Duck! It's Joan Burton!

Remember the Lisbon Treaty referendum?

‘Vote Yes for Jobs’ said the unholy alliance of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the Green Party, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the Irish Business and Employers Confederation. Where are the promised jobs? We have over 440,000 people unemployed in the 26 Counties and growing emigration and the only jobs are overseas.

That ‘Yes’ referendum campaign was a con job and unfortunately it succeeded in cajoling and scaring sufficient numbers of voters to ratify Lisbon. Like previous EU treaties it took away more democratic powers from the Irish people and gave them to the EU. And it has tied us to the disastrous economic strategy of the EU which is imposing austerity policies that are damaging our society and further weakening our economy.

Of course the EU has willing servants in Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore. It was pathetic to see Kenny tripping off for his dinner with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the ornate Meseberg Palace near Berlin this week. It was even worse to read of Irish officials dismissing the very idea that Kenny might dare to mention any serious issues at the dinner – like the massive debt burden on Ireland. I wonder did he drop hints?

“Chancellor, would you have any interest in more sauce on your duck? How do you rate the pear?”  (They had Brandenberg duck and pear dessert.)

Inconveniently for Kenny and Gilmore, German sources confirmed that the wording of the Fiscal Treaty was specially crafted to avoid a referendum in Ireland. This Treaty for austerity would impose a failed and doomed anti-people economic strategy on the Irish people. Our sad losers in Government, the teacher’s pets of Europe, are scared stiff of losing their place at the top of the class if the Irish people are given the chance to reject this Treaty. There’d be no more cosy dinners in the Meseberg Palace then.

But back in Ireland it was time for another con job as Kenny joined Labour’s Social ‘Protection’ Minister to wheel out the Government’s ‘Pathways to Work’ document. Billed as a big plan to tackle unemployment, this is a collection of rehashed proposals with no new funding or no real stimulus to create jobs.  At its core it is an attack on the unemployed.

In Budget 2012 people on low incomes, including social welfare recipients, were targeted. To try to justify this, and with the help of the likes of Independent newspapers, there was much hype about social welfare fraud. Now, don’t get me wrong – such fraud needs to be tackled. But it is a drop in the ocean of unemployment and it is miniscule compared to the billions robbed from the Irish people by the wealthy fraudsters and their friends in Government who wrecked our economy.

You would think that the points I’ve just made might come from a Minister whose party purports to be successors of James Connolly. But no. Who needs Maggie Thatcher when you get this from Labour Minister Joan Burton:

"I am trying to ensure that people don’t find the security of the social welfare system more attractive than the risky world of work."

It’s enough to turn you off your Brandenberg duck!

Housing - a right we had to fight for



Children of the slums in Cumberland St, behind Gardiner St., 1913.



A few days ago I picked up a haunting book. It's called 'Darkest Dublin' and it features photographs of the slums of Dublin in 1913. The photographs were taken mostly in the autumn and winter of that year, in the wake of the Church Street disaster when two tenement houses, Nos. 66 and 67 Church Street collapsed, killing seven people. This led to an inquiry into the housing conditions of Dublin's poor and the photographs were taken as part of that inquiry.

The Church Street disaster happened at the start of the Great Lockout and one of the dead, 17-year-old Hugh Sammon, was a locked out worker of Jacob's Biscuit Factory, a member of the ITGWU. His four and a half year old sister Elizabeth also died in the tragedy.

The pictures are shocking, even today, nearly 100 years later. We see not only the familiar delapidated tenement rooms in which large families were crammed, but also the crumbling houses and cottages in dim lanes, alleys and yards, in which families tried to survive. Scores of people had to share one or two toilets and one water tap in the yard. These hovels were not fit for animals. It was fitting that the ITGWU chose Horse Show Week to stop the trams when their conductors walked off the job. The horses of Dublin's wealthy were housed in far better conditions than the families of the exploited workers.

It is reckoned that over 100,000 people lived in slum housing in Dublin in 1913, out of a city population of 300,000.

One of the stark facts exposed by the housing inquiry was that three members of Dublin Corporation between them owned 46 tenement houses and 18 smallers houses. Many of these were grossly sub-standard, classed as third-class dwellings by the Corporation's own Sanitary Staff. These and other landlords were given tax rebates for their slum properties. One of the Corporation member's houses was certified as unfit for a rebate but was granted it anyway by the City authorities.

Sound familiar? You will recall that property developers, speculators and landlords benefited hugely from tax breaks during the Celtic Tiger property bubble. Because, while housing conditions have improved beyond recognition during the last century, property rights and the rights of developers and landlords still count for more in Ireland than the right to housing.

As a report showed ths week we have masses of people struggling with mortgage debt, the toxic legacy of the property bubble. Contrary to Enda Kenny's assertion that people 'went mad' during the Celtic Tiger, the reality was that people had no choice but to take out mortgages to purchase hugely over-priced houses and apartments. Or else they faced sky-high rents imposed by private landlords. Now these people are in deep trouble; many are skimping on essentials to meet mortgage repayments, or are facing repossession. Street homelessness continues, a shame on our counrry. Meanwhile many of the developers who were reponsible jointly with the Fianna Fáil Government for the property bubble are being bailed out by NAMA.

In this siutation it is doubly damning that the Fine Gael/Labour Government is continuing the retreat of central and local government from their obligation to provide housing. Social housing budgets have been slashed, continuing the trend begun by Fianna Fáil, which allowed the selling off of a huge part of the social housing stock in land and dwellings. The result is that the supposed safety net of social housing is threadbare. This is something that we as councillors encounter every day of the week as citizens seek housing that most often is simply not there.

Housing is a right. Generations of Irish people had to fight for that right, gradually forcing Government to improve conditions, end slums and develop council housing across the State, as well as facilitating affordable housing for those who wish to own their own homes. As we approach the centenary of the 1913 Lockout we should re-assert  not only the right to work and to decent pay and conditions but also the right to a home.

* 'Darkest Dublin' by Christiaan Corlett. Published by Wordwell, 2008.

In Dublin's Unfair City

Fáilte romhaibh!

This is my first venture into the world of blogging.

It's been a long journey from writing articles on A4 refill pads with a blue biro in the offices of An Phoblacht in pre-computer days. Now we have instant communication, by-passing print altogether.

With this blog I'll try to do what can't be done on facebook and keep you up to date, as well as sample some of my ramblings on politics and other matters.

This week the focus of news has been unusually sharp on the tangled affairs of Dublin City Council. The bin privatisation has been an absolute fiasco, exactly as we in Sinn Féin predicted it would be. When this was raised in the Dáil Enda Kenny called on Greyhound to step back and not refuse to lift the some 18,000 bins from households who have not paid some or all of the annual €100 standing charge.

However, this is hypocrisy as Kenny's Environment Minister Phil Hogan presides over waste management and fully supports privatisation. He even falsely claimed in the Dáil earlier this week when challenged by Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald TD that Dublin City Councillors voted for privatisation. False! Three times the Council voted by a majority to reject privatisation. But under legislation brought in by Fianna Fáil the City Manager was able to impose privatisation over the heads of the Councillors. Fine Gael and Labour in Government have done nothing to over-turn this legislation or to introduce a State-wide waiver scheme to exempt low-income households from the waste charges.

And a further note on the bins fiasco: I recently asked the Dublin City Manager what additional measures are being taken this year to compel the industrial and commerical producers of waste - excess packaging and the other stuff that fills our bins - to eliminate or reduce their waste. The answer was that no extra measures are being taken. There is still no real pressure on producers to eliminate or reduce their waste before it enters the waste stream, forcing citizens to pay for collection and the city to pay for land-fill.

The same Minister Hogan refuses to meet the residents of Priory Hall. They were marching for justice again last Sunday and I was privileged to join them and speak, together with councillors and TDs from other parties. The issues was raised by Mary Lou McDonald in the Dáil this morning (Thursday). Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore tried to score a few cheap political points by trying to link the Priory Hall developer to Sinn Féin. For the record this unscrupulous developer has nothing to do with Sinn Féin. He was an IRA prisoner and hunger striker in the early 1980s but long ago severed his connection with republicans and, by his treatment of the Priory Hall residents, he has betrayed everything he once stood for. But this is a distraction - the main point is to keep supporting the Priory Hall residents' fight for justice.