000 per bed per month while even the Tories in Britain were renting private hospital beds for €10,000 a month.

Nora Labo, an organiser with the Independent Workers Union, told the Oireachtas Covid Committee that the reason Ireland had witnessed so many virus outbreaks in meat plants was due to, “the workers’ substandard employment and living conditions which are the result of the industry’s long-term disregard for the well-being of its staff". Around 30% of workers were employed by agencies, who would have recruited them abroad for work in the processing plants. The workers reported living in fear and were forced to come to work despite being sick.

Many were living in grossly overcrowded conditions and were ‘hot bedding’, meaning one worker would go on shift and another would come in from a shift and take his bed. On the one hand Goodman and his fellow meat barons were creating the conditions in which the virus could fester and then, on the other hand, owned the private hospitals that were going to benefit from a deal with the state which would put millions in Goodman’s coffers. And there was no danger of the state penalising the likes of Goodman for putting workers and the wider community under threat.

For the likes of Goodman to make money from health the public would need to be denied a public service. The running down of the public health service only makes sense in this context. It’s the neo-liberal model in action: defund public services, outsource and sell them off. The author Naomi Klien called it the ‘shock doctrine’ pointing out that the rich never let a crisis go to waste. The US had used the shock of the invasion in Iraq to asset strip the country and hand it over to corporations.

The 2008 crisis had been used internationally to implement massive austerity and restructure public services and the state. Not that the ruling class could prevent the systemic collapse of the banks or that they welcomed that, but that they could use their vast wealth and control of the state machine to leverage the crisis in their interests. In the Irish pandemic situation, the health service crisis itself was the shock used to further worsen the health crisis. Everytime the trolley figures became shockingly high or someone died in an underfunded hospital, successive governments would come promising ‘reform’ and introduced a package that included more of the very measures that were creating the problem in the first place.

This is no accident. The destruction of the public sector is a vital part of the marketisation of every aspect of life. In this the Irish state serves the pockets of Goodman and his class.

Larry Goodman’s career has been mired in scandal. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 the Goodman group (who’d been doing deals with Iraq) were set to lose up to £70 million in cancelled orders. Goodman had Ireland by the throat though with his companies representing 40% of the national beef kill. He could bend the state machine to his will. The Irish politicians were on their holidays but Charles Haughey recalled the Dáil to pass emergency legislation to bail out Goodman.

They wouldn’t cancel their expensive holidays to declare a poverty emergency or bail out the homeless though would they? The new legislation allowed the government to freeze the assets of a company for a year. Considering Goodman now owed £400 million to banks around the world, Haughey had just saved his mate from personal responsibility for millions. The Minister for Industry and Commerce at the time was future Taoiseach Albert Reynolds. .

In 1991 the Granada TV show ‘World In Action’ revealed that Goodman was using EU schemes and community funds to run his business empire, stealing public money for personal gain. The programme featured Patrick McGuinness, a former Goodman accountant who had left the company and immigrated to Canada. Another scandal, another tribunal. The government was forced to set up the Beef Tribunal in 1991 to investigate. The tribunal found that Fianna Fáil had taken huge donations from the meat barons.

In one fortnight in 1987 alone, the party was given £105,000 from three companies: Goodman International, Master Meats and Hibernia. Donations of £25,000 or £30,000 coincided with key moments in the process of large public benefits being given to these companies. Goodman had engaged in tax evasion but a tax amnesty of 1993 prevented the prosecution of those behind the scam. He never faced any jail time and regained control of his companies. Goodman shares a hangar at Dublin Airport with billionaire Denis O’Brien, they need somewhere to store their expensive private jets. That way they can come and go as they please, despite being tax evaders, or is it because they are tax evaders?

In 2019 nine companies in the Goodman Group made a profit of €170 million and had assets worth more than €3.45 billion, yet the bulk of the profits were booked in Luxembourg and were largely untaxed. The Goodman Group’s complex corporate structure is headed by entities based in Liechtenstein that do not publish financial accounts or details as to who their beneficiaries are. Despite being found guilty of tax evasion back in the 1990s he could still continue to do it years later. Why? Because he has a near stranglehold on the meat industry in Ireland and access to the political elite. He’s part of the Irish ruling class.

When the Department of Health was looking for a new headquarters Goodman was there to rent them the old Bank of Ireland building on Baggot Street in Dublin. The government could have bought the building outright for €40 million but signed a lease that would see them pay €100 million in rent to Goodman. Goodman’s Parma Developments had bought the building in 2013 for €40 million. When the Department of Health began leasing offices in the building in 2016, they paid rent for 17 months before they even moved in at a cost of €15.8 million. The annual rent was over €10 million ‘depending on the rate of inflation’. The Department of Children and Youth affairs were also renting offices in the building.

Working class people in Ireland have been going through one of the worst housing crises in the history of the state. Thousands of people are still homeless while tens of thousands languish on social housing lists. But the story is very different for the vultures who swooped in after the banking crisis. In August 2020 the Canadian vulture fund IRES REIT reported a 30% increase in profits, Covid-19 hadn’t hit their margins. They had grown to become the biggest landlord in the state with 3,739 units by mid-2020.

They were able to pay their CEO, Margaret Sweeney, €1 million for 2019, with a nice bonus of €442,000 on top, not to mention the €110,358 in shares she got. A nice pat on the back for picking the bones of renters forced into the hands of vulture landlords by an intentional run-down and lack of social housing. The UN special rapporteur on the right to housing, Leilani Farha sent a letter to the Irish government criticising the “preferential tax laws and weak tenant protections among other measures” that were accelerating the housing crisis.

Compare the fortunes of the vulture landlords to the squalid conditions of the working class community in Seagull House in Dublin’s Dolphin’s Barn: You wake up and there’s rats in your flat. The walls are so damp you could push your finger through the softened wall. When you complain about the damp, Dublin City Council say “Ah it’s just condensation!” The wooden stairs between floors of the upper floor of each flat crumble and flake from the damp and rot, elderly family members fall and injure themselves and still the council do nothing. It took a series of protests by residents to get the council to listen and begin repairs. The strategy of the Irish state with regard to housing was the same as their strategy in the health service: run it down and sell it off.

This meant leaving council tenants in rotting estates dealing with damp and ill health while the state refused to build new public housing. It pushed people into the hands of private landlords. At the start of the 1980s the Irish state was building 8,000 housing units a year, but by the end of the 80s it had fallen to just 800 a year. The collapse in house building was accompanied by a demonisation of social housing, it was housing for the poorest of the poor. This was Thatcherism in action: turn public housing into ghetto housing and convince workers they needed to buy their own home.

It was about more than just a roof over your head, it was a way to buy into social status. The corrupt relationship between the Irish state and the landlords, vulture funds and corporations accelerated this process of commodifying housing and depriving working people of a public home.

In Greek mythology Cerberus was the name of the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to hell and is a fitting name for a vulture fund. The fund is based in New York and run by hedge-fund manager Steve Feinberg. Feinberg had been a trader during the 1980s. “Greed is good!” was the mantra back then. Hedge-fund managers are experts on ‘rolling over’ assets, where houses aren’t seen as places for people to live in, they are flashing numbers on a screen indicating profit or loss. They gamble with lives. Cerberus paid a £7 million ‘fixer fee’ to get their hands on assets, worth €6.5 billion, for just €1.34 billion.

The fixer in question was Frank Cushnahan, a well connected insider among the Northern political elite. He’d once been the chairman of Belfast Harbour and was hired as an adviser by NAMA, the National Assets Management Agency, the state body set up in 2009 to bail out Ireland’s developers in the wake of the 2008 crash. The £7 million had been moved to an Isle of Man bank by a former partner of Belfast-based legal firm Tughan’s. The legal firm’s senior partner, Ian Coulter, was among five men set to share in a “success fee” linked to the €1.34 billion sale.

The other four were said to be the then First Minister, Peter Robinson, accountant David Watters, developer Andrew Creighton and ex-NAMA adviser Frank Cushnahan. All five of them denied the claims. In September 2016, BBC Spotlight broadcast a secret recording in which Mr Cushnahan was heard to accept a £40,000 cash payment from Co Down developer and NAMA borrower John Miskelly. He also claimed the Cerberus ‘fixers fee’ was meant for him. The recording was made in 2012 while he was working for NAMA. The whole sell-off of NAMA property to Cerberus was dubbed ‘Project Eagle’.

It wasn’t the only dodgy deal going on with property developers and vulture funds at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. NAMA took over €74 billion of loans for a write-down price of €34 billion. They then hired many of the developers to look after these property portfolios. Soon after getting their hands on Project Eagle properties, Cerberus went on to snatch up ‘Project Arrow’, a portfolio of just under 2,000, mainly residential, properties. This had originally been valued at €6 billion but the NAMA reserve price was just €1 billion. NAMA was set up as a ‘bad bank’, taking over property development loads from the bankrupt Irish banks.

In setting up NAMA the government was advised by economist Dr. Peter Bacon. At the time of his appointment, Bacon was a director of Ballymore Properties, NAMA-bound Sean Mulryan’s property company. Here you had a property developer advising the Irish government on the best way to get property developers, and the banks they’d borrowed from, out of the crisis they had got themselves into. He was also Managing Director of Goodbody Stockbrokers for three years.

NAMA was set up as a ‘Special Purpose Vehicle’ with three banks owning 51% of the vehicle, Irish Life Investment Managers (part of Permanent TSB), New Ireland Assurance (part of Bank Of Ireland) and Allied Irish Banks Investment Managers (part of AIB). They each provided €17 million to get the bad bank going and would be rewarded for their stake. Following the acquisition of Allied Irish Banks by the Irish government the SPV stakeholding was sold to South African investor Prestige. When Fine Gael took over from Fianna Fáil they wanted to sell off the loans as quickly as possible so that they could claim they’d made a little profit out of the whole mess.

Minister of Finance Michael Noonan met with the vultures on 65 occasions. Some of the discredited bankers had enough insider information to turn up working for the vulture funds swooping in to benefit from NAMA, for example ex-Bank of Ireland Chief Executive, Brian Goggin, turned up working for Apollo Investments. The corporate vultures hired locals with knowledge of the local market, and importantly, access to the politicians. Goggin helped bankrupt the country, got a pension of €500,000 from the bank job and then went on to work for the vultures, wining and dining politicians to get policies favourable to the vulture funds.

Fine Gael’s strategy was simple: cut back on public housing, get the property bubble going again and attack the poorest people when they complained about the housing crisis. Leo Varadkar’s dog whistle attacks on people on welfare were designed to silence the most marginalised and blame the victims of his government’s housing policies. In the end it was estimated that 90% of NAMA properties ended up in the hands of US vulture funds.

In June 2016 it was noted that these vultures were recording massive profits but weren’t paying tax. They were using ‘Section 110’ tax loopholes to send their profits off to offshore accounts. It was estimated we lost up to €20 billion in tax revenue, enough to build tens of thousands of housing units and clear the housing waiting lists. Section 110 had been set up in 1997 to make Ireland an attractive tax haven destination. Firms could set up in the Irish Financial Services Centre and register as a Special Purpose Vehicle and pay zero in tax. Special Purpose Vehicles set up by the vulture funds had bought up assets worth around €300 billion, according to data gathered by the Central Bank.

One of the scams involved the parent company in the US or Canada setting up a subsidiary in Ireland that pretended to be a separate company. The parent company would then ‘loan’ money for investments in Ireland so that the offspring company could claim they had to pay back the fake ‘loan’. Profits given to shareholders as dividends could be taxed but loan repayments weren’t. So they’d just send the profits from Ireland back to the parent company as ‘loan repayments’ and avoid paying tax in Ireland. In October 2019, Fine Gael Finance Minister, Paschal Donohoe, was forced to admit the vultures had been engaged in “aggressive behaviour to avoid tax”. But his party had let it go on for years before taking action, only acting under pressure from the opposition in the Dáil.

In areas like Dublin 8, permission was granted for more and more staycation hotels and expensive student accommodation. The more hotels and staycation apartment blocks went up, the more locals were being forced out of the inner city. The same thing was happening in Cork and Galway. They call it “gentrification” and it’s made out to be of benefit to the local community. In reality it is hollowing out the old working class Dublin communities.

In Galway city centre in 2018 a poor couple on housing assistance could find nothing within their price range. The low threshold for the payments worked in tandem with rising rents to push poor people out of the city. The government and local councils were working arm in arm with the vultures to create an environment where profits were plentiful and the people paid the social cost with homelessness and high rents.

Margaret Sweeney, of Ires Reit saw her annual bonus increased, by €112,000, to €442,000 in 2019. She started as a chartered accountant with KPMG in the 1980s and, after spending time on the boards of the Dublin Airport Authority and Postbank, became CEO of the Canadian vulture fund in November 2017. Her total pay for 2019 was €1.04 million. The Ires Reit property portfolio grew to 3,739 units in the first half of 2020, up from 2,771 in 2019. A REIT, a ‘Real Estate Investment Trust’, is a North American concept whereby rich people pool their money into buying assets that guarantee them regular, long term profit.

The ‘Irish Residential Properties Reit’ or Ires Reit, is a Canadian company who swooped in to buy up Irish property in the wake of the property crash. When NAMA was formed, many said the Irish government would be the ‘biggest landlord’ in the state, but they underestimated the extent to which public assets burn a hole in the pocket of the Irish state and they unloaded NAMA properties as quickly as they could, often at huge discounts.

Ires owner David Ehrlich said: “We’ve never seen rental increases like this in any jurisdiction that we’re aware of.”

Welcome to Ireland. The Finance Act of 2013 introduced ‘REITs’ to Ireland for the first time, as part of the then Fine Gael/Labour government’s response to the financial crisis. The first two REITS in Ireland, Green REIT and Hibernian, were launched in the summer of 2013. They were to be exempt from corporation tax. The government argued these vultures would eventually increase the supply of housing, which would bring prices down for ordinary people. But in reality the government was intentionally stoking another property bubble and claiming the increase in profits for the vultures as welcome ‘economic activity’. But this wasn’t a sustainable strategy either in cold economic terms or in terms of the human catastrophe befalling the Irish people because of the housing crisis these policies produced.

By the start of 2020 the average rent in Ireland was €1,400 a month. Rents were over 40% higher than the Celtic Tiger peak. People were struggling just to keep up with rent payments. Rent increases became a new form of economic slavery with only the landlords benefiting. Irish workers were spending over 40% of their wages on rent alone, whereas workers in Germany paid, on average, only 24% of their wages. 1 in 10 Irish people in 2019 were spending over 60% of their wages on rent alone. We had become a nation working for the vultures. If an alien had landed and studied the purpose of Irish society, that’s what they’d deduce it was for.

When opposition voices called for rent certainty, the vultures pulled on the strings of government. In a letter to Minister Michael Noonan on September 30th 2015, the ‘Kennedy Wilson Europe’ managing director Peter Collins wrote: “Investors and their funding banks will see the new proposed regime negatively. This will certainly limit and, potentially eliminate, future investment.” Translated, they were saying “you help tenants, we pull our money out!” They were holding the country to ransom with the government as willing accomplices. So while the vultures stick billboards outside their estates promising “better living”, this PR is all just part of the dystopian reality of the housing crisis in Ireland.

NAMA and the re-named and now state-owned Anglo Irish Bank ‘IBRC’ sold off 37% of the total property sold off in Europe in 2013 and 2014. 60% of all assets sold by IBRC were bought by a single vulture fund, the Texas-based Lone Star Capital, whereas 90% of NAMA assets went to North American funds. The vultures also gobbled up mortgage loans from the banks. In 2018, Permanent TSB sold over 10,000 loans to Start Mortgages, an affiliate of the Texan based vulture, Lone Star. Over 40,000 home owners were under threat of eviction as vultures swept in and bought up their loans.

It was possible to stand up to the vultures as residents of Cork’s Leeside apartments showed. They fought off a vulture fund for a year and a half. In 2017 the apartments were bought by “Value Investor” Lugus Capital, the Irish wing of vulture fund Bain Capital, founded by Republican US presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The vulture moved to evict 30 households from its newly acquired ‘asset’, but residents organised to fight back with support from the left. Eventually, the large apartment block, with the capacity to house over 75 households, was sold to Cluid Housing Association and funded in cooperation with Cork City Council. This heavy handed approach to evictions was nothing compared to the thuggery employed by KBC bank. KBC were accused of using Loyalist thugs to evict a family from a house in Strokestown in Roscommon.

The head of the KBC eviction squad was an ex-member of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment. This caused outrage and masked locals retaliated evicting the security thugs from the premises. While they were hiring thugs to evict people they were also busy ripping off customers. KBC was fined €18.3 million by the Central Bank for ripping off tracker mortgage holders. It wasn’t just the banks and vulture funds that were benefiting from this orgy of housing profiteering - the old developers who had helped bankrupt the country - with the assistance of NAMA - were back and wealthier than ever.

Johnny Ronan coughed into the camera. He was pretending to have Covid-19. Then he stopped the mock coughing and started laughing. He was in South Africa on holiday. Drinking away with his arms around a group of young women. He was slammed for making light of the disease as the video made the rounds on social media. But he wasn’t shy of controversy. Ronan was born to a well off family in Clonmel before working for PricewaterhouseCoopers as an accountant. He formed “Treasury Holdings” in 1989 with his school-mate Richard Barrett. They built the Convention Centre in Dublin as well as the Montevetro building, later Google’s European HQ. They rented offices to the National Treasury Management Agency in Dublin.

His company owned 60% of “Real Estate Opportunities” which bought the Battersea power station in London in 2006 for €532 million. They got planning permission for thousands of apartments and for office and retail space. In November 2011 Lloyds Bank and NAMA took it into administration but Ronan and pals were appointed as managers to oversee construction when the project was sold to a Malaysian consortium. Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett had accumulated global debts of €2.7 billion, of which €1.7 billion ended up in NAMA. NAMA had lent the pair €100 million before the company was forced to shut down.

Ronan and Barrett got €100 million from selling his shares in a Chinese property company, TCT, and settled with NAMA, but Ronan used a group of companies called Lanaree Limited to loan €33 million to other companies in his group knowing they couldn’t pay it back. Lanaree only existed with support from NAMA. The state then paid the developers up to €200,000 a year to manage many of their own old property portfolios. Meanwhile these developers moved millions around in global property deals.

These rich parasites were experts at hiding money. Ronan was down as director of 323 companies, often shell companies within shells. Eventually Ronan paid off €400 million in debt to NAMA through the sale of properties in Dublin and China. When NAMA wanted a private developer to build on the site of the Irish Glass Bottle works in Ringsend in Dublin locals protested for public housing, but. NAMA went with Johnny Ronan and US vulture Colony Capital. Ronan and the vulture would have an 80% shareholding in the new “Pembroke Ventures DAC”, with NAMA keeping 20%, to develop on the 37-acre site. Ronan was soon up to his eyes in new developments. Ronan went to the Supreme Court to defend his high rent on Bewleys on Dublin’s Grafton Street where he was charging €1.5 million a year, twice the going market rates.

There was talk of him turning the heritage site into a new hotel. From skyscrapers on the Dublin quays to massive investments in London the Tiger developers were rewarded for crippling a nation. But from Ronan to the US vultures, none of them could flourish without the policy environment provided by the landlords in the Dáil.

In 2019, 25% of TDs in the Dáil were landlords. But that average rose when dealing with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael where 1 in 3 Fianna Fáil TDs were landlords and 1 in 3 members of the 2019 Fine Gael cabinet were landlords too. 36% of Fine Gael TDs were landlords in 2019. 50% of the TDs in the Dáil in 2018 were millionaires with corrupt politician Michael Lowry topping the list with a wealth of €6.4 million. Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton was worth €4.9 million in 2018. Even “independent” TDs like Shane Ross were worth €3.7 million. This wealth was a fraction of the wealth controlled by the likes of Denis O’Brien or Larry Goodman but it still demonstrated that the political system was and is run by millionaires acting in the service of billionaires. The TDs were often company owners too.

Former Jobs Minister Richard Bruton owned shares in Arytza, the Swiss food company. Former Fianna Fáil Defence Minister Willie O’Dea had a huge portfolio of investments in oil and mining concerns, including Union Jack Oil (Bath), Kaizen Discovery (Vancouver), and Dragon Oil (London). How were these people going to vote on issues that mattered like housing or the environment? They weren’t going to vote against their own economic interests. Politics was a pathway to wealth and gave access to the economic elite where the real power lay.

The Dáil is full of capitalists and landlords. They are in there to represent their own selfish interests and they cannot represent the people. At the beginning of 2020 over 680,000 people were living in poverty in Ireland and their voices were underrepresented in a landlords’ Dáil.

Corruption is part and parcel of this set up. Even when the landlord TDs don’t vote the right way, a political favour can be bought with a brown envelope. Fianna Fáil Minister, Ray Burke, was accused of taking £80,000 from a developer. He was forced to resign in October 1997. Later the Flood Tribunal found Burke to be “corrupt” as a developer had bought him his house, he’d opened offshore bank accounts in the Isle of Man, he got a £35,000 bribe to grant a licence to Century Radio and he’d taken corrupt payments that weren’t “political donations”.

The Flood Tribunal, and later the Mahon tribunal, also covered corruption involving his party colleague, Liam Lawlor. Lawlor was nicknamed “Lord Lucan”. He was the man whose palm you greased to get things done in West Dublin. Of the €4.6 million that went through his bank accounts he could only account for €2 million. In the end he faced jail, not for corruption, but because he refused to cooperate with the tribunals. If he had played ball he would have got a slap on the wrist. He got £350,000 from Goodman International for a land deal; National Toll Roads gave him £74,00 and he’d even travelled to Iraq to broker deals for Larry Goodman. Ray Burke got put behind bars for his tax affairs but not for his blatant corruption. If they started jailing corrupt politicians where would it end? You’d have to jail them all.

Politicians are also rewarded for their service to the capitalist elite when they retire from politics. When former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, was in power he handed over €200 billion of distressed debt to the vultures and then when he stepped down he started working as the chair of the Global Advisory Council within VentureWave Capital. His party mate and former minister, Brian Hayes, became a lobbyist for the banks, using his connections to the political elite to connect them to the capitalist elite. He even turned up to the ‘Golfgate’ dinner during the covid-19 crisis as a representative of the banks, wining and dining with his former political buddies to soften them up for the bankers.

Former Taoiseach Brian Cowen, after bailing out the banks and looking after big corporations like Shell, was rewarded with a seat on the board of Topaz Energy in 2014 and a job on the board of private clinic “The Beacon” in 2015. Both companies were owned by billionaire Denis O’Brien. O’Brien had paid Ulster Bank just €40 million for the clinic’s €100 million debt. The politicians make a fortune from their stint in public office, retiring with big pensions, and can then embark on a corporate career.

In 2010 TASC released a report called “Mapping the Golden Circle” which showed the web of connections between the corporate and political elite in Ireland. They are one ruling class with a division of labour. While some members of the ruling class act directly as capitalists, employing workers to create profit for them, other members of their class run the political system and defend it from popular democracy. 39 rich Irish people held 93 directorships in 33 of some state’s largest banks, public sector companies or government agencies and a huge 398 additional directorships in other companies.

Anglo Irish Bank had directors in common with a huge number of Ireland’s biggest companies from Smurfit to Bord na Mona and Aer Lingus. But the power of these ruling class individuals spanned both public and private sector with Anglo Irish Bank directors also sitting on the boards of the Dublin Airport Authority, the Dublin Docklands Authority and Forfás, the state enterprise agency. Just 24 people sitting on the boards of the 4 big banks accounted for 68% of the 398 additional directorships held by this network of directors. Seán Fitzpatrick of Anglo Irish Bank was also chair of the remuneration committee (in charge of pay) at Greencore and at Smurfit.

He was also on the board of the Dublin Docklands Authority. 25% of these directors sat on the board of a state agency, while 50% had at some point sat on top of a state agency. But this top tier of the ruling class is enmeshed with the lower tiers that work for the state machine.

The whole Irish state is populated with unelected civil servants who are drawn from the ruling class and act as gatekeepers, hired to defend capitalism no matter who is in the Dáil. When Sinn Féin won a huge popular vote in February 2020 their manifesto had to be transformed into a programme for government, presented to the senior civil servants who would filter out what was ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic’; in other words, they would filter out what was compatible with Irish capitalism at that given moment.

Sinn Féin negotiation team members Pearse Doherty, Eoin Ó Broin, Louise O’Reilly and Matt Carthy met with Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach, Martin Fraser. What filters would Fraser employ? After getting a commerce degree from UCD and a masters in science degree in economics in Trinity College, Fraser joined the civil service. He joined the Department of the Taoiseach, as finance officer in 1999 and became the Assistant Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach in 2007; he was there to advise on economic policy during the austerity years. In 2011 he became the senior civil servant in the Department of the Taoiseach. His influence spanned both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael austerity regimes.

The population elect politicians to the Dáil and those politicians have to present their ideas to the civil servants and have them filtered for anything that may be offensive to business interests. We do not live in a democracy. Not only do the capitalists control all of the wealth but they also control the state machine.

Some use the term ‘crony capitalism’ to describe Ireland, but, although this country is particularly corrupt, capitalism everywhere is built on a web of connections between the capitalist owners of industries and the capitalist state machine. Neo-liberal ideology contains a glaring hypocrisy when it comes to the state. Margaret Thatcher used to say “there’s no such thing as society” meaning it was every individual for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world. Those who espouse neo-liberal theory will demand the destruction of welfare and the sell-off of state assets while at the same time running with their hands out begging to the state the minute they get into trouble. It’s socialism for the rich and neo-liberalism for the poor. When the Irish banks got into trouble they were bailed out at huge cost to the taxpayer.

We’ve already seen how the Irish state used the housing crisis to enrich the landlords, vultures and developers, often just handing them state-owned land. Capital has always needed the state machine to defend it. When capitalism was on the rise the state bureaucracy and armed forces were first developed by the ruling aristocracy. After a wave of wars and revolutions brought the capitalists to power they began perfecting the machinery of control.

Milton Friedman and other pro-capitalist thinkers argued that the state was merely a ‘night watchman’ gently guiding the market. They wanted the market left to its own devices, a mad idea that the competitive greed of a million competing capitalists would somehow magically produce a ‘greater good’. The neo-liberals replaced the Keynesian orthodoxy which prevailed in the Western world before the 1970s. The Keynesian argument was that the state should spend to escape from the doldrums of a crisis.

As capitalism experienced an unprecedented period of expansion from the 1940s to the 1970s the future neo-liberals couldn’t get a look in. There was huge state spending on arms while the threat of post-war, working-class revolt led to the establishment of the welfare state. But capitalist crisis can’t be held back forever. The causes of crisis lie deep in the bones of the system itself. When the crash came in the early 1970s the ruling class could no longer reconcile their profits with spending on welfare and public services and they looked around for a set of ideas that would equip them to go on the attack. That’s what made neo-liberal ideas popular: panic in the ruling class.

Far from dispensing with the state and leaving everything to the Gods of the market, the new attack on the working class required the state as a weapon, first in Chile where the dictator Pinochet tried ‘monetarist’ policies that sank the economy. He defended these new economic policies with machine guns and tanks. So much for the ‘hidden hand’ of the market these posh boy economists go on about. 30,000 working class people were massacred by the regime. The next assault came with Thatcher and Reagan striking a blow against the trade unions in the USA and Britain. Once again the move to asset strip the state, slash welfare or break the miners came with baton charges and use of the state. The capitalists have always depended on their state machine to defend their rule, that’s why corruption is endemic, it’s everywhere in this system.

In 2019 $3.47 billion was spent on lobbying US politicians. The rich just buy the politicians, who are also often drawn from the same wealthy class, go to the same schools and socialise with the rich. The capitalist class and the state bureaucracy are two parts of one organism as the exploitation of workers in the factories and offices needs the protection of the state and if workers rise up the state forces move to evict them from the workplace. Companies compete with each other, seeing who can exploit workers most efficiently and grab more of the profit pie, but they also compete for influence in the state.

It’s not good enough that the machine always works for their class, it must also work for their particular company. Now all those meetings between Irish politicians and vulture funds make sense. The state is a weapon to defend the interests of the ruling class and they use laws, courts, police and ultimately violence if necessary to defend their rule over us.

Karl Marx once said that any movement that rose up but didn’t smash the state would simply ‘perfect it’. Everytime you challenge the state and back away from revolution, they learn and adapt the machine. They perfect the machine to better keep you down. All state machines are weapons in the hands of a ruling class to keep the majority down. Every party in Ireland outside of the radical left wants to run the corrupt Irish state instead of dismantling it and building a new democracy. You can’t change the nature of a beast by changing the rider.

A tiger doesn’t become a pony because you switch out the person on it’s back. The idea that you can change the Irish state machine bit by bit is like trying to avoid being eaten by a tiger while clipping its nails. That may seem like an oversimplification, but it cuts to the heart of what the state is and what it does when you get down to it. When we think about the process of people power and rebellion, what is revolution if not the class struggle multiplied exponentially?

During a revolution the application of force against the revolutionary forces by the old state power becomes obvious. The state is naked. But the machinery they’d use against a revolution is in place long before a revolution takes place. The Irish state was born from a ruling class determined to stop a workers’ revolution and install a counter-revolutionary regime. Those who formed the Irish State were very honest about the role of force in establishing their class rule. As Lord Justice O’Connor said when challenged over the arrest and coming execution of Erskine Childers:

“No Government can exist unless there is some physical force behind it.”

They understood they would build a machine, with armed bodies of men, backed up by courts and prisons, that would crush all opposition. As Kevin O’Higgins stated:

“Not only must the Irregulars be crushed, but illegal holding of land, refusal to pay debts, must be stamped out immediately.”

The Free State army was consciously sent out to evict workers occupying factories or to fire shots above the heads of striking post office workers. The Gardaí were set up to defend wealth and property as the army was withdrawn from areas and the “normal” running of capitalism was restored.

The ruling class during peaceful times will never admit to the reality of their state machine. As the Russian Revolutionary Lenin explained in 1919:

“This apparatus, this group of people who rule others, always possesses certain means of coercion, of physical force, irrespective of whether this violence over people is expressed in the primitive club, or in more perfected types of weapons in the epoch of slavery, or in the firearms which appeared in the Middle Ages, or, finally, in modern weapons, which in the twentieth century are technical marvels and are based entirely on the latest achievements of modern technology. The methods of violence changed, but whenever there was a state there existed in every society a group of persons who ruled, who commanded, who dominated and who, in order to maintain their power, possessed an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence, with those weapons which corresponded to the technical level of the given epoch.”

No ruling elite, including our own Golden Circle, can stay in power without what Gramsci calls “consent” and “coercion”. By consent he means that people are convinced that there’s no alternative to this system, so they reluctantly accept it. The ruling class own the media and put out ideas that help to manufacture consent.

But when consent breaks down they turn to “coercion”, the application of force. How many of us remember being pushed around by ‘community’ police officers for standing up to water meter installation? We refused to consent so the state turned to coercion; they used force.

The bosses have two bases of power. They own the factories and the offices; they control all the wealth. But they also control the state machine. As we’ve seen they make sure to place members of their own class in the political class, and politicians are rewarded for serving their class with nice jobs when they jump ship from politics.

But on a deeper level the wealthy control the state machinery. We often think of the state as just the Dáil. But the Dáil is window dressing, it’s a puppet show hiding the real decision making that goes on behind the scenes. The deep state is an unelected machine staffed by people drawn from the upper class, the unelected army generals are drawn from that class, as are the police chiefs. These are “reliable” men and women who will defend the ruling class. If they won’t they get the sack. The heads of the civil service watch governments come and go and aren’t elected or accountable to popular democracy. When we elect politicians they have to present their manifesto to the senior civil servants who then tell them what can and can’t be implemented.

The Department of Finance dictates to the politicians what’s economically viable, from their ruling class point of view. So there’s no democracy in the workplace, where all the wealth of society is produced by workers. And there’s no democracy in the deep state that operates behind the puppet show of the Dáil. We live under the dictatorship of the capitalists like Denis O’Brien and Larry Goodman, but it’s a very clever and subtle dictatorship. If it was more overt we wouldn’t accept it.

Therefore, no matter who is elected to the Dáil, every single government is a coalition with the capitalists through the unelected parts of the State. Every government is a coalition with the right, because they populate the deep state. No matter who came out on top of the 2020 election in Ireland they would have to work with MI5 man, Drew Harris, as Garda chief or with top civil servant Martin Fraser. From the origin of the Irish state to the present - the essence of the State is that it is composed of ‘armed bodies’ that serve the interests of the ruling class.

If a Left Government steps out of line and the economic weight of the capitalists isn’t enough to force submission then the capitalists can firstly declare attacks on the property of the rich as ‘unconstitutional’, using the separation of powers to charge the Government from the upper house or courts and if that doesn’t work then the army and police command are in the hands of members of the ruling class; people who share their prejudices. The capitalists, aware of their economic power and control over this machinery of State, can tactically retreat from the frontline of the State, temporarily hand over parliament to the left and then use all means at their disposal to force capitulation.

Clearly, any movement that has illusions in the State, and believes that this machinery serves any purpose other than oppression, is blinding the working class to the key task of any revolution, the life and death necessity of dismantling these oppressive structures. The Irish state machine was built to hold us down. That’s its purpose.

You can decorate it any way you want but you can’t change that purpose. It has to be dismantled if we want a real democracy that serves the people. Elections are useful to get your message out there. But that’s it. It’s handy to have someone like Paul Murphy or Bríd Smith on the telly. It legitimises the left message. But Connolly understood that parliament was a dung heap, more people can see you if you stand on it, but just don’t fall in.

Socialist democracy is the only way to get rid of corruption. To build a socialist society where the public democratically control all of the wealth. That way no one like Denis O’Brien can buy our public officials. A democratic socialist society would make all representatives recallable too, so that if someone didn’t represent the people you could recall them and replace them. Ending economic inequality and building on forms of grassroots direct democracy removes the soil from which corruption grows.

The ruling class are divided into an economic and a political elite that can sometimes differ on the best way to exploit us. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil hate each other, with one appealing to a right wing voter base with dog whistle attacks on the poor and the other pretending to be everyone’s friend while playing the same capitalist game. After the Second World War there was a postwar boom and the global economy doubled in size. During the boom it was easy for members of ruling class parties to argue for state spending.

They could keep their profits up and also buy working class cooperation through house building or by offering a public health service. When that postwar boom collapsed in the early 1970s the ruling class was desperate for a strategy to recover their profit rates at the expense of workers and neo-liberalism was promoted and accelerated by Thatcherism and Reaganism. So the ruling class can argue about how best to exploit us, but they never fall out on the necessity of keeping capitalist exploitation going.

The philosopher Karl Marx described them as a ‘hostile band of brothers’ as they compete like pigs at a trough for a greater share of the spoils of exploitation, but they will unite to put down any real challenge to the system of exploitation.

Recognizing that the state is a weapon in the hands of our exploiters doesn’t mean abstaining from the day to day fight for reforms, like better public health services. You have to make life better for suffering people. If you abstain from the day to day battles of the working class no one will have any respect for you and the working class itself will be beaten over and over. A working class that faces a raft of defeats is not going to suddenly embark on the path of revolution. We should fight for reforms because it makes working class life better. Any improvement is worth fighting for because life is tough for us. The difference between fighting for reforms and reformism is that reformism is a political philosophy that thinks that these reforms by themselves are changing the nature of the state.

Reformists argue that the incremental accumulation of reforms changes the nature of the beast. But it doesn’t. At no point is the underlying machinery of oppression and violence deconstructed because you win a reform. The fact that the state administers a public health service doesn’t change the nature of the judges, courts, or the capitalist legal framework, the nature of the police or the army command. Neither does it change the nature of the capitalist economy. Workers are still treated as commodities bought and sold on the labour market to bosses who exploit them for profit.

The provision of social welfare and the multiplication of functions the state takes on doesn’t change it’s core nature. When Fianna Fáil introduced the dole into Ireland in the 1930s they didn’t dismantle the counter revolutionary state machinery and start again. They added the modern functions and reforms won by the working class onto the already existing underlying oppressive state structures. The reformists will argue that the state isn’t a ruling class state, that it can be won by the working class. You can tame the tiger. They argue that the state itself can be a site of class struggle inside the state itself.

Some of those who led the Greek reformist party Syriza were from what’s called the ‘Euro-communist’ tradiction. They mis-quoted the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to justify a ‘slow march’ through and not against the capitalist institutions. The key battle for them is about taking over the existing corrupt state apparatus.

Compromises become permissible in order to obtain state power ‘for the working class’. But once in power these parties realise that the capitalists use control of the economy and the deep state to put a noose around the necks of naive reformists. Syriza promised a very radical programme for government but once in power immediately surrendered to the bullies in the EU and the Greek bankers. They had no plan other than to try to run the machine. But the machine wouldn’t listen, it answered to the class that built it.

It is like the ‘One Ring’ in the Lord Of The Rings. It only answers to its master Sauron and can’t be used for any other purpose. It has to be destroyed. The path to real liberation is never as easy as just winning an election. Despite this truth the reformists constantly attack revolutionaries as “idealist”.

For example, Nico’s Poulantzas, a popular thinker among the Euro-communists, states:

“..the expression ‘sweeping transformation of the state apparatus in the democratic road to socialism’ suggests that there is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that apparatus. The fact remains, however, that the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or ‘formal’ liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties. It is necessary to take sides… talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick. What is involved, through all the various transformations, is a real permanence and continuity of the institutions of representative democracy—not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.”

This is a clever sleight of hand. Poulantzas conflates the stunted parliamentary democracy, the fake democracy we have under capitalism, with the direct grassroots democracy that prevails during a revolution and is the basis of real socialism.

During a revolution, working class people would have to elect delegates to coordinate a rebellion on a national level, leading to the potential for a counter state based on direct democracy. He is saying to the working class:

“Don’t bother smashing the state; why don’t we just use the already existing ‘democracy’ to get what we want?”

But the existing “democracy” is a sham that acts as a cover for an oppressive ruling class state machine. When Marx said the state needed to be ‘smashed’, he meant that the repressive deep state would use violence against workers if they tried to rise up. That violence would naturally have to be opposed and if the working class was victorious they would have ‘smashed’ the state. If an army commander ordered his troops to fire on a revolutionary crowd and they refused and joined the people, arresting their commanders - that’s ‘smashing’ the state.

If factories and offices were occupied and the police came to evict them, but the workers refused to leave and elected mass assemblies to take over the running of the factory and then marched on the local police station evicting the police, that’s ‘smashing’ the state. The mainstream parties would be busy using talk of ‘democracy’ to rally the forces that were intent on ‘smashing’ the revolution, but workplace assemblies, community assemblies, that kind of direct democracy is vital and there can be no gradual transition from the capitalist ‘weapon’ of a state to real grassroots democracy.

Reformism’s misuse of Gramsci is also based on a false parallel between how the emerging capitalist class came to power in their fight against the feudal system’s aristocrats and how the working class could come to power under the capitalist system. The capitalist class grew under the rule of Kings and Queens. In the Middle Ages society was ‘feudal’ and feudalism was a society based on the peasantry working the land, ruled over by Kings, Lords and Bishops. Capitalism emerged through trade networks and the development of industry in the towns.

The new capitalist wealth was attractive to the aristocracy and in some cases the Crown encouraged capitalism. So the court of Elizabeth I in Britain was full of merchants intent on conquering the world to make more money, but at a certain point the capitalists were frustrated, answering to a bunch of useless aristocrats and church bureaucrats. The result was revolution in Britain in 1648 and in France in 1789. The capitalists came to power through revolution after a long period of becoming ‘hegemonic’ they could grow their wealth under the wing of the aristocracy and then overthrow the aristocracy.

They could capture the aristocratic state machinery and perfect it, aware that they had gained power through revolution, they wanted to make sure the working class didn’t get the same idea. This gradual growth of one system within another has misinformed many thinkers who draw an impossible parallel for the working class.

The working class can’t accumulate power and influence in the same way as the capitalists could. Workers can’t take over half a factory and hope the boss doesn’t notice. You can’t take over one factory and then use that as a base to take over another. The state forces come along and evict you. Isolated victories for the working class are rolled back as long as the capitalists have all the economic and political power.

For two centuries now the working class has fought. Sometimes victories are won, sometimes there are defeats. Sometimes reforms are won, sometimes those reforms are taken away. The class struggle is a multi-front battle where there are simultaneous victories and defeats on different fronts. We can win a higher minimum wage at the same time as the introduction of an austerity tax. The class struggle is economic, political and, at the same time, in the realm of ideas. The capitalist class had the wealth and power to finance universities and with philosophers, economists and the greatest musicians and authors on their side, fought the aristocracy.

The working class doesn’t have those resources. We can’t focus on capturing a machine that won’t work for us. We need to build up networks of intelligent and class conscious workers within our class, who fight to become ‘hegemonic’, to become the dominant force shaping our class. They need to win other workers to the idea of self government of the working class.

For revolutionaries the battle to render workers fit to self-govern is connected to the revolution itself, for it is in mass struggle that people start to throw off ruling class ideas and begin to grow in confidence. That offers the most fertile soil to plant socialist ideas in. The tax haven economy will fall and people will be forced to fight. They need to be won to the realisation that the Irish state is a rotten and corrupt state and it always was.

The machine was constructed after the Irish Revolution to make sure the working class never rose up. The state was always a captured state, working for the wealthy. The rich use the state to get them started in business and the politicians are rewarded for loyal service with employment by the rich when they retire. Behind the facade of the Dáil there is a deeper state consisting of an unelected civil service bureaucracy, police chiefs and army commanders, who are all loyal to the ruling class. We should never forget the words of the wise James Connolly when he said:

“Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

The Irish capitalists and their state machine are a barrier to a decent society. Who can we rely on to build a socialist Ireland? Connolly answers:

“Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman, the hired liars of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared."