I N T E R N AT I O N A L

MONDAY, FEBRURY 22, 2016

EDENDERRY, Ireland: An hour’s drive fromthe now bustling centre of Dublin,Edenderry bears more scars of Ireland’srecent economic collapse than signs of itsseemingly rapid recovery. With a popula-tion of 10,000, the town has one of thehighest vacancy rates for commercial prop-erty in the country, with close to one infour units standing empty since a propertycrash almost a decade ago devastated theIrish economy.

It is a scene replicated throughoutrural Ireland. The two-speed patchiness ofthe revival in Europe’s best-performingeconomy has undermined Prime MinisterEnda Kenny’s re-election message to“keep the recovery going”. “I can’t see itchanging for the next while,” said MichaelCarroll of the boarded-up, tattered shopfronts along the same high street as hisfamily-run Carroll’s Menswear store. “Wetravel up and down to Dublin a lot andyou can see that it’s thriving but that’scounterbalanced by what you’ll see in therest of the country. It’s definitely more dif-ficult on the ground here.”

The recovery is only slowly trickling

down, according to the 36-year-old retailer,who has seen sales rise for the first time inseven years over the past few months.Unemployment in the midlands region is12.4 percent, compared with an 8.6 per-cent national average, but is down from apeak of 19 percent in 2012 when Irelandwas in a three-year EU/IMF bailout. Awayfrom the traffic jams, packed restaurantsand buzzing shops of the big cities, ruralcommunities are still struggling and seeingmore young people emigrate.

They have missed out on the foreigndirect investment which companies likeGoogle and Apple have delivered to majorcities. And their souls have been ripped outby closures of bank branches and pubs andcuts to local services. “Let’s be honest, thereis a recovery but it’s not in rural Ireland,”said John Foley, a local councillor who isrunning for election as an independentcandidate. “The people in small towns andvillages do not feel it. We’ve been leftbehind. The business people in Edenderry,along with all the other towns, are surviv-ing through pure downright determina-tion but they’re crying out for a bit of help.”

Dublin DichotomyDublin’s CHQ shopping mall was for

years a monument to the crash, standingalmost completely empty in the city’sfinancial district. Bought in 2013 by for-mer Coca-Cola chief executive NevilleIsdell, one of many foreign investors whohave taken over distressed assets inDublin, it is now thriving with trendylunch spots and technology startups.“ Three or four years ago, we walkedthrough this place and there was nothinghere,” said Dave O’Donoghue, who withCormac Manning has brought Canadianhealthy eating franchise Freshii to CHQ.

“We’ve been blown away by the reac-tion, our customers have good disposableincomes, there are good solid jobs andmore are being created. There’s a beliefback that we’re on a recovery that isn’tgoing to suddenly be knocked off for fiveyears.” O’Donoghue and Manning arehoping to roll out 30 to 40 franchises inIreland’s major cities, buoyed by retailsales volumes that rose at their fastestpace in 15 years last year and consumersentiment that also hit a 15-year high last

month.Kenny’s Fine Gael party chose CHQ as

its election headquarters to illustrate theturnaround it has overseen in the past fiveyears. The party has struggled to buildmomentum ahead of the vote on Friday,raising the prospect of a post-electionstalemate as opposition complaints thatthe benefits of recovery are unfairlyspread appear to resonate with the pub-lic. A poll this week found that after yearsof austerity, 56 percent of adults have notfelt the effects of the economic recoverypersonally and 79 percent believe theeconomy is recovering on a two-tier basis.

“While the government keeps extollingthe need to ‘keep the recovery going’, thereality is well over half of the populationstill feel that they haven’t actually felt anyimpact,” said Richard Colwell of Red CResearch, which carried out the survey. Intwo opinion polls on Saturday, Fine Gaelappeared to be recovering from its recentslide in popularity, but its coalition part-ner Labour fell to its lowest ever level.Kenny’s hope is that nervous voters preferto play it safe on the day after taking the

pain of spending cuts and tax rises.In Edenderry, the increasing number of

commuters driving to Dublin each morn-ing gives some grounds for optimism.“When I’m here at 6.30 in the morning,you wouldn’t get across that street withthe amount of cars - lads back workinghaving not been for a long, long time,”said Johnny Brady, who owns the town’slocal supermarket. “Three years ago, youcould have played football in that streetearly in the morning. That was sad. Butthere’s a few more quid to spend now andyou see it in the shop and in bars and therestaurants again.”

He’s voting though for Foley, the inde-pendent candidate who could be amongthe largest-ever contingent of non-partymembers of parliament. Brady, 46,believes the government should havedone more to help small businesses intowns like Edenderry. His son opened atattoo shop which only lasted a month,after a large bill for services from thecouncil rendered it unsustainable. “He’sback on the social welfare now. It’s demor-alizing,” he said. — Reuters

Unevenness of Irish recovery weighs on election

CHICAGO: A gunman killed six people in a shootingspree in the northern US state of Michigan, policesaid yesterday, after arresting an armed 45-year-oldwhite male for the crime. Officials corrected an earli-er report of seven dead, stating that one of the vic-tims was alive but seriously injured. The suspect wasapprehended at 12:40 am on Sunday (0540 GMT)after the shooting rampage Saturday night in thecity of Kalamazoo, police said.

Michigan state trooper Lieutenant Dave Hinestold a post-midnight press conference that therewere three separate shootings - one outside anapartment complex, another outside a car dealer-ship, and the third at a chain restaurant. “What itlooks like is we have somebody driving around, find-ing people and shooting them dead in their tracks,”Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Paul Matyas told

the local CNN affiliate 24 Hours News 8. “This is yourworst nightmare, when you have somebody justdriving around randomly killing people,” he added.

At a later press conference at sunrise KalamazooCounty prosecutor Jeff Getting identified the whitemale suspect as Jason Brian Dalton, 45, and said thathe will face murder charges in court today. Gettingsaid Hines is accused of shooting eight people, six ofwhom died. Earlier reports of the death of seventhvictim, a teenage girl, were incorrect, Getting said,though he did say that the teen was “gravely injured”.The gunman’s motives were unclear, officials said.

Several police agencies were involved in thecase, and the death toll and profiles of those killedchanged as the hours went by and details emerged.The suspect was armed when he was arrested at atraffic stop, but surrendered peacefully, Matyas said.

Kalamazoo, in the northern state of Michigan, islocated some 190 km west of the industrial city ofDetroit and has a population of 76,000, according tocensus figures. The Kalamazoo killings follow a pat-tern of mass shootings in the United States thatinclude the Dec 2 massacre in San Bernardino,California that left 14 people dead and 22 wounded,and the Dec 14, 2012 Sandy Hook school massacrein which 20 children and six adults were shot dead.Gun violence kills about 30,000 Americans everyyear and mass shootings - rare in most countries -have been on the rise in the United States.According to the tracking website gunvio-lencearchive.org, there were 330 mass shootings inthe United States in 2015, up from 281 in 2014. Theyaffected nearly every part of the country, reachinginto both big cities and small towns. — AFP

Six dead in Michigan

shooting rampage

Suspect in custody • Victims selected at random

KALAMAZOO, Michigan: Police investigate the scene early yesterday where people were shot in vehicles outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant.(Inset) This image provided by the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office shows suspect Jason Dalton. — AP

NIAMEY: Niger voted yesterday amid tightsecurity in an election in which PresidentMahamadou Issoufou has promised a“knockout” blow to his opponents, who arealready crying foul after a tense campaign.A vast nation endowed with an abundanceof uranium, gold, coal and oil but amongthe poorest on the planet, Niger is electinga head of state, as well as a new parliament,with Issoufou hoping for a second five-yearterm. A total of 7.5 million people are eligi-ble to vote at 25,000 polling stations acrossthe country on the edge of the SaharaDesert, where security is a growing concernafter attacks by jihadists from neighboringNigeria, Mali and Libya. The results areexpected within five days.

Security was tight with forces on patrolacross the country, including the capitalNiamey, where voting got off to a delayedstart in many parts of the city due to thelate delivery of ballot papers and othermaterials. “There is no such thing as zerorisk but we are working to uphold securityon election day,” Interior Minister HassoumiMassaoudou said ahead of the ballot. Somestations opened up to three hours late, butelectoral commission chief Ibrahim Boubeinsisted that “all voters who come will beable to vote”.

After voting in Niamey, Issoufou said“there will be only one winner, and that willbe Niger”, saying he hoped the electionwould reinforce the country’s democraticstructures. In an interview with AFP onThursday, the 63-year-old said he was“absolutely” confident of victory and pre-dicted a second-round run-off vote wouldnot be needed. Issoufou said he had methis pledges on boosting growth and infra-structure, while shoring up security in theface of jihadist attacks.

Known as the “zaki” or “lion” in Hausa,the majority language in Niger, the formermathematician and mining engineer facesa total of 14 rivals, including two formerprime ministers and an ex-president.Should he fail to win a first-round victory,his rivals, who have accused him of plan-ning to rig the result, have agreed to unitebehind whoever scores highest amongstthem for the second round.

Cheating Claims Heading the opposition pack is 66-

year-old Hama Amadou, who is campaign-ing from behind bars after being arrestedin November on his return from exile inFrance over his alleged role in a baby-traf-ficking scandal. Amadou, a former premierand parl iament speaker, heads theNigerien Democratic Movement (NDM)whose members were tear-gassed bypolice earlier this month after gathering intheir thousands to support their man.

Among the other candidates are SeyniOumarou, of the National Movement forthe Society of Development (NMSD), arunner-up to Issoufou in the 2011 presi-dential race, and Niger’s first-ever demo-cratically-elected president, MahamaneOusmane, 66, who is making his fourthbid to step back into the job since his 1993election.

Defence remains a top budget priorityin Niger, with the remote north threat-ened by jihadist groups operating out ofMali and Libya while the southeast tries tofend off attacks by Nigeria’s Boko Haram.In December, the government said it hadfoiled an attempted military coup. Thethreat of unrest hangs over the vote, withsome opposition supporters threatening ageneral strike if Issoufou is declared victo-rious at the first round.

“If Issoufou wins in the first round, it’sbecause he has cheated. If this happenswe will go on strike and there will beclashes,” an Amadou activist said, speakingon condition of anonymity. Tensionsedged higher after Niger ’s top cour tapproved a controversial plan to allowvoters to cast their ballots without identitypapers, sparking an opposition outcry onthe eve of the vote.

Moussa Tchangari, a leading civil socie-ty and opposition figure who heads arights and development group, said hefeared violence. “Everyone is afraid theoutcome could be exceptionally serious,”he said. Niger, which has a history of mili-tar y coups, has only had multi-par tydemocracy since 1990. Three quarters ofthe country’s 18 million people survive onless than two dollars a day and desertifica-tion, driven by climate change, is pushingrural dwellers into towns. The UN expectstwo million people will need food aid thisyear in Niger, which has the world’s high-est fertility rate. — AFP

Niger ‘lion’ prez

seeks re-election

LONDON: London Mayor Boris Johnson arrives homeyesterday. — AFP

LONDON: Charismatic London Mayor Boris Johnson was set onSunday to lend his pulling power to the campaign for a British exitfrom the European Union, dealing a heavy blow to Prime MinisterDavid Cameron ahead of June’s referendum. The BBC reportedJohnson’s decision without citing sources ahead of an officialannouncement. One source with knowledge of the decision con-firmed to Reuters that he would back the ‘out’ campaign.

The decision comes a day after Cameron called the June 23poll and declared his own intention to campaign for Britain tostay in the EU after clinching concessions from other memberstates that he said would give Britain a special status in theworld’s biggest trading bloc. Johnson, a political showman whosebuffoonish and eccentric exterior masks fierce ambition to suc-ceed Cameron, has the potential to galvanise the ‘out’ campaignbecause of his ability to swing public opinion.

Cameron yesterday urged Johnson, instantly recognizable byhis thatch of platinum-blond hair, not to join opponents of EUmembership, loosely organized around divisive political figuressuch as UK Independence Party chief Nigel Farage and maverickleft-wing campaigner George Galloway.

“I would say to Boris what I say to everybody else, which is thatwe will be safer, we will be stronger, we will be better off insidethe EU,” Cameron told the BBC. It was not only Cameron who hadbeen waiting to hear Johnson’s decision.

Leaders on both sides of the Brexit debate, Britain’s Sundaynewspapers and even financial markets had been eagerly waitingfor Johnson to declare his allegiance. Johnson joins six membersof Cameron’s cabinet who on Saturday rebelled and said theywanted to leave. British voters - and Cameron’s rulingConservative Party - are split on membership. —Reuters

Defying Cameron, Boris

to campaign for Brexit