Sunday Independent - 17 December 2023

Taxing issue of JP's gifts: Billionaires play by different rules to the rest of us. Their displays of generosity keep us off their backs

"If you suspect that tax is a rigged game, a con, designed to fleece the little guy, you are about to find out how shockingly true that is..."

Taxtopia, The Rebel Accountant

A PR industry has sprung up around billionaires (they make up 0.001 per cent of the world's population) that casts them as humanitarians and heroes. It is important not to rub the little people's noses in it too much. So, you donate a children's hospital wing or support a popular sports star or team and in this way become a national treasure. Except with the bloody lefties and those people before profit commies.

The PR coaxes us not to criticise but to applaud the winners. We are begrudgers if we criticise. We are made to feel spiteful and ungrateful. Why can't you just celebrate the success of these winners? Why are you jealous if their private jets and yachts and helicopters? What the hell is wrong with you?

So, when PBP councillor Madeleine Johansson tweeted "Just pay your f**king taxes," Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea angrily countered, "JP voluntarily donates millions of his own money to good causes. Let's leave the envy to one side and celebrate what's being done."

Or as my good friend Tomás Ó Sé tweeted in 2018 when JP donated €3.2m to the GAA, "Is it an Irish thing or what but the negativity aimed at JP McManus for the gesture he gifted on every GAA club in the country is wrong. He didn't have to do it and does so much no one sees or hears. We should be grateful and let the haters hate!! Míle Buíochas JP."

In this world, billionaires know best how to spend their money. Governments are wasters. Charity, not paying taxes, is the true solution to inequality. The new way of saving the world is private, voluntary and accountable to no one.

Let us imagine for a moment that every citizen of Ireland could register in a tax haven for a nominal fee, say €20. Or that every citizen could simply opt out of paying tax. They could, instead, at their sole discretion, make donations to good causes. It is certain that the vast majority of people would opt out. Within months, without tax receipts, Irish society would collapse. No money for teachers or police officers or bus drivers or schools or hospitals or vital infrastructure. So my question is this: Why should tax be optional for billionaires but not for nurses?

Here is the compromise: Leave us billionaires alone and we will look after you when our winnings are win. We will spend it much more wisely than any government. In this compromise, generosity is a substitute for a fairer and more equal system of living. The winners do not have to make any sacrifices. They do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. They are great men and we should be thankful that they sprinkle us with some of the profits of their greatness every now and again. And it works. Their public displays of generosity are enough to keep us off their backs and preserve the status quo.

The trick is to donate in a way that is eye catching and pulls at the heart strings. What better way to achieve it than through a beloved community organisation? This provides moral cover. It feels good. And it does good. As Trump might say, "it really does."

But it is a pleasant fantasy. It means that the billionaire does not have to interact with the messy reality. It avoids the duty of citizenship. It is a dystopian world where the rich and powerful get to decide what is best for the world. And what is best for the world is what is best for them.

But if you are an Irishman, if you have respect and empathy for the people of Ireland, you should pay your taxes here. You should be pulling your weight with the nurses and teachers and firemen. Not counting the days to make sure you don't go over your 182-day residency limit.

John Patrick McManus, pay your taxes here.

One of the podcasts I enjoy the most is The Free State podcast. The normal structure is a discussion between Dion Fanning, a journalist with The Currency, and Joe Brolly, a barrister as well as a former Gaelic football All Star and current GAA pundit.

The quality can vary depending on the topic but as this review attests, the political discourse is where it comes into its own.

Where these two presenters add real value, for this listener, is when they get stuck into politics: class politics, Northern politics, political punditry, and when Brolly in particular brings his personal context to the conversation. He and Fanning air their differences, and it’s smart and heartfelt and fascinating listening. They up the ante to the point of real difference, and still they keep talking. Nobody cancels anybody else, nobody walks out, nobody stoops to insult or opprobrium. That’s the kind of conversation I can pull up a stool for.

"Free State With Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning aims at too many easy targets" - Laura McCann (The Irish Times)

Joe Brolly does have an axe to grind with RTÉ as he used to work as a pundit with them for 20 years before his contract was not renewed in 2020. He has expressed he felt badly treated at the end of his time there.

With that said, the last 2 episodes, which have focused on the ongoing crisis in RTÉ, have been excellent.

RTÉ The Musical - Part 1

RTÉ The Musical - Part 2

Joe's experience as a barrister allows him explain the gravity of the situation that RTÉ finds itself.

One of the topics he narrowed his focus on was the influence of the agent Noel Kelly. I don't think I had heard of him before but when I visited NK Management website I was surprised by the amount of people he represented who have shows on Irish radio and television. Brolly speculated on just how large an influence Kelly had on the programming decisions in RTÉ and it looks to be not insignificant.

I enjoyed his disdain for the RTÉ executives and their appearances before the Oireachteas committees over the past few weeks. It's a valuable lesson that sometimes the people given the jobs with a lot of responsibilities and correspondingly high salaries are sometimes not deserving of those positions.

We learned this lesson before. Fanning brought up this quote from a Michael Lewis story on the Irish banking collapse in 2008.

In McCarthy’s view, the dominant narrative inside the head of the average Irish citizen—and his receptiveness to the story Kelly was telling—changed at roughly 10 o’clock in the evening on October 2, 2008. On that night, Ireland’s financial regulator, a lifelong Central Bank bureaucrat in his 60s named Patrick Neary, came live on national television to be interviewed. The interviewer sounded as if he had just finished reading the collected works of Morgan Kelly. Neary, for his part, looked as if he had been dragged from a hole into which he badly wanted to return. He wore an insecure little mustache, stammered rote answers to questions he had not been asked, and ignored the ones he had been asked. A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith. Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

"When Irish Eyes Are Crying" - Michael Lewis (Vanity Fair)

This crisis is far from over. There will be more revelations in the coming weeks and months as auditors comb through the accounts of the national broadcaster.

This is also an opportunity. It's an opportunity to display accountability. The people responsible should lose their jobs. If they have broken the law, they should be prosecuted. Justice should be pursued. I've heard too much talk of punishment and cuts. Some people want to see RTÉ tarred and feathered and made to do the walk of shame. I want to see change.

It is also an opportunity for the Irish citizens to define what they want from public service broadcasting. What does it look like in the age of the internet? How should it be funded? Should commercial advertising play some part? Should there be a ceiling for pay? Should the ceiling rise with inflation? Who sets it? What measures should be put in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again?

There are so many possibilities. I hope this moment isn't squandered.