The Builders and the recession

The recession has left a lot of buyers who bought their homes off-plan at the height of the market in big financial trouble.

Last year I did a story (t'isn't online) about how a raft of suppliers were suing the Hanly Group for unpaid debts. One of Hanly's building companies, Laragan Developments, have in turn tried to sue a lot of house buyers through the High Court. The builders were trying to get buyers to complete purchases agreed in 2006/07 and to pay those 2006/07 prices. Some of the buyers don't want to buy because of the huge prices drops in the last few years but many more can't get the mortgage approval they had secured from the banks two or three years ago.

Many other people bought homes off plans a few years ago from developers expecting them to be completed and ready to move in to by now. Unfortunately, and this has happened to more builders than just Hanly, the developers have got in to financial trouble and construction has stalled.

Ordinary punters have been left with 15,000 euro deposits tied up in developments which may never be completed. The standard Construction Industry Federation (CIF) contract that they signed offers little protection for buyers.

I spoke to about a dozen people who are in this situation with a development called Milner's Square in Santry in Dublin. All wouldn't speak publicly because they were afraid of prejudicing future legal action with Hanly/Laragan, the developers.

For a newspaper often a story will only work if a person is willing to go "on the record" - to be quoted and possibly photographed. A story with a living, breathing and named case-study always carries more punch (and gets more space in the paper).

So when I hear "I need to see if it's ok with with my solicitor first". That always means no. Solicitors and barristers in 99% of cases advise clients not to speak to the press in advance of court hearings because of a mortal fear of "prejudicing the case". I think that translates in to "we don't want to piss off a judge".

Anyway, thankfully Ann St Leger agreed to speak to me about her awful experience in Milner's Square. She is a good example of how young couples are being affected by the downturn. Ann and her partner can't even walk away from their 15,000 euro deposit because Hanly says it will pursue them for the full cost of the apartment in the High Court.

Things for the developer and the buyers in this story don't seem to getting any bettter. Velfac, a window supplier for Hanly/Laragan, got fed up waiting to be paid and sought to have Laragan Developments wound up by the High Court.

Now its seems the builder is insolvent and is seeking examinership.

International Adoption

The international adoption system in Ireland is going to be radically changed later this year when we pass a new adoption bill. This will finally ratify the Hague Convention on international adoptions which Ireland signed in 1993. (This convention is not to be confused, as I did, with an earlier Hague convention on child abduction as a reader and blogger pointed out). The Hague Convention requires all participating countries to carry out adoptions while ensuring the best interests of the child are the highest priority.

We currently adopt about 400 children from abroad each year which is a large number considering Ireland's population. The problem is that the vast majority of foreign adoptions to Ireland are from poor countries which haven't signed up to Hague. I wrote a few weeks ago about how the government is trying to negotiate a new bilateral agreement with Vietnam with a May 1 deadline fast approaching.

Sources say Irish officials based in Vietnam have raised concerns that the existing five year agreement wasn't strong enough. The decision of America and Sweden to suspend new adoptions from Vietnam because of a series of irregularities has raised further alarm.

Vietnam has jumped to the top of the charts for prospective Irish parents in recent years with 130 adoptions completed in 2007. In 2008 Vietnam accounted for 60% of all international adoptions approved in Ireland. This has been directly promoted by the Irish government who have approved Helping Hands to act as an intermediary in all adoptions from Vietnam to Ireland.

I've done a few stories on international adoption over the last few years and found adoptive parents to be wary of journalists as a result of the outcry over the Tristan Dowse story. Understandably some are of the view that all newspapers are trying to paint every international adoption as a sordid transaction.

Adoptive parents have a tough ordeal to go through before they're are allowed to adopt. Depending on what part of the country they live in it can take over four years before they are assessed by a HSE social worker - a vital part in the process of getting approval from the adoption board.

A view which is rarely articulated but which is strongly held by many in the HSE is that the whole concept of international adoption is wrong. There are 5,000 Irish children in need of foster care each year and many social workers and HSE managers believe Irish people should be volunteering for this rather than adopting children from abroad.

I know people who have adopted from abroad and understand why fostering does not appeal. These parents point to a recent Trinity College study of Irish international adoptions that paints a fairly positive picture of how adopted children have fared in Ireland.

A provocative, if admittedly one-sided, alternative view of international adoptions was published by the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism recently. The article is called "The Lie We Love".

International adoptions are a middle class phenomena and there is huge pressure from this vocal community on Micheal Martin, the Foreign Affairs minister, and Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, to get a new deal done with Vietnam.

Martin is from Cork where many parents who have adopted or plan to adopt from Vietnam are also based. So Martin knows that if the May 1 deadline is missed a lot of his constituents will be left in limbo.

But while there are problems such as forged documents and mothers being paid or coerced in to giving up their children then its important that newspapers highlight these uncomfortable facts. It's up to Ireland to ensure all its adoptions from Vietnam and other countries are above reproach.

No comment?

John Rogers, the former attorney general, was back in the news last week. On the front page of the Irish Times he was quoted as having given a legal opinion that said part of the new Charties Bill may be unconstitutional.

The story caught my eye as I've been trying to get in contact with Rogers for about a month now without success. I was hoping to chat with the barrister about a story we'd published on Creighton Street residents accepting a 1.6m euro payment to withdraw an appeal against a Derek Quinlan development on Sir John Rogerson's Quay. I've written about this on the blog here too.

Rogers owns a house on Creighton Street and objected to the original planned development as you can see on the Dublin City Council planning website.

Was the former AG then part of the deal the residents made to withdraw their objection to An Bord Pleanala? Well he aint telling me! John Burns detailed some of the efforts we've made to contact Rogers in his Atticus column a couple of weeks back.

Health Whistleblowers

On March 1st Mary Harney brought whistleblower laws in to effect for health workers. This is obviously a good thing. The problem I hear from some health workers is that they are raising fears about patient safety with superiors but because of tight budgets nothing is done.

I wrote about a case last weekend where health workers in Dun Laoghaire were concerned that the eyesight of young 100 school children were being put at risk due to the failure to appoint an administrator for the local health screening programme.

The HSE have a policy of not replacing clerical staff that retire, go on leave, go on maternity leave, get moved internally, that are on long term sick leave... the list goes on. So problems like this one in south Dublin, where public health concerns come second to a manager's need to allocate scarce resources, are bound to happen

In this case a whistleblower approached us in despair that the HSE management were not addressing the concerns of health workers. Basically out of 3,500 children screened from the HSE's Dun Laoghaire health centre each year 100 are referred on to an eye specialist. If the problem of amblyopia isn't addressed before the age of seven or eight it may be too late and the child may lose the use of one eye. As the woman who ran the programme's administration last year retired and was not replaced the programme couldn't happen this year.

It was a small story for us in the Sunday Times but our raising the issue with the HSE had a big effect on this problem.

We asked the HSE why they weren't doing this screening and why they wouldn't warn parents it had been withdrawn. In response the HSE promised they would start the screening again in the next few weeks and insisted the programme had been "delayed" and was never "withdrawn".

Obviously some clerical officer has now been reassigned to this programme. Inevitably this shuffling of resources means some other area of the HSE has lost a worker and a new problem is created.

Still, instant result for the whistleblower. Would approaching another manager instead of a newspaper have yielded the same outcome?

Member of the European Parliament

Ireland has 13 MEPs. With the European elections coming up this summer and recent public outcry over the Galvin report on abuses of MEPs' secretarial allowances we decided to see how many of the Irish MEPs employ family members.

Out of the ten MEPs I contacted six said they employed family members. The next five year term of the parliament will be the last in which MEPs will be allowed to employ family. So from the following term, from 2014 onwards, family can't be hired. Those MEPs like Sean O Neachtain, who employs two family members, will have to find alternative staff if they make it past the 2014 elections.

Galvin found that some MEPs were abusing the system by paying their secretarial allowances, now worth 210,480 euro annually, in to family businesses, a creche and companies whose accounts show no activity. This system will be changed following this summer's elections and the secretarial allowances will be paid directly by the European parliament.

In the mean time there is a lack of transparency and most Irish MEPs aren't keen to say what company they pay their allowances through.

Eoin Ryan said he uses a firm of solicitors while some of the Fine Gael MEPs and Marian Harkin use Falcon Financial, to handle payroll administration. Proinsias De Rossa has taken a lead on other Irish MEPs in the transparency stakes by laying out some of the details of his expenses on his website.