Tag: Housing

Happy the opposition when a government cannot effectively promote its own achievements…

by dsmooney, posted in Fianna Fáil, Green party, Housing, Mary Lou McDonald, Micheal Martin, Taoiseach

This column appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday, May 23rd 2022, and sees me return to a point I have made many times over the past few years, namely the urgent need for a government response on housing that addressing the crisis on the scale required. This government’s “Housing For All” strategy is a dramatic improvement on the near inertia of the previous 6+ years under Fine Gael, but it is still not on the scale or timeframe required to convince the public that this crisis will be over soon. And… to make things worse… inflation, rising interest rates and building cost increases will make a tough task tougher.

Just over a week ago Iarnród Éireann announced that it was no longer able to provide catering services on its Intercity network. With the exception of some Dublin/Belfast Enterprise trains, passengers will not be able to buy a cup of tea/coffee accompanied by a stale Kit-Kat or a half-filled sandwich.

Yes, we will miss the fun of seeing what items the catering service had managed not to pack on to those wobbly aluminum trolleys which dispensed hot water with all the force of a 56-year-old man with a swollen prostate… but as problems facing this country go, this isn’t a big one.

The problem has nothing to do with the complexities of providing a cup of tea on a train and – according to the catering contractor, Rail Gourmet – has all to do with the real difficulties it is having in finding staff to push the trolleys up and down the train. Rail Gourmet says the problem is so acute that it cannot resolve it, and so Irish Rail must now organise a tender competition so it can hopefully restore this fairly basic service sometime in 2023.

Continue reading “Happy the opposition when a government cannot effectively promote its own achievements…” →

There’s only one issue that matters – and it is #housing

by dsmooney, posted in Covid-19, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Housing, Micheal Martin, Sinn Féin

This column appeared on Broadsheet.ie on Monday May 31st and looks at the main issue occupying the minds of most Irish voters, Housing. Now that public concerns about Covid-19 are beginning to ease, its attention has almost immediately returned to the issue that dominated before the pandemic: housing… particularly the seeming inability of the two main parties to grasp the scale of the crisis for many people. 

Cherrywood site – Dublin 18

Regular readers, by which I mean those who have read a few of my columns, opposed to those who have read just one while eating a bowl of fruit and fibre,  will know that I have a few themes to which I like to occasionally return.

These include, Fianna Fáil’s future, Northern Ireland, defence/cyber security, and the old hardly annual: electoral politics. It is why opinion polls can be a useful grist to my mill. I say “can” as most of the polls published since last December have not – with the exception of one Sunday Times/B&A poll – shown much political movement.

The shifts in support between the parties over the past five months have been negligible. Across that time Red C has had Sinn Féin in a range of 27% to 29% and Fine Gael in an even tighter range of 29% to 30%. In effect, Red C polling has the two biggest parties in a continuing dead heat for first spot.

The range widens when you turn to Fianna Fáil. But is also drops. Like the proverbial stone. Red C has the party of Lemass in a range from 11% to 16%. If you treat Fianna Fail’s numbers as if they were high-diving scores (plummeting more like, says you), by removing the highest and lowest ones, the party ends up in the much tighter 13-14% range.

Continue reading “There’s only one issue that matters – and it is #housing” →

Forget Dear Kylie… it’s the letters Leo that won’t write that matter

by dsmooney, posted in Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, Politics
This piece appeared on Broadsheet.ie on April 2nd. 2019:

kylie-01 (1)

No matter how I try, I just cannot get worked up about Leo Varadkar’s hand written letter to Kylie Minogue.

I can see how some folks may see it as a bit cringey, but I also know that if I had been in Leo’s position back in 1989 when Frank Sinatra was playing Lansdowne Road with Sammy Davis Junior and Liza Minnelli, I would not have stopped at just writing a fan letter.

I would have happily agreed to replace Amhrán na bhFiann with The Best Is Yet To Come and offered to make Italian our first national language just to get an invite to the after-show party in the Horseshow House. I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky lucky… (Where did this come from?).

Continue reading “Forget Dear Kylie… it’s the letters Leo that won’t write that matter” →