Panel of Speakers

Host/ MC
Margaret E. Ward, Financial Journalist & Broadcaster
Margaret is an award-winning financial journalist, broadcaster, author and small business owner. She is known for “telling it like it is” and combining humour with finance and economics. Although she’s spent most of her 25-year career as a print journalist — The Irish Times’ business and personal finance columnist and The Sunday Times’ Money Editor — Margaret also presented Newstalk’s Breakfast Business programme during the bailout period. She is a regular contributor to radio and TV and managing director of Clear Ink, a global clear English consultancy based in Dublin, Ireland.

Panelists
David Begg, General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU)
David Begg became General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) in 2001. For five years prior to that he was Chief Executive of Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation working in 27 countries and with offices in Dublin, London, Belfast, New York and Chicago. David is a Governor of the Irish Times Trust, a non-Executive Director of Aer Lingus, and a member of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC). From 1995 to 2010 he was a Director of the Irish Central Bank. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). He holds a Master’s Degree in International Relations from Dublin City University.

Glenna Lynch, Mimosa Interiors
Glenna Lynch is a Stillorgan businesswoman, owner of Mimosa Interiors, with a strong interest in current affairs. She became known for questioning Seán Gallagher’s business ethics at a Frontline debate during last year’s presidential election, and has since been a contributor to various shows including Today with Pat Kenny, Tonight with Vincent Browne and Frontline.

Jim Power, Economist
Jim Power is a graduate of University College Dublin with a BA in Economics and Politics and a Master’s Degree in Economic Science. He has previously worked as the Chief Economist at Bank of Ireland Group and the Treasury Economist at AIB Group. Jim is a board member of Agri Aware and is Chairperson of Love Irish Food, an organisation working to help consumers make informed choices about buying Irish manufactured food and drinks. In the past he has served as a member of the Fáilte Ireland taskforce on a strategy for tourism. Jim lectures on Finance and Economics subjects at Dublin City University and at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin. He also writes a weekly column in the Irish Examiner and contributes to numerous other newspapers and magazines on an occasional basis.

Dr Jane Suiter, Lecturer, Researcher & Political Analyst
Dr Jane Suiter is a researcher, political analyst and lecturer in the Department of Government, University College Cork. Her research interests centre around political economy, or the interaction between economics and political science, participative democracy and citizen engagement. She has a particular interest in pork barrel politics and economic voting on a comparative European basis. Dr Suiter is co-founder of www.politicalreform.ie and also co-founder and academic adviser of We The Citizens, a pilot citizen assembly. She is the former project manager of the Irish National Election Study, and has also worked for a variety of media organisations including the Irish Times, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Independent, the Financial Times Group and AP Dow Jones. Dr Suiter is a graduate of University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, with a BA in Economics and Politics and a PhD in Political Economy.

Senator Jillian van Turnhout, Vice Chairperson of European Movement Ireland
Senator Van Turnhout is Vice Chairperson of European Movement Ireland and has been heavily involved in EU affairs for many years, most notably since her time as President of the National Youth Council of Ireland. She was a Member of the European Economic and Social Committee for twelve years, from 1998. From October 2006 to October 2008, Jillian was Vice President of the EESC. Her involvement in the EESC included: Social Affairs, External Relations and Communications. Jillian also represented the EESC on the Steering Group of the EU Forum on the Rights of the Child and the EU-China Round Table. Jillian also previously served as Chief Executive at Children’s Rights Alliance, Chief Commissioner at Irish Girl Guides and is currently a Board Member of Women for Election and Chair of Early Childhood Ireland.

Here’s some food for thought
LAND ACQUISITIONS
Iceland: http://www.grapevine.is/Features/ReadArticle/China-and-Iceland-Friends-With-Benefits

DAIRY DEVELOPMENT
New Zealand court halts Chinese dairy deal

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/03d0a622-57bf-11e1-ae89-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uDBrhqPW

New Zealand approves deal for Chinese to buy 16 dairy farms

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/04/23/pengxin-nz-crafar-farms.php

China grows its dairy farms with global cattle drive:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303863404577281302732745814.html

ENVIRONMENTAL RECORD
China’s environmental track record in Africa:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-09/africa-s-new-friend-china-finances-9-3-billion-of-hydropower.html

HUMAN RIGHTS
China’s human rights violations:

http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/china

PRESS FREEDOM
Al Jazeera’s Beijing bureau closed

http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/al-jazeera-beijing-china-bureau-closed-melissa-chan-visa-refused/s2/a549116/

Before we get into bed with the Chinese shouldn’t we be asking about the potential risks?

What do you think?

STORIES FROM MY GRANDMOTHER
By MARGARET E. WARD (note: spelling incorrect in Irish Times archive)
1482 Words
29 October 1996
Irish Times

GRANDMA was a jailbird. The confirmation of this fact, a few months ago, was strangely comical and I laughed nervously as I read the document in my hand that confirmed it: “Prisoner Index No. 13286, O’Toole, Maggie, Tomduff, Borris, Carlow”.

Still doubtful, I checked the Kilmainham Gaol register and found an inquiry after her from March 26th, 1923. This was apparently one of many letters written by her mother, my great grandmother, Mary Anne Murphy O’Toole, in a campaign to have her 14 year old eldest child released from prison.

Hold on a minute. How could this girl possibly have grown to become my 88 year old grandmother, who lives in the US and whose greatest past offence, in my mind, was providing me with forbidden butterscotch or mint sweets?

This sense of confusion began the moment I stepped off the plane in June 1995, armed with 50 or more hours of interviews with my grandmother and a deep curiosity about my parents’ and grandparents’ emigration to New York. Although I’d travelled to Ireland over a dozen times as a child, this time I was here as an adult to write my grandmother’s life story and I was deeply sceptical as to the accuracy of the interviews.

There was no doubt she was a captivating storyteller, but journalists and biographers usually find that many stories are false; merely a combination of gossip, half truths and misinformation. My numerous discoveries over the past 16 months concerning Margaret O’Toole Rice, the woman for whom I was named, have made me put aside my scepticism and reassess my attitude towards the truth in ordinary lives.

While I was growing up in New York, I’d heard grandma tell her story about running dispatches during the Civil War but I thought it was just that: a story. She lived on the third floor of our house in Long Island and although I was frightened by anyone without teeth, a decidedly American obsession, I found a solution to the problem in order to hear her tales. After dinner each night, I ran up the stairs shouting: “Grandma, put your teeth in, I’m coming up.”

There she sat, as if she’d never moved from the day before, in her armchair crocheting an afghan for one relative or another. I’d pick up one of the brightly coloured balls of yarn from her basket, sit on the floor next to her and ask her a question: “Who is this afghan for, grandma?” or say “Tell me again what it was like in prison”, knowing full well that it would release another tale of that strange country where my parents were born.

According to my grandmother: “In Kilmainham, I got this itch, some sort of rash between your hands. I was the only one who got it, because I was younger, or whatever. I had to be isolated from the others, getting soaks and baths, and you had to scrub yourself and it used to bleed. I was about three weeks on it, and that’s all on my own. I got to choose my own cell, because they were idle. I chose the one where Count Plunkett and his daughter in law were. The moon shone in and you could see Mary painted on the wall, with the light from the outside shining on it.”

Once I absorbed her words, I decided to reenact her experience there, even though I was twice her imprisonment age. Last spring, I stood alone in that freezing cold cell and imagined the stern faced Maggie O’Toole praying, as she would, to the religious mural on the wall, with only a candle for warmth and light. The sense of desperation and loneliness I felt in five minutes was overwhelming and my toes were so frozen I thought they’d snap off if I took even one step. I quickly moved to the comfort of a warm room off the cell, to re-read her interviews concerning Kilmainham, making my attempt at reliving the past even more pathetic.

Despite the warmth of my grandmother’s voice when she spoke, there was an “Are you listening to me girl, because this is important” urgency in the telling. I admit that sometimes I wasn’t listening but instead floating on the melodious intonations of her voice and the very roll of the words from her Irish tongue. When the crochet needles fell silent, I knew I was being reeled back in for the climax of the story. Looking up, I’d see my grandmother’s dour stare give way to her greatly mischievous laugh and a nod of acknowledgement before she fashioned the grand finale.

According to my grandmother, this gift for dramatic storytelling was inherited from my great grandmother, Mary Ann O’Toole. “My mother could read books, and she could sit there and tell you from A to Z. After my father died, her oldest brother used to come up with the horses for a couple of days to help us put in the crops, and she’d start telling stories, and the stories that she read, like Cusped Hands and Lady Isabel and all that. Well, she’d stare at that book, and we used to be so quiet because we couldn’t stir, we couldn’t make a stir while she was telling the story.”

In 1908, the year my grandmother was born, this same Mary Anne O’Toole obtained the Scottish Widows’ Fund Calendar and Diary 1908 and started recording important family events within its pages. This index finger long and two thumbs wide book was lovingly maintained by my grandmother’s late sister, Katherine, and was loaned to me recently by her daughter, Betty Ryan Costin of Kilcock, Co Kildare. One of the first entries says: “The first child was born August 20, 1907 an [sic] died a son. The second child was born 2nd August 1908 a daughter baptised by Father John Beechman p. priest of Rathanna the 9th day of August 1908, sponsor Micheal Murphy DMP and Margret Doran of Sisken an called the child Margret.”

Over a year after my grandmother was released from prison, Mary Ann wrote one of her last entries in that tiny book: “Maggie O’Toole left Tomduff 13 day October 1924 for London” then finally, “stopt their till 3 Nov an sailed to New York in 1926 wrote by her mother Mary An Toole”.

Little did she know that Maggie would return to Ireland in 1932 married, against her mother’s wishes, to a man from the parish in Rathanna named Arthur Rice and holding the first of an eventual total of seven children. Although Arthur was the youngest son, he had inherited their new home, Rice’s of Ballinvalley, from his mother. Unfortunately, Arthur maintained his rambling ways and, although my grandmother continued to love him, things were very difficult for her working the farm with the children.

By 1959, with Arthur gone for good, she followed her grown children to the US: “We did auction and when I left the road gate the morning we were moving out I thought my heart would break and oh Lord, I cried and cried all the ways to the train. And when I look at that now I say God knew so well that it was hard at that time like everything was. God directed me. But it was hard, and I loved every grain, every blade of grass that grew on that farm.”

Ballinvalley, the farm my grandmother loves so well, was never sold and is now being refurbished by the family. Today, at 88 my grandmother has outlived her husband, her siblings, three of her seven children (including my mother) and most of the people she was imprisoned with in Kilmainham. She stopped crocheting the afghans and working her full time job as a nurse only a few years ago. In August, her physical health collapsed and now she lies semi comatose in a hospital bed in Andover, Massachusetts just a few minutes away from her only son Thomas and his family.

Although I have a lifetime of listening to her stories and I’ve been researching them for the past year and a half, I find that it is only when the people we love are silenced that we really begin to listen. A few years back, Grandma told me she learned how to crochet from her mother but perfected the craft in Kilmainham Gaol as a way to pass the time while telling stories. I still have the little pink, white and blue baby blanket she gave my mother before I was born. If I ever have a daughter, I wonder how many stories that blanket will whisper to her as she sleeps?

When the noise of the financial crisis dies down we might be left asking ourselves some very important questions: what are banks for? Are they fit for purpose in our society? Are they doing what they’re meant to be doing? If not, what do we – as a society – need to do about it?

The European Union says

"Banks provide vital services to citizens, businesses, and the economy at large (such as deposittaking, lending, and the operation of payment systems). These institutions operate largely based
on trust, and can quickly become unviable if their customers and counterparties lose confidence
in their ability to meet their obligations. Because of the vital role played by banks, and in the
absence of effective resolution regimes, authorities have often had to put up taxpayers' money to
restore trust and avoid a domino effect of failing banks from seriously damaging the real
economy." http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/bank/docs/crisis-management/discussion_paper_bail_in_en.pdf

An excellent examination of banks purpose in “Promises that proved ultimately empty” it in Financial Times article by John Gapper on Jan 9, 2012 here:  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35f6c704-3ab8-11e1-a756-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1qsOM1qcf

They climb the market and scrape their pocket
The Armani suits have got a tear
They waltz on their way to bank guarantees
And whistle at the Central Bank’s gold-plated lair
And underneath their wallet
They have betting slips on their mare
I even heard them singing in the Galway tent

He’s always avoiding punishment
But his PR-trained penitence is real
He’s always late for everything
Except for every salary fattened meal
I hate to have to say it
But I very firmly feel
Bust banks are not an asset to the country

I’d like to say a word on their behalf
Fat cat bankers – and their arrogance – make me laugh

How do you solve a problem like a bust banking system?
How do you catch property market speculators and pin them down?
How do you find a word that means the nation’s bankrupters?
A vampire squid! Ignorant politicians! A frown!

Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them
Many a thing they ought to understand
But how do you make Irish bankers stay
And listen to all you say
How do you keep their solicitor’s hourly fees under a grand

Oh, how do you solve a problem like unrepentant bankers?
How do you hold an old Irish punt in your hand?

When I’m with them I’m confused
Out of focus and bemused
And I never know exactly where I am
Unpredictable as an EU politician
They’re as flighty as a Ryanair technician
He’s an amadon! He’s a dunderhead! He’s probably a resident of D4!

They’d outpester any pest
Drive a Sarkozy from its nest
He could throw a whirling Merkel out of whirl
He is garrolous! He is wildly optimistic!
His strategy’s a financial riddle! He’s a hard one to abide!
He’s a tax-avoider! He’s the IMF’s worst curse!
He’s  really just a big girl’s blouse!

How do you solve a problem like unrepentant bankers?
How do you catch a piece of slime and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means bust bankers?
An ignoramus! A risk-o’-the markets! A clown!

Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them
Many a thing they ought to understand
But how do you make Irish “bust bank” execs stay
And listen to all you say
How do you keep their solicitor’s hourly fees under a grand

Oh, how do you solve a problem like frozen credit?
How do you hold an economy’s lifeblood in your hand?

Is Brian Cowen one of the 10 best leaders in the world?

A special PrimeTime programme asks where does Ireland go now.