lff12

I spotted this on the RTE news website this morning - I really gotta ask?  Why do we need this?

Ballymun is probably the poster child in Ireland for how not to do development.  Unlike the sister development in West Dublin, Tallaght, which was essentially a planned project which included schools, a hospital and a proper town centre (which admittedly was then kinda skewed when the "Square", a large shopping precinct, was built).  But its actually not bad, aside from the large dual carriageway which effectively splits it in two, and sink estates on the periphery.

Ballymun, in contrast, used high rises, which through a combination of non-management (mismanagement is too strong a word since DCC effectively stopped managing the high rises decades before they were knocked and just left them to decay both physically and socially) and local impoverishment, became a rather unpleasant place to live.  Rather than address the key issue - why did Dublin Corporation simply stop maintaining and managing Ballymun towers as they were bound to do in their stewardship as landlords - the government chose to "blame" the buildings.  Over the last 10 years many of the original tower blocks and surrounding eyesores have been demolished and replaced with - well slightly smaller blocks and surrounding eyesores.  Residents generally have been happy so far with the development, but lets be honest, its still being "managed" at present.  What would happen if the corpo simply opted out, as they did previously with the old tower blocks, and stopped actively managing the estates?  It would end up the same.  And I suspect this is what may well happen if cutbacks resume.

In the meantime, the Corpo have served up a massive new gravy train for the construction industry on top of the 54 billion NAMA bailout last week - 800 million is the cost, not counting the inevitable overruns, and if I recall, Treasury Holdings is or was part of AIB.

Funny that.

Meantime some little spoilt uberbrat who was kicked out of BOI albeit with a 2.4 million payoff for viewing porn at work, has taken the usual swipe at "unmarried mothers".  I took out my calculator and did some quick sums.  On the basis that at any one time, there are around 60,000 lone parents on the welfare system, each running at a cost of around 20k per annum to the state.  This represents a total figure of 1.2 billion euros per year - so effectively the NAMA bailout paid out in one week would subsidise the entire current body of lone parents for up to 45 years.  Who is the welfare sponger now Mr Banker?