Announced this morning at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.
Super Retro Boy.
A clone of the Nintendo classics, that plays all your Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games, with a new HD screen, ten hours’ battery life and a bundled cartridge of new games for the classic handheld machine.
Available this August via retro hardware lads Retro Bit.
*drools*
Former Irish swimming coach George Gibney; Investigative journalist Irvin Muchnick
In December, San Francisco district court judge, Judge Charles Breyer, ordered the US government to release documents pertaining to the US immigration file on former Irish swimming coach George Gibney to US journalist Irvin Muchnick.
Gibney was charged with 27 counts of indecency against young swimmers and of carnal knowledge of girls under the age of 15 in April, 1993 – but sought and won a High Court judicial review in 1994 which quashed all the charges against him.
The judicial review was secured following a controversial landmark Supreme Court decision – during which Gibney’s counsel Patrick Gageby argued that the delay in initiating the prosecution against Gibney infringed his right to a fair trial.
After this, Gibney left Ireland for Edinburgh, Scotland and then Florida.
Further to this…
Investigative journalist Irv Muchnick, writes:
Federal judge Charles. Breyer struck a blow for the long, slow bend of justice when he ruled in our favor last month in our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for additional public release of material from George Gibney’s American immigratiion records.
Perhaps we soon will have black-and-white documents shedding light on what the judge termed my suspicion “that the American Swimming Coaches Association greased the wheels for Gibney’s relocation” from Ireland to the United States.
Or perhaps not.
During the waiting game of the government’s 60-day appeal window, which expires a month from now, supporters of Gibney’s many sexual abuse victims, as well as general advocates on two continents, need to keep pushing public understanding of the story’s intertwining threads.
How the American swimming establishment enabled the harboring of Gibney — USA Swimming along with ASCA — is the most resonant thread for me; it ties together amateur sports abuse on a global scale.
But don’t try selling that to the youth athletes and their families who seek basic closure.
Like everything else about Gibney, even his crimes are a multinational affair, with at least one of them, his 1991 rape of a 17-year-old swimmer on a training trip, occurring in Tampa, Florida.
I have no information on whether a government appeal of the FOIA ruling is likely. If there is an appeal, our victory in the Northern District of California will be delayed, at least, while the fight heads to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
But even if we win outright, a lot of work is in front of us. We don’t yet know the extent of the mix of the court’s final unredactions and retained redactions.
Judge Breyer said he was ruling “(largely) in Muchnick’s favor,” but he also made it clear that blacking out the names of third parties, for example, was still appropriate.
If I had to guess, I would say there is likely substantial new information in the additional documents, but I also caution against expectations of a proverbial smoking gun. Challenges of interpolation and interpretation remain.
In the meantime, all other legal gears must continue to turn.
At the behest of Irish legislator Maureen O’Sullivan, the country’s director of public prosecutions (DPP) has been reviewing, since 2015, information on the abruptly terminated criminal counts of Gibney’s indecent carnal knowledge of 27 underage victims (allegations on which the Irish government’s Murphy Commission would find that the accusers “were vindicated”).
Reportedly, there is also other information on never-prosecuted incidents.
A time to wait — yes. But not a time to rest.
In Long and Winding George Gibney Saga, Month of January Is No Time For a Lull (Concussion Inc)
Previously: The Chief Justice, Her Brother And How George Gibney Got Away
DV writes:
Underneath the Xmas tree in Leixlip village, Co Kildare, this morning…
Anyone?
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Yesterday evening.
Culture editor of The Irish Times Hugh Linehan interviewed the newspaper’s Opinion Editor John McManus (above centre, with editor of The Irish Times Kevin O’Sullivan, left, and KPMG managing partner Shaun Murphy at the launch of a magazine in 2013) for his Inside Story podcast.
It following Wednesday’s publication of Nicholas Pell’s ‘glossary of terms’ article and the reaction to the same.
From the interview…
Hugh Linehan: “This week, The Irish Times has come under strong criticism for a sympathetic piece it published about the American so-called alt-right. The article by Irish-based American journalist Nicholas Pell claimed to offer a glossary of terms – some of them racist and misogynistic which are used by followers of that amorphous far-right movement that has grown over the last few years to become a very significant element in the success of Donald Trump. I talked to our opinion editor John McManus about how and why an article of this sort gets published and about his response to the criticism of The Irish Times‘s decision to go ahead with it.”
“John, thanks very much for joining us today. You’re the opinion editor and I wanted to get a sense, first of all, before we got into the nitty gritty of this particular subject of what your day-to-day job involves?”
John McManus: “Well, I suppose the way to answer that is what the purpose of the opinion pages are. We see them as a space in which we will carry pieces that will inform people, challenge people, give them something to think about. And, over and above that, we believe we have a, part of our job is to provoke debate, encourage debate about matters of public interest. So, with all those three, with all those things in mind, the job basically involves going through a lot of stuff that’s submitted, commissioning stuff and then obviously we have our regular columnists. So, between that mix, you know, what you’re trying to do is achieve those objectives. We’re not holding this stuff out as factual accounts, we’re not holding it out as our opinions either. That’s probably an important point to make. The opinions of the paper are expressed only in the editorial columns.”
Linehan: “And, obviously, in this day and age, the opinion page isn’t restricted to a single page in the dead tree edition, there’s also the digital output as well. So, the opinion pages online also…”
McManus: “Yeah, it’s a vertical on the website.”
Linehan: “So, if you’re commissioning then now, does that mean, I know some readers have asked me this in the past, you know, how is a decision made and is the process different of commissioning something which is purely for online. Obviously everything that goes into print, I think I’m right in saying also ends up having an online life as well but, increasingly, you’d be commissioning pieces which end up just online.”
McManus: “Yes, we are, no, the same basic rubric applies. But we have more space, obviously, on the website so that’s why you get pieces on the website that don’t appear in the paper. What we…”
Linehan: “Is there a quality issue? Is their a first division? Second division thing? That things go to print, if they’re deemed good enough or is it different type of content at times?”
McManus: “No, the quality is the same. Perhaps you’d be conscious, you might have a different audience in print as online and you might put a piece in print for that reason. It might appeal to that audience more than the online audience.”
Linehan: “And would you be mostly working with, obviously, as you said, you have your regular contributors, daily columnists and so on, would you generally be working with a pool of people who you would have an ongoing working relationship with or do you take pieces on spec much?”
McManus: “We have our columnists, outside of that, a pool of writers who we would go to because we know they would be experts on a particular area or have a good insight into it. And then, beyond that, we’d get a lot of submissions from a lot of people and we go through them and treat them on merit and, you know, if it chimes with something we think is interesting and that people would want to read about, and it’s well written, then we’ll publish it.”
Linehan: “Which brings me to the Nicholas Pell piece which has caused such controversy over the past 24 hours or so, how did that piece come about?”
McManus: “That was a submission from Nicholas Pell that came in earlier this week and I had a read of it and, you know, I thought it met the criteria that I just set out, you know, it was about a topical issue. It was, it informed people. I mean, at a minimum, you came away from it understanding the language that this sort of alternative right conservative movement in the US uses and, at best, you would, it gave you a pretty good insight into the way their minds work and the ideology they espouse. And the public interest argument is pretty clear because, if you like, the poster boy of this movement, the founder of Breitbart, he’s going to take up a job in the Donald Trump administration. They are a real force in American politics. And I don’t think, to pretend they don’t exist or just not, deciding they’re too obnoxious to be debated with is…”
Linehan: “I suppose there are two separate points to that. I mean I think, clearly, we would all, we would all agree that pretending that something, something which is clearly a rising political phenomenon doesn’t exist isn’t really an option. The piece itself I think, one of the things that people took exception to was that, it certainly seemed to me reading it, the piece itself, was in a jocular fashion, quite sympathetic to the beliefs and, you know, aims of the alt-right movement which is, to describe it as, thinly veiled fascism is not that far from the truth, in some respects.”
McManus: “No, far from it, and some of them would even celebrate being described as such. Yeah, that’s a valid criticism but you’re never going to get the exact, perfect piece you want. And, you know, this piece came along and it was a, you know, it, by publishing it, we’ve served to get this debate going and I think that, you know, the response that we’ve had confirms that this is something that people have very strong views on. You know, it’s not as if we’ve done just a one stop shop, we’ll be having, we’ve a piece lined up for tomorrow hopefully, giving the other alternative view. I’m sure there’s going to be an awful lot of letters. There’s been a huge amount of comment online. So, you know, we’ve done our job in a way, we’ve surfaced this issue, we’re going to…”
Linehan: “I suppose, some of the criticism and…from all kinds of people, I noticed, I just picked up on a couple of them that were interesting to look at. One was Colm O’Gorman, of Amnesty Ireland, and he pointed to an article on the same subject really which The Economist published a few months ago, back in September. I read it, went through the link, it was a well-written, fairly, you know, very objective piece but it contained all the information and more, I suppose, that was in the piece in The Irish Times but did not come across as an apologia for views which many people consider outside the pale, which is the criticism of the piece which we published.”
McManus: “Well, I mean, people are going to feel like they feel and, you know, there’s no point not acknowledging that we’ve offended some people but the point is that was not our objective. What we were trying to do is, it was a piece that gets this issue ventilated and you can argue about the tone but fundamentally, you know, it wasn’t, I’d be amazed if anybody came away from reading that piece thinking ‘these are good guys, I really like what they’re doing’. You know, to a certain extent, we let them hang themselves.”
Linehan: “Well some people did because I actually…I noticed, I mean I was looking at Nicholas Pell’s Twitterfeed for example and he was retweeting comments by people who clearly identified with out-and-out fascist organisations who were expressing pleasure at the fact that these views and some of the expressions were appearing for the first time in mainstream Irish media, which had never happened previously.”
McManus: “Yeah, but they’re going to appear in mainstream Irish media. You go and Google any of those words and they’re, you know, they’re out there now but that’s, you know, not even…”
Linehan: “But isn’t this part of the criticism of Liam Hogan, who’s written extensively about the conflation of Irish indentured servitude with African American slavery, as a way of undermining the critique of racism in American society. That’s a very long-winded explanation of who he is but he’s a respected scholar in his own right. And he was writing today about this process of what people call normalisation is going on at the moment. Now, obviously, normalisation is a reality because, as you say, some of these ideas have been injected much deeper into the American mainstream than they have been previously and in other countries, too. But is there a responsibility on us not to go along, fully, with such normalisation? I suppose the question is: would an equivalent article been published in The Irish Times ten years ago?”
McManus: “That’s hard to know. And things, the media has changed dramatically. There was no social media, as such, ten years ago but there’s a couple of points there. One is the Irish, sort of, right-wing fascist thing is a niche within a niche within a niche and…”
Linehan: “Well, American fascism as well…”
McManus: “The broader thing is, I suppose, what you’re talking about there, is this whole business of platforms and who you should and shouldn’t give a platform to. You know, we as an organisation don’t subscribe to the…I mean I understand the platforming argument is that the groups that are either so powerful or so controlling, you know, it’s unfair to, they shouldn’t really be allowed access to platforms. We don’t really subscribe to that, we will run pieces by people whom we don’t agree with. We will run pieces that we think may challenge our readers. We think, to a certain extent, our readers want that, they almost expect that of us. I mean, if you look at the abortion debate at the moment, we’ve run trenchant pieces arguing it both ways and they’ve upset people on either side of the argument but, you know, we haven’t had the same level of…”
Linehan: “Is that a valid comparison though? Because the views of the, of the organisation, I’m not even sure if it is an organisation, it’s more of an amorphous thing than that. But the views, the racist, the white nationalist views, the deeply misogynistic views, in some ways, are not, for example, reflected in any way in any elected political body of any consequence that I’m aware of in Ireland. Whereas, in fact, there is a political movement, you know, there are political views on both sides of the equation in the abortion debate, for example.”
“I suppose what I’m trying to get at is if, say that, this is within the boundaries of what The Irish Times thinks is valid, publication of interest and debate, what’s outside the boundaries?”
Silence
McManus: “Well, you know, there’s taste and decency and this piece, we believe, fell, fell on the right side of that and I think it’s, you know, it’s… The point of publishing the piece was that, you know, Donald Trump is going to be in the White House in a few weeks. This movement fed into his election. People who are aligned to this movement are going to in his administration. You want to know…if you don’t know who they are, what they do, you should because they’re going to be a factor. They’re going to be in the news this year. They’re going to be affect how America is run. There’s no point pretending they’re nasty, fringe, marginal people who are just going to go away now. That’s not going to happen. So, unpleasant, disgusting as they are, they’re here. If you’re serious about challenging them, then you want to understand them…”
Linehan: “Accepted but then in covering that, is there a greater than usual, perhaps, imperative on all of us to be careful about who we do get to cover these issues. You know? Because again, this comes back to the criticism of this, this is somebody who has never written for The Irish Times before. I’ve no reason to believe he’s not a perfectly professional individual. His sympathies, it seems to me, are quite clear in terms of the tone and tenor of the article. You know, is that sort of person the right person to cover an area of such sensitivity because, you know, there are serious kind of issues that people might, are personally affronted by this subject.”
McManus: “Well, that’s a risk, like I said, if we offended people, that wasn’t the objective but I suppose you could argue if we had got one of our writers there, if I’d suggested to one of our columnists ‘why don’t you write a piece about this alt-right movement’, they would have written a fine piece but you probably would have come away from it thinking, like I said, that’s a nasty fringe movement that shouldn’t be taken seriously. You know, which would be, a lot of Irish Times readers would be comfortable with that because it would reinforce their views and this piece doesn’t. So, it’s offended some people, that’s never the objective but it’s probably shaken a few other people out of a certain complacency about it and this consensus that, you know, that they can be ignored or shouted down.”
Linehan: “I suppose one of the things that strikes me about that is we’re talking about this in the context of a way of thinking about journalism, in particular, which is rooted, to be honest, in the printed newspaper and the idea of the opinion page. That these things play very differently in the digital space and the social media sharing space and that, in particular, with a piece of writing of this sort..I went searching around a bit, around about the writer, Nicholas Pell. He actually wrote a piece, quite an interesting piece actually, about how you can learn to get paid for trolling online. And he goes into some detail about what he’s learned about getting paid for trolling online. And a lot of the criticism in the last few hours of this piece is that this is The Irish Times engaging in the lowest form of trolling. I’ve, myself, written a few pieces over the last couple of months about this whole issue about fake news. Reading the piece, it’s not a million miles away from what those Macedonian teenagers were doing in Veles and making money out of it on Facebook.”
McManus: “I don’t think so, I mean he hasn’t said anything, he hasn’t made anything up there which I think is the definition of fake news. It’s clearly…”
Linehan: “Actually one of the points he makes about effective trolling is, always make sure everything’s true. It’s an interesting piece actually.”
McManus: “Social media is very fickle. You know, it’s a very quiet day, in the start of January, everyone is going beserk about this particular piece. I don’t think it’s going to be remembered as one of the stories of 2017 particularly. I think, people having a great, good, strong, robust debate going on…”
Linehan: “There’s one particular phrase in this glossary of alt-right phrases. And it says ‘dindu od dindu nuffin’ and that’s described as ‘A black man convicted of a crime, often one lionized by the press or portrayed as innocent. An attempt to approximate the African-American vernacular English pronunciation of “didn’t do anything” (“dindu nuffin”).’ Now I look out the window, at the sea of white faces here in The Irish Times and I’d say if I was a person of colour, I would say that is a racist statement published by an almost exclusively white media organisation.”
McManus: “You would and we thought about whether or not to include it and took the view that, you know, if you’re going to, if what you’re setting out to do is provide a lexicon of these people’s language, this is what they mean when you read that word, that’s what they mean. Then…”
Linehan: “Would you do the same with an anti-semitic phrase?”
McManus: “Well, it’s all about context isn’t it? I suppose if there was an equivalent context perhaps yeah, and this is one of those… it’s..”
Linehan: “I suppose really..”
McManus: “That’s the, that was the question for us really about this piece was, you know, we know what we’re about and we…but you know this piece was practically at the edge of what we considered acceptable for publication. And we, I took the view that it was acceptable. And I thought there was good grounds for publishing it because, you know, if nothing else, you can say it’s worked. We’re having, there’s a big debate going on now about these people and their language and perhaps it’s, people are going to realise that they’re real. You know I keep going back to the fact that they’re connected to the Trump administration and, you know, if you’ve read that piece, you now know more about them and what they’re about.”
Linehan: “And was this the best way to do that? I suppose, I’ll just ask, I mean just to wrap it up, the conflation of the issues we’ve gone through here, that you had a, you had a writer who, we didn’t really know who he was..would you have…is that fair to say? You know, we’re not really familiar with him..”
McManus: “He’s never written for us before but…”
Linehan: “So, you’ve a writer that hasn’t written for us before at all, writing on a subject of which I think, we can all agree, is a very sensitive subject in terms of some of the issues, in terms of…writing about that subject from a point of view of sympathy, I would say, to views which the majority of people in this country would find reprehensible. And, in the course of doing that, using objectionable racist hate speech.”
McManus: “Well, that’s the criticism of the piece. They’re the counter arguments which, you know, I’ve been through, are that only on balance… it was worth publishing and I suppose there is a certain…”
Linehan: “You don’t feel at all that, you know, this is an imperfect trade that we work in, we all make mistakes and god knows, I’ve made plenty of them along the way and you wouldn’t be a journalist if you didn’t make mistakes sometimes, that sometimes, you know, that in a context like this, there’s not some element of it that you’d be prepared to acknowledge, in retrospect maybe, that you might have done it somewhat differently?”
McManus: “Well we’re not in the business of offending people, it sounds trite but it’s true. So, I suppose, yeah, you, when the dust is settled on this, you know, that’s the thing we need to look at. You know, was it, did we offend more people than we informed? I suppose is how we’ll judge it. And did we offend too many people? Is perhaps the other things we need to get a handle on. I’m not going to get, I’m not going to do that right now.”
Inside Story – Reaction to ‘alt-right’ article (Irish Times)
Previously: To Pell And Back
Photograph: Irish Times
UPDATE:
A ‘wordle’ of the interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8wpUaZ-qKM
The 6-axis-gyro-stabilised, 1080p, radio-controlled, crash-resistant drone you’ve been waiting for – currently funding on Indiegogo
From top: Simon Coveney TD and Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal Damien English TD
The Rebuilding Ireland Plan has allocated insufficient funding, is manipulating the use of the term ‘social housing’ and misleading people with its promises
Dr Rory Hearne writes:
The government has been responding to the Apollo House action by stating that dealing with the housing crisis is its “number one priority” and that their housing plan, Rebuilding Ireland, will address the crisis through the investment of €5bn in “a truly ambitious social housing programme of 47,000 units to 2021”.
Minister Coveney claims that “There’s a real acceleration happening here in terms of delivery” and has stated that there will be more than “21,000 social housing solutions provided in 2017”. With Budget 2017 providing “for a very significant increase in housing funding (of €1.3 billion).
But the Minister’s figures and the Rebuilding Ireland Housing Action plan just don’t add up.
The graph above is the forecast provision of social housing in the Rebuilding Ireland Plan from 2016-2021. But in this you see that the new construction of social housing (represented by dark blue shade at the bottom) is only a very small proportion of the overall 100,000 ‘social housing’ units to be provided over the next 5 years.
The majority of ‘social housing’ is in fact not new build social housing at all but are various housing support schemes provided through the private rented sector such as the Housing Assistance Payment and the Rental Accommodation Scheme.
These social housing ‘solutions’ (as the Minister’s refers to, note change of language from ‘new build housing units’ to ‘solutions’) are temporary, do not provide tenants with security of tenure and most importantly do not increase the much needed supply of real permanent social housing homes.
The schemes such as RAS and HAP have not met their delivery targets due to lack of availability of private rental housing (thus the governments social housing strategy also exacerbates the rental crisis – as it is taking supply from a sector that requires greater supply – a third of all tenancies are state funded social housing schemes.These should not be classified as social housing as it is not providing a secure form of tenancy).
Of course the HAP schemes suit government because they can reduce the housing waiting lists and make it appear as if the housing crisis is being dealt with – also while subsidising private landlords and avoiding allocating the necessary increase in funding to government/local authority state provision of affordable housing.
The Rebuilding Ireland Quarterly Review published in November gave the first official figures for what is represented in the graph above and breaks down the 47,000 ‘new social housing’ units figure.
This outlines that of the 47,000 social housing units by 2021:·
It is expected that 26,000 units will be built (construction, voids, Part V) exclusively for social housing
11,000 will be acquired (by LA, AHB & HA) from the market
And 10,000 units will be leased by LAs and AHBs – this will be a mix of units from the existing housing stock and newly-built units
Now the key figure here is the new build one because this provides additional housing supply. This is particularly important in Dublin, the commuter counties and other large cities (Galway, Cork) which need new units built and do not have the same vacancy level as other parts of the country. So the actual figure for ‘new build’ social housing units is 26,000 units (just over half the headline 47,000 figure).
Now as is mentioned this also includes bringing local authority voids back into use and new housing built under Part V (the 10% social housing provided in large private housing developments). But Part V delivered just 65 units in 2015 (but 286 were in progress).
Given that Part V delivered 3,246 units in 2007 (4.5% of total 71,000 private units delivered), and that was when Part V was 20% of all developments – which has since been reduced to 10% (but developers could pay cash to the local authority in lieu of the units and this is no longer available), then using the same percentage, then on the basis of 25,000 private units per annum, Part V is likely to deliver no more than 1,250 units per annum in the coming years.
That brings the 26,000 ‘new builds’ down to 24,750.
It was also estimated that 800 local authority voids would be brought back into use in 2017 so taking that away it leaves us with 23,950 new real social housing units planned to be built between now and 2021: which is 3,991 units per annum.
At that rate of delivery it would take 22 years to house all those of the current social housing waiting lists (90,000 households) into real permanent social housing homes.
How can that, in any way, be deemed an acceptable time frame of delivery to address the crisis? Particularly given that housing need is increasing significantly.
So what about the increase in the allocation in social housing investment in Budget 2017? The total exchequer Housing allocation in 2017 will be €1.2 billion –up from €814million in 2016.
However this is the same trick – the main increase is on temporary social housing through the private rental sector. Current (mainly spent on private rental sector schemes and leasing from private sector) increases from €382m to €566m while capital expenditure (includes new building and purchase of permanent social housing) only increased by an additional €150 million from €432m in 2016 to €655m in 2017.
But the ‘housing’ capital budget appears also includes €50m for an ‘infrastructure’ fund for local authorities to enable the development of private sites for housing, the payment for previous social housing already built by housing associations, the mortgage to rent scheme, urban regeneration, €70m for retrofitting existing social housing stock, €45 million for grants for private housing and funding for schemes such as the Pyrite Remediation Scheme. So while we don’t have an exact figure we can see that the actual budget allocation for new building (and purchase) of social housing is certainly under €400 million.
Therefore, the social housing units outlined in the Rebuilding Ireland plan are in fact largely various forms of private sector and privatised housing delivery. They are dependent on various forms of private financing, ‘off-balance sheet’ mechanisms, Public Private Partnerships, acquisition from the private market and delivery from Part V mechanisms.
The plan itself acknowledges that securing the social housing output is “dependent on a number of critical factors” including, most importantly,
“A functioning private residential construction sector, with levels of supply to meet demand (delivering 10% social housing units under Part V and providing a supply for targeted acquisitions)”.
Social housing provision is being privatised onto the private rented sector– which has meant a failure to achieve social housing targets and reduced private rental stock available to the wider population. This is not a ‘social housing’ strategy!
And this is where the plan ultimately fails. Its output of social housing is dependent on a very significant increase in supply in the private housing market which has already proven in its inability to do so.
What is required is an increase of the social housing capital allocation to €2bn per annum to local authorities and housing associations to ensure the building of at least 12,000 new permanent social housing units. This is alongside the changing of NAMA’s mandate to prioritise its social mandate over the maximising financial return and to ensure the 20,000 units it builds are affordable and public housing units – and to use its 3bn cash reserves to build an additional affordable and social 30,000 units.
It is only when we get close to building at least 20,000 new affordable and social housing units per annum that we can get close to addressing the national emergency of the housing crisis.
Ultimately the only guarantee of affordable supply of housing to a broad range of income groups (from the lowest income to middle income workers) is by the state through local authorities (with support from Housing associations). A social mix in developments can be achieved by the state building affordable housing available to different income groups.
This should be a mix of traditional public housing, cost rental housing, shared ownership, equity partnerships and cooperative housing. It is the time for a ‘New Deal’ in housing where we take this opportunity to ensure the provision of affordable and high quality homes as a right to all in this country.
It is great to see that Home Sweet Home’s Emergency Housing Plan includes these ideas as some of its core proposals.
Home Sweet Home outlines that there should be the provision of “a minimum of 10,000 new social/public housing units owned by Local Authorities and Approved Housing Bodies per year for the next decade in order to clear all social housing lists”.
The government should “suspend all sales by NAMA of land and assets and use its finances to deliver 10,000 new social and affordable housing units for families and low-income households”.
Most importantly Home Sweet Home outlines that this new social and affordable housing building programme can be financed through “ceasing all tax cuts until the current housing and homelessness crisis has been averted”. It states that it “is morally reprehensible that we have so far given more than €2.5 billion in tax cuts while homelessness has doubled and thousands of children are spending their childhoods growing up in hotel rooms”.
They also highlight correctly that “should borrowing be necessary, the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) has borrowed €500m at an interest rate of 0.81%. This low cost borrowing could provide up to 5,000 social housing units per year”. F
urthermore, they point out that in 2014 the Irish League of Credit Unions formally proposed making up to €5bn available for social and affordable housing schemes but “two years on and Government has yet to formally respond. This source of funding should be accessed as a matter of urgency”.
The reality is that the government in its Rebuilding Ireland Plan has allocated insufficient funding to the new build of permanent real social housing homes. It is manipulating the use of the term ‘social housing’ and misleading people with the figures it is using in order to suggest its plans will address the crisis – when in fact there is much less new build of real social housing in the plans than the government is trying to portray.
Rebuilding Ireland is a fundamentally flawed plan as it driven more by an ideological aversion to the state building affordable homes than evidence-based policy solutions based on meeting the housing needs and right to housing for people.
The Plan is based on the taxpayer incentivising and subsidising the private construction industry and private speculative finance through the various private rental social housing schemes, the ‘help-to-buy’ subsidy (for which there was no cost-benefit analysis done!), Real Estate Investment Trust tax breaks, the sell-off and leasing of local authority land to developers and the sale by NAMA at discount of land and property to vulture funds and investors.
The alternative approach outlined above is, therefore, urgently required. And that is why it is really important that the Apollo House and Home Sweet Home campaign gain sufficient public support to achieve this policy change.
Dr Rory Hearne is a policy analyst, academc, social justice campaigner. He writes here in a personal capacity. Follow Rory on Twitter: @roryhearne
Rollingnews
Claire Cahill writes:
Hey everybody… Podge ran away today in the Christchurch, Dublin 1 area. Can people please keep an eye out for him and contact me if u see him? Thanks so much.
Anybody?
From top: Samoa Joe and Finn Balor: Finn’s tweet
Former WWE Universal Champion Finn Bálor on Twitter yesterday, repping Miltown Malbay beatmaker Mankyy and his debut E.P. to wrestling rival/colleague Samoa Joe.
The lad’s so good, he’s brought about peace between two lads that only recently settled their score in a steel cage.
Fergal Devitt, the man behind the facepaint, is a Bray, Co. Wicklow native, and a renowned Irish music nerd, as some may recall, going as far as having Naive Ted write his old baddie gang’s theme tune. He’s had plenty of time to get caught up, while out with a shoulder injury.
Rumble!
