Carrickmines tragedy must spur us to action

The deaths of 10 people at the Carrickmines Traveller halting site were awful. Dublin Castle will need to ensure what happened isn’t an echo of dispossession. If ever elected representatives and government agencies needed a reason to address deprived communities, then this is it.

After a time of mourning, there has to come real investment in living improvements. Electionioneering can’t have any place here, nor ‘budgets’ of our borrowed money.

Those who are healthy and well-off and those who aren’t, in common, need to look at how life could end. The brutalising of society has to stop. The powerful are beyond reach, opaque, whilst the rest of us struggle.

These are circumstances where society provides a degree of shelter and a sort of cover for some to abuse it. This happens when we go economically and socially through these boom-bust cycles.

The US Treasury and the EU let our representatives know we couldn’t burn the bond-holders — they were too big to burn, like we were being told the banks were too big to fail.

We pray on hospital trollies, at halting sites; families living in motor cars pray, as do families in B&Bs and hotel accommodation facing into winter 2015. Several thousand do, with 10,000 families that bought high in the boom now being served with eviction notices.

This winter, we cannot forget those survivors of rural crime living now as recluses, afraid to unlock doors to neighbours.

Tom Ryan

Dún Bleisce

Co Limerick