Dear Sir... Readers' Views (27/01/17)
Politicians and civil servants are âcreativeâ with words. âAllocatedâ, âearmarkedâ funding means little will be spent.
âFast-track prefabricatedâ, âmodularâ, and ârapidâ mean conventional timber frame. Housing 2020, in 2014, âallocatedâ âŹ3.2bn and promised that 25,000 social homes would be âdeliveredâ in five years. Fewer than 200 local authority homes were built two years later.
Strategic plans have âpillarsâ, âdeliveredâ is rented, and âunder constructionâ means out to tender or on the drawing board. Word play is all part of the political âgameâ.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) says 14,000 homes were âcompletedâ in 2016. Market indicators, such as new home loans, home registrations, commencements and transactions, all point to lower new-build levels.
Based on January-October figures, stamp duty transactions (estate homes), once-off house commencements, and local authority homes add up to 7,500 new-builds for 2016.
Government bases âcompletionsâ figures on ESB meter connections and ignores its own Building Control Management System (BCMS) completions database.
When a property has been vacant for two years or more, the ESB network requires vacant homes to get a new connection and a new meter. The old number is cancelled. In a typical year, 25,000 MPRN numbers are cancelled; half are residential.
By equating ESB meter connections with âcompletionsâ, government has double-counted thousands of completed NAMA vacant units, ghost estate homes, local authority voids, and residential refurbishments. Figures are inflated accordingly.
Between 2014 and 2015, there were 11,242 once-off âcompletionsâ (ESB connections), government says. The two-year total for once-off commencements from the BCMS database is 5,081. The number of once-off commencements in 2015 was 1,435, a poor year.
The chairman of NAMA told the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness, in May, 2016: âWe inherited about 14,000 empty homes and, working with debtors and receivers, we found tenants or buyers to live in the overwhelming majority of them.
"This was a significant injection of thousands of units of supply into the housing market... We also inherited 3,000 âghost estatesâ, containing thousands of homes that needed some form of finishing-outâ.
Governmentâs five-year total for all housing âcompletionsâ (ESB connections) from 2011- 2016 is 50,951. More accurate indicators for the same period suggest that the five-year total for actual new builds is 30,000. Census 2016 confirmed that there were 18,951 homes added to housing stock in five years, or an average of 3,718 per year.
The extent of new-homes supply and the capacity of the sector are far lower than we are led to believe. If the âRebuilding Irelandâ target of 37,000 new social homes by 2021 sounds familiar, it is. Government is double-counting homes and also recycling housing strategies.
We need proper housing policy based on accurate information, not on word play.
There is an argument for giving responsibility for road safety and driver behaviour (from the issuing of driving licences to the funding of road safety measures) to a single State agency.
Such an agency should be accountable to the Minister for Health, not to the Minister for the Environment and Local Government.
A connection needs to be made between road safety expenditure and health expenditure, especially in hospital accident-and-emergency wards. Patient numbers will decline if road safety measures are successful. This, in turn, could lead to a reduction in the number of fatalities and injuries on our roads.
Road safety should be a function of the Department of Health, in conjunction with An Garda Siochana, rather than a matter merely associated with roads and infrastructure.
Road safety is not a financial issue, but a human one.
Nobody can put a value on the lives lost on our roads. This could lead to huge savings in health and hospital budgets, and eliminate human suffering.
Road safety should be given a much higher priority. The time has come to give responsibility for the problem to a dedicated, single agency.
The National Safety Council should be that agency. Life is sacred â act now.
It was the overly tolerant Irish people who bailed out the banks and who were trampled on by a goverment that did not stand up for their interests in Europe.
We were saddled with a debt that was not ours and these vulture funds have been allowed to buy up large amounts of Irish property, including 90,000 distressed mortgages at knockdown prices, to the tune of âŹ200bn, without regulation.
This has resulted in huge devastation, and evictions and increased rents. One has only to walk around Cork, Limerick, and Dublin, and see people sleeping in doorways to know that there has been no economic recovery for these people.
A collective madness has descended on a number of Irish people who have convinced themselves that they are entitled to protest the result of an election in another country.
Apparently, democracy is only allowed if their candidate wins. Time for a reality check: We donât have to like Mr Trump, but he won. Ireland needs America a lot more than America needs Ireland. We are a tiny, flea-bite of an island on the edge of the Atlantic. We are a small part of the US supply chain and the US is our customer. It is never a good idea to insult your customer.
Perhaps we need a reminder of what happened when Charles Haughey did his infamous solo run during the Falklands war and offended Margaret Thatcher.
The result was a de facto, temporary boycott of Irish products in the UK, which cost many Irish jobs and achieved nothing other than a longer dole queue.
One wonders how these Irish people would react if citizens in another country had staged a protest against some of the idiots we have elected over the past decades. No doubt, that would be an affront to our sovereignty, but itâs all okay when itâs the other way around.
If we only did business with leaders that we like, then Ireland would be a very lonely and broke country (like Cuba or Venezuela, for which many of the protest organisers have a strange fetish). We already trade with countries that have leaders who make Mr Trump look like a choirboy.
That trade employs many people, and generates tax revenue that keeps the economic lights on in this country, and pays the welfare that so many of these professional protestors live on.
Itâs time to build a bridge and get over it. Mr Trump is the president of the US. A tiny country needs powerful friends. If you hope to persuade and influence someone, you donât start by insulting them.
Let the sane people get on with the business of doing business with Mr Trump and his administration. The professional protestors should work on doing something that actually creates jobs rather than just shouting slogans â donât hold your breath, though.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny, with his recent announcement that the Rural Renewal Scheme will produce 882 jobs every week, on average, for the next three years, is just pie in the sky.
We, the plain people of Ireland, are not fools. We do not, for one second, accept these figures, and he has some cheek asking us to believe them.
At the same time, some rates in business in Longford have increased by up to 400%.
US president, Donald Trump, is correct when he states that the mass media treats him unfairly. They quote him.
Just how much money is enough? Lotto winners should be taxed.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
