The bombs of freedom
The Irish Ferries story and Microsoft's tax breaks in Ireland show that capitalism still reigns.
As a double whammy against media freedom, it could hardly be bettered. First the President of the United States privately threatens to bomb Al-Jazeera – or he jokes about it, the spinners tell us, though America's deadly record against the media in Kabul, Baghdad and Belgrade suggests this is no laughing matter.
Then the London whistleblowers who try to make the private comments public are prosecuted under Britain's Official Secrets Act, and publications are officially warned they'll face the same treatment if they publish the story.
If you're bracing yourself for a rumbling firestorm of condemnation from Ireland's self-appointed tribunes of liberty, you can relax now. We've heard barely a blip. Our tribunes have been busy with more remote and unlikely free-speech martyrs. Neo-fascist historian David Irving, for example, was robustly defended in the Sunday Independent after his jailing in Austria. (His spirits were lifted, the Daily Telegraph reported, when he found his own books in the prison library.)
Meejit agrees with the Sindo on this one, as it happens: laws that prohibit certain ideas, even Holocaust-denial and worse, should be anathema in a proper democracy. If you won't stand up for the legal principle of free speech, even for nasty ideologues such as David Irving and commercial oligarchs such as Tony O'Reilly, your knees at bound to buckle at more important hazards.
Speech and consequences
We're more sceptical about the addition to the freedom-martyrs' list of two of Ireland's most ubiquitous media figures; Magill editor Eamonn Delaney and Bank of Ireland economist Dan McLaughlin. Contrary to a wave of comments in the last week or two, the mere fact that these gentlemen caught abuse from the Questions & Answers audience and from Liveline callers for their comments about Irish Ferries does not constitute a herald of politically correct fascism in Ireland.
Indeed, inasmuch as these programmes offer some index of popular sentiment, it's imperative and heartening that leading members of our commentariat occasionally learn that the public doesn't share their assessment of what constitutes respectable comment. This doesn't interfere with their freedom of speech; it simply demonstrates that such speech has consequences. Unlike Justine McCarthy, they got to have their spake on the issue.
Many of the pundits' brave defenders have used their alleged persecution as a means of advancing the case for Irish Ferries management, having branded those who oppose it as intolerant censors. This segued into the more familiar suggestion that we were hypocrites, opposing the same untrammelled capitalism that has made us all as rich as Croesus.
Tiger-talk is cheap
The inadequate standard reply says it is "social partnership" rather than free-market bloodlust that has fed the Tiger. But given that explanations and celebrations of Irish wealth have been rife, right up to the booming Budget, the re-emerging story of Ireland's tax-haven status for multinational companies has got little coverage.
To be sure, our press has mentioned the storm that started with the Wall Street Journal's story about how Microsoft hides its intellectual-property wealth behind a door-plaque in Dublin, availing of low corporation tax. But by and large, the journalists deemed able to handle the story (business correspondents etc) are the same ones who have been most celebratory about the entrepreneurial and/or partnership-sponsored boom, and are slow to remind us that the relatively tiny Irish economy (population comparable to Greater Boston, or northeast New Jersey) floats on the balance sheets of US companies.
Thus Arthur Beesley can do a huge piece in The Irish Times and bury the real creative-accountancy scandal more than a thousand words down the article, remarking on a US tax case: "At issue was the price at which US technology was transferred to the Irish unit". Indeed. Trinity economist Antoin Murphy was on RTÉ's This Week recently, putting flesh on talk of "transfer pricing" (Gerard Barry called it "money laundering"): eg, cola-concentrate workers apparently have 30 times greater output in Ireland than elsewhere – an impossible difference, but a tax-efficient one. "If the Americans change their tax system," Murphy said, "that will be the end of the Celtic Tiger."