The independent TD Noel Grealish has recently developed a passionate interest in ‘spongers’, the international movement of capital and the chronic state of housing, education and healthcare in rural Ireland. More worryingly he also seems to be developing an obsession with finding links between these issues and African immigrants to Ireland.
Grealish doesn’t have to go to Lagos to find a sponger, or someone who conspired to move tens of billions of euros out or Ireland, or someone who is responsible for our failing public services. He need only look in the mirror.
Most of us have a common understanding of what the word ‘sponger’ means. It would include someone who uses deceit to get their hands on public money or someone who accepts payment for a job but fails to carry it out. Someone like Noel Grealish.
We, the taxpayers of Ireland not just the constituents of Galway West, pay Noel Grealish to perform the function of a legislator in Leinster House. He is paid by us to participate in debates and vote on legislation. That’s his job.
But the records show that Grealish has the fourth worst voting record in Leinster House. Between March 2016 and July 2019, Grealish did not participate in a single vote on 45% of the 145 voting days that he was allegedly in Leinster House. Only Enda Kenny and the Healy-Rae’s have a worse voting record than Grealish.
Grealish claimed €87,000 in expenses for travelling to Leinster House, but didn’t participate in a single vote on almost half the days he was in the building. (Table courtesy of RTE)
TDs ‘sign-in’ to Leinster House using an electronic fob which can be activated by whoever is in possession of the fob. There are no other checks to establish whether a TD is actually in Leinster House.
It is the act of signing in, not voting, that allows Grealish to claim the extremely generous, non-audited Travel and Accommodation Allowance (TAA). Between March 2016 and December 2018, Grealish claimed a staggering €87,000 in TAA.
And it doesn’t stop there. Over the same period Grealish took €272,000 in wages and claimed €57,892 under the Public Representation Allowance. In 2018 alone Grealish also claimed €10,037 for the very vague purpose of ‘policy formation’.
In the 34 month period up to December 2018, Grealish took a minimum of €417,000 in public money while not bothering to turn up for half the parliamentary votes that took place in a building he was allegedly in.
Over the course of his seventeen years as a TD, Noel Grealish has received several million euro in public monies. Sponger doesn’t come close.
But even those millions pale in comparison to the figure of €3.5 billion that Grealish quoted in Leinster House this week as the alleged figure for Nigerian remittances from Ireland. This was no innocent question as some have claimed.
Grealish knew fine well that the actual figure for the eight year period in question was closer to €136 million, or just 3.9% of the ‘astronomical’ figure of €3.5 billion he quoted in Leinster House.
Grealish deliberately ignored the data that had been supplied to him by Irish Central Statistics Office in recent weeks and instead chose to use calculations that had been made by the Nigerian authorities and the IMF - calculations that he knew were highly inaccurate.
Grealish knew because our own Central Statistics Office has supplied him with the correct information several weeks ago. But he chose to run with the totally inaccurate higher figure to cause maximum impact, to feed into a narrative that the entire Nigerian community is in some way criminal.
The irony of Grealish choosing to use figures that had been calculated by the Nigerian authorities and the World Bank over figures that had been calculated by the CSO was lost on nobody.
While Noel Grealish has used the platform of Leinster House to promote fake figures about capital flowing from Ireland to Nigeria, he has nothing to say about the actual flow of tens of billions of euros out of the country - a flow that he helped to create.
Before he became an independent TD, Noel Grealish was the leader of the Progressive Democrats. Before that he was a Progressive Democrats TD and before that again he was a Councillor for that party as far back as 1999.
For younger readers, the PD’s were formed in 1985 in a split from Fianna Fail. Their core economic policies were neo-liberal in the extreme, aiming to out-do Thatcher at Thatcherism. Privatisation, de-regulation of finances and low corporation taxes were all part of the core PD ideology.
Noel Grealish and PD colleagues in 2002, before entering coalition with Fianna Fail in a government that laid the foundations for the economic crash of 2008.
The decision to cut corporation tax from 32% to just 12.5% was taken by a PD / Fianna Fail coalition, a decision which has allowed some of the largest corporations in the world to ‘wash’ hundreds of billions of euros through the state at a nominal rate of €12.5%. In reality, many of these companies are paying an effective rate of tax closer to 3%.
The Apple case that is currently before the European Courts relates to tax that should have been paid from 1991 onward - a period during which Grealish was a PD Councillor and government TD. And Apple is just one of hundreds of companies that have similarly benefited from the policies that Grealish helped implement.
The Irish Financial Services Centre was another monstrosity borne of the ideology that drove the PD’s. Over the years that the PD’s were in power the IFSC was well on its way to becoming the largest tax haven in the world which it is today.
By 2015 the IFSC was estimated to have €3,200,000,000,000 (€3.2tn) in funds under administration. The flows of capital between Ireland and other tax havens runs into the hundreds of billions - far in excess of the fantasy figures that Grealish quoted in Leinster House. This is real money that should be used for housing, education, healthcare and other public services in Ireland and other countries.
For a man with such a keen interest in the flows of global capital, Grealish is strangely silent on the flows of TRILLIONS, not billions ,of hot euros that he helped to create during his time in the PD’s and today as a Fine Gael proxy.
The IFSC is regarded by academics as the largest tax have in the world.
Back in September Grealish spoke about how Oughterard would be unable to cope with a large influx of asylum seekers. This narrative, which many others shared, highlights the chronic shortage of housing and the fact that our healthcare, education and other public services are unable to cope with the demands that are being made upon them.
It’s reasonable for a local community to ask what impact a significant increase in the local population might have on local public services. But not Grealish.
The party he once led bears more responsibility than any other for many of the problems that face our society today. It was the Progressive Democrats that relentlessly pushed the ideology of deregulation of the banking and construction sectors, laying the foundations for the Celtic Tiger property bubble and the catastrophic crash that followed.
The ideology that Grealish and his old party championed still guides Fine Gael today, preventing them taking the steps that need to be taken to end the housing crisis. It is Grealish’s ideology, not asylum seekers or immigrants, that have caused the housing crisis. It alone is preventing the state from taking on the private landlords and building tens of thousands of homes that the Irish people need.
Mary Harney, Bobby Molloy and Noel Grealish helped introduce and embed neo-liberalism into the heart of the Twenty-Six County political establishment.
The party leader that preceded Grealish famously stated that she believed in politics that were more ‘Boston than Berlin’. As Minister for Health Mary Harney sought to create a US-style privatise health system.
The two-tier dysfunctional health system that exists today is largely a legacy of Harney, Bobby Molloy, Grealish and the other Progressive Democrats. Collectively they have the blood of thousands of Irish citizens on their hands.
Ireland has a long tradition of Gombeen politicians who flog the ideology of the day while furiously lining their own pockets. In the 80s and 90s Noel Grealish jumped on the Thatcherite bandwagon that was then sweeping the world. Today he’s jumping on the Trump bandwagon, knowingly using false information to stoke up fear and target a minority community.
Like every Gombeen that went before him, Grealish is as cute as an old fox. He has spent decades attempting to manipulate his own community, presenting himself as their only champion and for that he’s being targeted by the Dublin media and the political establishment.
Grealish is no victim. He’s a conman and a bully that cares for nothing but his own interests. His old ideology brought nothing but exploitation, inequality and hardship to the people of Ireland. The politics he is now experimenting with is potentially far more dangerous.
Regardless of the message Grealish is selling, one thing hasn’t changed - the steady flow of astronomical amounts of public money into his private bank account.