EU case on poor housing - A shameful development

One of the most persistent and beneficial aspects of our relationship with the EU has been the opportunity membership offers citizens who believe they have been denied their rights by our Government or by our courts to seek redress, or at least a hearing.

This process has to a very welcome degree driven social legislation and real change in this conservative society.

One of the earliest Irish applications to a European court established that a woman was entitled to free legal aid in a case that followed the collapse of her marriage.

A more recent one meant that, after more than two decades of prevaricaion the Government had to finally confront the implications of the X Case ruling on abortion. The recent UN Human Rights Committee report on our human rights record suggests that the issue is far from resolved and that further consideration may be needed around the avalability of abortion in rape, incest, and fatal foetal abnormalities cases.

Yesterday another group — one with very different issues and with the help of a Paris-based human rights organisation — announced that they are to take what may prove a ground-breaking case on behalf of 130,000 people living in very poor conditions in either Dublin or Limerick. The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) is to lead a case on behalf of people who have lived, for long periods, in damp, leaking homes where sewage systems do work as they should.

It is an indictment of us all that this should be necessary or that local authorities — or other responsible bodies —have not been able to resolve this long before this shameful point was reached. Of course local authorites were emasculated and beggared when rates were scrapped in what still stands as one of the most appalling, exploitative vote-buying swizzes in this state’s short history.

That bribe resonates today through poor infrastructure and feeble local democracy. Even in our reduced circumstances, especially in a country where so many construction workers are out of work, no Irish person should have to live in conditions so poor that their human rights are brought into question.