Letters to the Editor: We need to put an end to developer greed
Construction of Cork Corporation roads and new church at Ballyphehane in February 1955 when many thousands of homes were built by local authorities.
House building in the 1950s and 1960s produced many thousands of houses in towns, cities, and in rural areas at a time when the country’s finances were in a far more perilous condition campared with now.
What were the conditions then which allowed this to happen, and provided the population’s families with affordable and adequate houses — usually with gardens?
How can young people today expect to be able to bring up families in blocks of grossly overpriced and undersized flats and houses if bought with crippling mortgages, or if rented with little in the way of security?
It is high time that the Government found ways of breaking the stranglehold of developer and builder greed.
Michael Clifford highlighted the ‘lengthening public housing waiting list’ when analysing Housing For All —Strategy is a gentle squeeze when the housing crisis really needs radical action (Irish Examiner, September 4).
In fact, public housing waiting lists have fallen to 61,880 households in November 2020, a decrease of 29,720 or 32.4% since Fine Gael’s Rebuilding Ireland started in 2016.
This excludes any homes being rented or leased.
In 2019, 428 new public homes were built within South Dublin County Council and 569 new public homes within Dublin City Council — the last full year before public health restrictions.
This year, 9,500 new public homes are to be built, an extraordinary increase on only 600 built in 2015 before Rebuilding Ireland.
Local authorities are back in the business of building.
Rory Hearne: Generation Rent has been failed once again (Irish Examiner, September 3) correctly highlights most of the reasons that this policy will fail.
However, he leaves out one of the main players.
Our banks are overly reliant on property-based securities for their solvency. A reduction in property prices would probably lead to a collapse of the ‘pillar banks’ and force our leaders to admit the failure of their policies.
Until the banks again become genuine service providers, this problem will continue.
Once again, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, ably assisted by the Greens, are nailing their housing ideology to the already sunken ship of private enterprise and are preparing to bail out their developer friends, this time under the guise of the Land Development Agency.
Welcome to New Ireland — worse than Old Ireland.
Greyhound Racing Ireland are correct in protesting to Folens Publishers and to the Department of Education regarding the article entitled ‘Going to the Dogs’ in secondary school text books — Publisher defends portrayal of greyhound racing in Junior Cycle book (Irish Examiner, August 24.)
Any other national corporate body would have done exactly that, as encouraging young adults to write to a minister to have greyhound racing banned is inappropriate in a school textbook.
If there was an issue with greyhound racing — and I do not believe that there is — then why didn’t the publication encourage young people to engage in a research project and educate themselves through listening to both sides of an argument?
The insidious and gradual creep of animal rights activism here in Ireland should concern not only our national politicians and civil servants but also the silent thousands who farm, hunt, shoot, go coursing, deer stalking, or fishing; who train greyhounds, foxhounds or terriers; who go horse racing, point-to-pointing, or those who just ride a horse for whatever purpose, including a sport.
Putting animals’ rights before those of humans is clearly wrong; trying to infiltrate the minds of young people through the State national secondary school curriculum is equally wrong, and denigrating the minority of those that support coursing and greyhound racing is also wrong.
Thankfully, in a country that still has a strong rural base, the radical extremists that purport rights for animals are marginalised, but they are certainly adept at getting media coverage for their activities.
Every man, woman, and child that carries a gun, a rod, or has a greyhound or terrier; that either rides to hounds or engages in farming, or goes horse racing, greyhound racing or point-to-pointing, and anyone who engages in equestrian activity, needs to realise the threat of the animal rights agenda.
It behoves us all to stand firm and remind our politicians of their duty of care to protect the legitimate rights of those who live in, love and preserve the countryside.
Texas is seeing the most extreme abortion laws in the US come into law. This shocking disregard for human rights and access to healthcare is putting women’s lives at risk. Not in an abstract way but in real way, right now.
However, what is also worrying is the way in which these new laws give power to individuals to sue abortion providers. This imbalance of power is damaging to the very fabric of humanity, allowing for extremists to remove access to safe healthcare.
In Ireland, while we have begun taking steps in the right direction — repealing the Eighth Amendment provided improved access to abortion services — but what is happening in Texas highlights how tenuous these steps can be, how steps in the right direction can be unpicked and unwound with a campaign of fear, hate, and discrimination.
Texas is a stark reminder that reproductive choices are always the first target for those who refuse to accept bodily autonomy.
Without robust protections and comprehensive supports for people seeking abortions, then what has been achieved here in Ireland remains a soft target.
It also shows the importance of the promises that were made to bolster these rights — such as exclusion zones.
We need to ensure the inroads we have made are protected and that we stand up against what is happening elsewhere in the world.
On Saturday, September 25, I will stand at the Dáil at 2pm along with other pro-choice supporters and I urge you to join them.
I would like to express my congratulations to everybody who got their Leaving Cert results on Friday.
I would also like to offer some words of contemplative wisdom.
Completing your Leaving Cert may have a shaken you a little bit, the process may have shaped you somewhat. Overall, though, a Leaving Cert won’t define you. It’s what you do next that does that.
So reach for the stars, follow your dreams, and even if you only land on the moon or orbit the earth once, achieving the best that you can be, that will surely be the best you that you can be.
It beggars belief that, with more than 1,500 daily Covid cases, we are returning to 100% capacity on long journeys in trains with windows that cannot open, no fresh air ventilation, and no CO2 monitors.
Provincial buses are in a similar condition and Dublin City buses at peak times are at overflow.
If an alien arrived from another universe and was told there was a pandemic in progress they might well conclude that malign policy-makers were attempting to escalate a crisis.
A more benign interpretation might be that government, health policy advisers, and politicians in general are (despite many written appeals) so far removed from the public transport experience that its reality does not appear on their radar.
Windows on long-journey intercity trains could be retrofitted to open and monitors could be installed. The fact that these matters were not even debated by our national parliament speaks volumes.
From a perusal of the record and to a significant degree, the health of those having to use public transport appears unwittingly or otherwise, not to have weighed a feather in the balance of this particularly egregious decision.
