1% Halloween Treasure Hunt Down Shrewsbury Road
One of the most novel political protests of recent years took place in Dublin on Saturday last [October 30]. More than fifty people joined the ‘1% Halloween Treasure Hunt’ as it assembled at 6:30pm outside of the headquarters of Allied Irish Banks in the heartland of the golden circle in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
Many of the participants had entered into the Halloween spirit by dressing up as ‘vampire capitalists’, ‘ghost estates’ and ‘zombie bankers’. Like the successful ‘political walking tour’ of October 9 Saturday’s protest stopped at a number of locations that are relevant to the telling of the story of Ireland’s economic elite – the 1%. Amongst the stops were the homes of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country.
Having moved past the British Embassy on Merrion Road the protest turned right onto Shrewsbury Road, the most exclusive street in Ireland, where individual houses have sold for in excess of €50 million. Any form of political protest on Shrewsbury Road is highly unusual, but for that protest to be made up of vampires and zombies under Special Branch surveillance must surely be without precedent.
The first stop on Shrewsbury Road was outside of numbers four, six and eight which are owned by Paul Coulson, Derek Quinlan and Dermot Gleeson respectively. Coulson made a fortune with the controversial sale of the Irish Glass bottling site in the Dublin docklands for a staggering €400 million. Quinlan, one of the Celtic Tiger property developers, is believed to owe more than €600 million to NAMA. Gleeson, a former attorney general, was at the helm of Allied Irish Banks for the five years leading up to the collapse of that bank in 2008.
Outside of this trio of houses the tour guide for the night, Andrew Flood of the Workers Solidarity Movement, gave a detailed account of the various and often interlinked business dealings of Coulson, Quinlan and Gleeson. Before moving onto the next stop Gleeson was left a Halloween ‘trick’ – a mock up bank bailout invoice for €6.5 billion – the minimum amount of tax payer’s money that the Dublin government is currently pumping into AIB.
The next stop, number 21 Shrewsbury Road, was the Dublin home of tax dodger Denis O’Brien who is estimated to have a personal fortune of more than €2 billion. His business portfolio extends from the media to energy and from telecommunications to transport. Although O’Brien is nominally resident in Malta as a ‘tax exile’, this does not prevent him from regularly lecturing the people of Ireland on how they should conduct their affairs.
Unfortunately O’Brien was not at home. Two burly self-proclaimed ‘gardeners’ were, however, on hand to make sure that nobody stepped foot in the garden. This meant that O’Brien’s Halloween ‘treat’, a mock up of a Revenue Commissioners bill for tax owed, didn’t quite make it to the letter-box of the mansion.
The last stop on the Halloween Treasure Hunt was the home of property developer Bernard McNamara on Ailesbury Road. McNamara, a former Fianna Fáil councillor, made headlines in 2008 when he unilaterally pulled out of a ‘public private partnership’ deal that he had negotiated with Dublin City Council. As a consequence of his leeching on that agreement the regeneration projects for five Dublin housing complexes including St Michaels Estate, O’Devaney Gardens and Dominick Street all collapsed. As a result of this one man’s greed hundreds of families have been forced to endure years more of living in substandard housing.
Outside of McNamara’s house cathaoirleach Éirígí Brian Leeson brought the protest to a close by thanking people for attending and promising further protests between now and the budget in December. The final act of the night saw a box representing the broken hopes and dreams of the communities of St Michaels Estate, O’Devaney Gardens and Dominick Street left at the gates of McNamara’s massive residence.
Speaking after the event Brian Leeson said, “Although tonight’s protest had a humorous theme to it, the issues behind it are deadly serious. The Twenty-Six County government are on the cusp on introducing a blood budget which will result in widespread hardship and suffering. Over the course of the next three years they intend to hollow out all aspects of public services, with the long term intention of creating predominantly private health and education systems.
“It is no exaggeration to state that these budget cutbacks will result in hundreds, if not thousands of avoidable deaths, as the healthcare system is starved of resources and ever increasing numbers of people turn to substance abuse and suicide to escape the economic and social mess that that neo-liberalism has visited on this state.
“The Dublin government are justifying their cutbacks on the basis that they have no choice, as if the wealth of the Celtic Tiger has magically disappeared. Anyone at the protest tonight could see with their own eyes that Ireland’s very own oligarchs are still living the high life in Dublin 4. The challenge now is to get more and more people across the country to start questioning why there is so much wealth inequality in Ireland. The 1 percent who own 34 percent of the wealth of this state have everything to fear once large numbers of people start questioning the status quo. Because they know that not far behind those questions will come the answers.”