O’Conall Street

We have a great bumper sticker in the office with the slogan above. It captures the democratic hankering for  change and a return to progressive politics in the United States.

Bill Clinton came and conquered in Colorado yesterday. Tonight is the main course, Obama to 80,000. His biggest challenge will be to get substance into his oratory.

The democratic darling and high king of Irish America came to Denver, Colorado on Monday to deliver what will probably be his last ever speech to a convention.

He came to pledge his presence on the Senate floor in January to welcome President Obama, but his real message was of party unity. Should Obama - Biden win through the VP will become the highest ranking Irish American in recent years. Nobody will ever replace Teddy Kennedy though.  I leave O’Conall street to this true Irish American hero….

Sen Joe Biden a catholic from Delaware, born in Pennsylvania and strong on foreign policy is Barack Obama’s running mate in November. The text went out as promised at about 3am EST but CNN got the scoop (see below).  It is very difficult to beat the fourth estate to a big announcement.

Without even knowing we were in the running, O’Conall Street has made Iain Dale’s top ten Northern Ireland blogs.

Thank you to everyone who voted for the street!

The question of whether the Northern Irish soccer squad should change their anthem from God Save the Queen has reignited after the team’s fans were booed during last weekend’s  this weeks friendly in Glasgow. One UUP MLA, Basil McCrea, has called today for a debate on the issue.

At so many levels one would think the case for a local anthem is a no brainer. The IFA has spent the past five years genuinely trying to grow participation and support from across the community. Significant steps have been taken to remove single identity flags and songs from the terraces. Good work and deserving of support.

The anthem has always been the elephant in the room. It needs to go if the NI squad genuinely wish to attract support from the nationalist community. We live in a place with one of the richest musical heritages in the world. Finding an existing song, or creating a new one like the IRFU did, should be a relatively easy thing to do if the will exists to move on.

My text from Barack Obama on his chosen running mate will arrive later. From the very first day his campaign has been revolutionising political communications. It’s cutting edge stuff built around an advocacy model and has to date allowed the voice of the many to compete with the vested interest of the few. That is something in a country where no money means no voice for candidates for public office. 

The Construction and Property Group which has been established to represent builders, developers, suppliers and those involved in the provision of professional services to the building industry is having a mass meeting in Cookstown tonight.  Over 300 people are expected to attend.

The scale of the crisis facing our construction sector cannot be underestimated. 1500 jobs have already gone and there are rumours of many more. None of these record the many thousands of self employed trades people who are also out of work.

Also concerning is the debt owed to banks by the development community. The financial institutions backed the purchase of development land at very high prices over the past decade.  The builders cannot now build out this land because the market has now fallen below the level at which it is financially possible to do so. This is why the banks and many in the development community are doing a lot of soul searching about how to get the market moving again. If this was an old fashioned western movie, we would be looking at the scene where everyone is pointing a loaded gun at each other. In simple terms the banks and the developers can be guaranteed mutually assured destruction if they don’t find a way out of this problem.  

20,000 new houses are needed here every year. The big developers have already down millions. Many will spend the next decade trying to claw back the losses they have made in the past twelve months and some may go out of business. There is the possibility a bank may also hit the buffers.

But that is not the real issue.

If liquidity is not restored into the market and building restarts then the outlook for our regional economy is bleak.

The utilities and emergency services have so far kept themselves afloat in communications terms. The crisis media relations strategies were clearly activated and the public infomation plans appear to have worked.

Having a well rehearsed crisis communications plan is critically important for public services and utilities. These bodies are in the front line at times of crisis and are judged primarily on their operational communications during the incident.

From a reputational point of views things are very different for government. Ministers need to be both on top of the crisis and capable of responding to the aftermath in a way that reassures tax payers that something is being done to mitigate the chances of history repeating itself.

In that regard the response to date of government North and South is quite different.

North of the Border the ministers for the Environment and Regional Development rolled up their sleeves and got stuck into the immediate handling of the crisis. However, in an interview yesterday Sammy Wilson avoided any discussion about the wider environmental causes of this unseasonal weather and defended his belief that climate change is not being accelerated by human actions. It was not clear at all whether he believed there were any lessons to be learned from an environmental policy point of view.

In contrast, John Gormley, the southern environment minister said he will be bringing forward publication of a climate change adaptation strategy. According to the Irish Times he said the severity of the weather and flooding of recent weeks had underlined the urgency of having the strategy in place as soon as possible.

“We are going to see more flash flooding and more storms. We need to plan accordingly,” he told The Irish Times.

“There will be a 20 per cent increase in precipitation in the future. There will be increases in wind speed and more storms. When it does rain it will be more heavily.”

Officials at the Department of the Environment have been working on the strategy since late last year. It will set out responses to the more severe and extreme weather patterns expected to occur in the future and their impact on drainage systems, flood plains and coastal defences.

The strategy will also propose substantial changes in forestry and agriculture practices.

Mr Gormley said climatic changes would involve droughts during the summer months. The torrential rainfall during August seemed to suggest the contrary but the evidence was also pointing to severe water shortages in future. Water conservation would become a major issue.

The survival of some species of deciduous tree native to Ireland could also be threatened, he said.

Mr Gormley also said he would publish new planning guidelines “within weeks” specifically designed to prevent flooding.

“Any future significant development will have to carry out a flood-risk assessment as part of the planning process. The guidelines will also oblige county and local development plans to include full flood-risk assessments. “It essentially means the end of any major construction on flood plains.”

Will the Executive bring forward a similar plan? Only time will tell.

One thing for sure, Mr Wilson is in the minority believing all this has nothing to do with man.

Mr Usain Bolt was in full flood yesterday, running his way into the history books with a smile and a swagger.

The sandbags were out in Fairview and the floodlights were on in Croke Park. The torrential rain washed away Dublin’s hopes of all Ireland glory and Tyrone delivered one of their finest performances ever to put themselves right in contention for the Sam Maguire. There is no substituting the hunger for success players like Brian Dooher are still able to display. Dublin take note. Time for a little less swagger and a bit more work lads.

Ronnie Drew died too. A Dubliner by name and by trade gone but not forever from our fair city. Video below Irish music’s own tribute to him a couple of years ago.

The drive home through the floods was an appropriate end to the day. Today will be clean up, or at least until it starts raining again and after that the questions will start. Northern Ireland Water, the Roads Service, the Rivers Agency and their political masters in the Executive will be under fire from tomorrow. To date there has been no interest in recalling the Assembly early to discuss the economic crisis. It will be interesting to see if that changes as the waters rise around our public representatives.

I remember the day of the Omagh bomb like it was yesterday. I was the SDLP’s Director of Communications and Seamus Mallon was Shadow Deputy First Minister for just over a month. It had been a long summer. Drumcree was bad and the 12th of July in Belfast had been tense.

We took a last minute opportunity to go on a bargain basement fortnight to Tenerife to escape northern politics. It was one of those get yourself to Manchester for a middle of the night flights out. Fine when you are leaving but pretty awful on the way home. We got back to Belfast at about 9.00am on Saturday 15th August 1998. I was still asleep when my wife answered the phone just after 3.00pm. It was a BBC journalist in London asking had I got someone to react to a bomb in Omagh. He was panicked and wanted to speak with me immediately. When he told her there were seven dead she shouted into the bedroom. A minute later it was a local journalist saying reports were of ten dead but nothing was confirmed because the lines were down in Omagh. I was practiced in this type of media relations. A couple of years as SDLP press officer had served up more than enough shootings and other incidents, but this was on an altogether different scale. This was back to the dark days. Days I had hoped I would never see. Hard to believe we were organising concerts for a YES vote in the Referendum for the Good Friday Agreement with U2 just three months earlier.

I phoned John Hume, Seamus Mallon and the local MLA at the time  - Joe Byrne. Mallon, now in an office of state, had already received a call from officials and was getting ready to travel. He would be in Omagh by 5.00pm.

Seamus is one of the most literate men I know. He is a master of the English language and that afternoon, the sun beating down as he drove from Markethill, Co Armagh, he would have been preparing himself, choosing his words carefully, conscious that whatever he said would be broadcast far and wide as the words of the hopeful future for Northern Ireland delivered against the backdrop of a scene so reminiscent of its tragic past.

When Seamus emerged from the bomb site and stood to face the assembled media his first words were about a pram. He told the press he had seen a mangled pram in the wreckage of the road. He wondered about the little child being carried in it and the mother who was pushing it. To this day I don’t know the answer to his rhetorical question. Among the children that died that day were two little girls, Maura Monaghan (18 months) alongside her mum, Averil and her Mother, Mary and Brenda Devine (20 months). I must assume the pram belonged to one of them.

I have met the Omagh relatives on a number of occasions. They are a brave group. Despite the events of 1998 most remain deeply committed to the peace process and a new beginning for this island. Today they must feel betrayed and rejected by the hope of Good Friday 1998. They must also feel angry that a new beginning to policing has not brought justice to Omagh.

Sean Hoey walked free from court last December. 59 charges against him struck out. The police case fell apart like a house of cards. Low copy DNA has been discredited and ten years after the largest single atrocity on this island we are further from justice than ever.

I just wanted to note that fact on this tenth anniversary.

May they all be remembered.

In the concluding Irish Times article by senior Irish business figures on the best way out of the current economic blip, Denis O’Brien makes the case for greater state intervention in the housing market.

Calling for the expansion of the role of the Housing Finance Agency, Mr O’Brien says:

“The significant positive is that government debt is only 25 per cent of GDP. Therefore, the State has a huge capacity to play a most important role. I would advocate expanding the role of the Housing Finance Agency (HFA) and this could be overseen by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). The HFA could be expanded and its criteria for funding home ownership dramatically changed. Effectively, right now, a bank looking to make a mortgage would want a margin of up to 250 basis points over Euribor (three months/4.9 per cent) to make a home loan. [Euribor, the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, is the rate at which euro interbank term deposits within the euro zone are offered by one prime bank to another prime.]

The HFA can raise money at a tenth of this margin. By reducing the cost of mortgages, then a lot of unsold housing stock becomes a lot more affordable to first-time buyers.

By reducing the cost of mortgages to circa 5 per cent to first-time buyers, this would, in turn, provide liquidity for developers and things would begin to move again, (albeit more slowly). It would also have a big impact on trade-up homes. It must be realised that the housing market is one market and that trading up and down are as important to the liquidity of the sector as the first-time buyer.

The crunch now is that with loan-to-value ratios retreating to 70 per cent, stamp duty will have to be overhauled as buyers have to fund more equity.”

An interesting suggestion from a man who would be perceived by many as an advocate of small government and free market economics. The rest of his piece is well worth a read.