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?

It seems insane that Ireland burns while Cowen fiddles.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is looking at extricating itself from the awful financial crisis we hit last year.  Ireland, meanwhile, hurtles not only towards the horrendous spectre of having 500,000 adults on the live register, but the rarely considered and terrible consequences of massive levels of people unable to meet repayments on mortgages, loans etc, not to mention the loss of business which must be crippling companies right now cannot be underestimated.

It seems shocking that the current "NAMA" solution only deals with the twin peaks of banking and construction and effectively solely "bails out" these business sectors - ignoring services, manufacturing and retail, some of which are literally dying on their feet.  There is a real lack of investigation of the way in which the credit crunch has damaged businesses - for example, a lot of businesses have lost lines of credit and flexibility which is squeezes them hard.

Meanwhile, obscene profiteering in commercial and residential rents seem unaffected by the crunch.  Landlords are still looking for rent levels that are simply not justified in terms of real world profits.  Its incredible that the "social dividend" suggested by hypocrite Dan Boyle (I call him a hypocrite because he is effectively shutting down Musgrave Park in Cork as a viable concern by helping to stymie the redevelopment of the site by voting against planning for apartments on part of the site that would finance the redevelopment while moaning on his website about sports facilities moving out of urban areas, as they are being forced to move out by policies such as his that deny access to mixed zoning in order to finance redevelopment costs, leaving the sports groups with no choice but to entirely sell off the land and purchase cheaper out of town facilities).

What is worrying is the lack of access to finance and suitable office/industrial leases at a reasonable cost.  Likewise the current Fás scandal is terrible considering that this agency is so desperately needed right now and it is currently facing the spectre of total reorganisation.  Too little, too late.  What are the IDA and Enterprise Ireland doing?  We are effectively financing also the removal of industry and services from Ireland by happily refunding the cost of "redundancies" where jobs are relocating to cheap locations.  Why is the tax payer's money being taken in order to finance the relocation of Irish jobs?  These are not true redundancies and the companies involved need to be forced to pay the full cost of relocation, not be subsidised in profiteering by exploiting tax laws in Ireland.