John Burns: What the State paid Bobby Kerr, Michael Portillo and Mary Kennedy

The Newstalk radio host Bobby Kerr was paid €1,441 to do a launch for the Western Development Commission, and personal trainer Karl Henry earned €6,050 for delivering three webinars to staff in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, we learn from a series of Dáil questions tabled by Catherine Murphy TD.

She asked government ministers to list the social media influencers and personalities they’ve engaged since 2021, what campaigns they were hired for, and how much each was paid.

The Department of Rural and Community Development paid TV presenter Mary Kennedy a fee of €4,305 to launch “Our Rural Future” in March 2021, while former Tory MP Michael Portillo got a €1,000 “honorarium” for taking part in an online conversation about the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. We also learned that in 2021, members of the Future of Media Commission were paid a “stipend” of €13,750 for their work.

In his reply, Tánaiste Micheál Martin said the Gardiner Brothers, who are brand ambassadors for Guinness and have two million followers on TikTok, were paid €10,000 to do three recruitment videos for the Defence Forces. In one 45-second clip, the brothers danced to the White Stripes’ song Seven Nation Army. (See what they did there?)

Quiet quitting: You always had workers who did 9-5 but it’s a creeping malaise, employers say

---

Pre-budget sums are not as flush as they look at first glance

---

We are at last creating AI approaching human intellect but the underpinnings are insubstantial

---

Interesting new faces on FD Technologies share register

---

Curiously, one government department refused to name names. Paschal Donohoe’s Department of Public Expenditure said that to do so would be a breach of GDPR.

Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation scales back as ‘tsunami’ yet to materialise

David Hall, the seismologist of the Irish mortgage market, has been predicting a tsunami of home repossessions since 2011. The huge wave of cases hasn’t materialised, with just 3,300 on foot of a court order since 2009, and there was a complete drought during the pandemic.

So we were intrigued by a line in the recently filed annual report for 2021 from the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation (IMHO), the charity Hall co-founded to help homeowners in arrears after the 2008 crash. “Due to recent reduced level of activity and legal proceedings due to Covid,” it said, “the directors of the charity are currently considering restructuring [its] operations.”

I rang Hall to find out what this meant.

The IMHO chief executive revealed its staff headcount is down to five, from a peak of 15 in 2020, with some positions scrapped. “A number of people moved on, moved jobs – natural evolution – and we would have had a number of redundancies to scale back to a level of cover for the activity that’s there,” he said.

Describing it as a normal adjustment, Hall said: “There’s a modest change to the organisation that was required to meet demand at the time. We’re still functioning and working away, but the number of [homeowners] engaging is much lower because of the threat that’s there. But that will change.”

He’s not backing down from his “tsunami of repossessions” prediction, noting that there are still 24,000 people in long-term mortgage arrears. “So we are waiting to see what happens next.”

Debate on Apple’s Irish activities gets real

“Apple doesn’t do anything in Ireland,” Brad W Setser, an American economist with the Council of Foreign Relations, told The Times of London last Monday. After readers pointed out that, in fact, the company has a factory in Cork employing 6,000, the quote disappeared from the article.

We tracked down Setser, a former staff economist at the US Department of the Treasury, to see if he’d had second thoughts. He agreed it would “probably” have been better to say “Apple doesn’t do anything of great significance in Ireland”, and stressed that the context of his interview was manufacturing and generating revenues.

But then he took another bite out of Apple: “Obviously, there is an operation in Cork that Apple would argue is ‘real’, even if it is mostly accounting and the like, plus a few designers/programmers who work with CA [California].”

Last in, first out in the tech sector?

One in three ICT (information and communications technology) workers are non-Irish nationals, according to a new report from the Central Bank of Ireland. That adds a new dimension to the lay-offs in the tech sector. Might some of these workers be permanently lost to Ireland?

ICT accounts for almost 12 per cent of all jobs in Dublin – another eye-catching statistic in the report. On average, these workers are younger, with one in three aged between 25 and 34. They are also highly educated, further underlining what a loss they would be.

Employment in the ICT sector increased to 165,600 in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 29 per cent rise compared with the fourth quarter of 2019. Is it now a case of last in, first out?

David McRedmond is bookies’ favourite to succeed Dee Forbes

Clearly no one in Montrose has been reading The Big Con, a new book by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, which claims the consulting industry is pulling a fast one. RTE is currently tendering for a consultancy firm to help develop a strategy for its commercial activities. Fans of David McRedmond would suggest it should instead hire the An Post chief as its next director general, since he has a proven track record of boosting commercial revenues, notably with TV3. He will leave the post office network profitable when he exits this year.

The former director of Eircom is the bookies’ favourite to succeed Dee Forbes – you’ll get a miserly 7/4 at BoyleSports. Not much money to be made on that particular commercial activity, then.

Why isn’t Ryan making a bigger play of greener fuel?

The Oireachtas has passed a green transport measure which, according to Fuels for Ireland chief executive Kevin McPartlan, would decrease carbon emissions by more than all of the existing electric vehicles on the road. So why hasn’t transport minister Eamon Ryan been making political capital out of it?

The measure is contained in the Oil Emergency Contingency and Transfer of Renewable Transport Fuels Function Bill 2023. Which doesn’t help. It allows for the introduction of E10 petrol – a 10 per cent ethanol blend that has lower emissions. Ireland can start filling up with E10 – as Northern Ireland and Britain already do – when garage forecourts switch to the summer fuel blend in May.

Is the Department of Transport not making a bigger deal of this because E10 is still a fossil fuel? “Eamon Ryan’s reluctance to champion the introduction of E10 petrol in Ireland is a little surprising,” says McPartlan.

Mallee on the move in pharma

The much-travelled Bernard Mallee is on the move again. A Fianna Fáil press officer in the mid-2000s, he was a government special adviser from 2008 to 2011, then had a stint with Q4 public relations agency.

After a five-year stint with the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association, Mallee has now become director of international policy communications at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). While it’s one of the lower-profile pharma companies, BMS has been in Ireland for 50 years and employs 650 people.