From top: Minister for Housing Darrah O’Brien (left) with Peter McVerry at a construction project on Haddington Road, Dublin 4 where the Peter McVerry Trust will deliver 18 new social housing units; Dan Boyle

The government’s housing policy is starting to take shape. It is likely to increase supply significantly. However, because of conflicting objectives, it is also likely to miss out on key objectives.

The building of greater numbers of social housing units, after decades of neglect, will help dampen rising prices. A ramping up of cost rental, what the Green Party has promoted most strongly, should achieve something similar.

Where I feel the government’s strategy will achieve least is by placing too much of an emphasis on affordable housing.

In Ireland we have had a cultural attachment towards home ownership. This obsession has been why the development of property has become a touchstone of our economic being, often to the cost of having a more rounded, more diverse economy.

In recent decades Ireland has gone from having one of the highest levels of home ownership in the World, to now being under the European average. For some this is deemed to be a bad thing.

Mixed and balanced housing tenure should be the goal of any housing policy. We are still a journey away from that. What is making that a harder to journey is the clinging to of the belief that incentives benefit house buyers rather than property developers.

What taxation incentives have also done has been to direct building types of development other than residential housing.

Welfare for developers has given us more hotels, student accommodation and introduced us to the joys of co-living. All developed while a dearth of residential housing continued.

I’m not opposed to incentives, where such incentives have direct positive effect. What I would like to see incentivised would be to bring back unused, vacant and derelict properties back into housing stock. To seek these objectives would have a broader benefit of bringing City and town centres back to life.

The concern for Generation Rent would be better applied if we had less of an emphasis on home ownership, with much more of an emphasis on security of tenure.

Fair and affordable rents must be the policy goal, even above affordable mortgages. Government policy needs to promote this as the norm, not as some kind of runners up prize for the disappointed.

While we are at it maybe we could try to bring to an end the era of property porn. Rhapsodic prose celebrating additional zeros being added to property values has not served us well.

What it has done has made housing less attainable for more people. It has brought additional, but largely notional, wealth for an older generation many of whom live in housing that is much too large for their current needs.

Traditional housing policies have made housing people more difficult. They have created the instruments that are helping to ferment greater inequality.

Ultimately it is the economy itself that suffers. A population constrained by rents that are too high or mortgages that are too expensive, limits money being spent on anything else.

There are small signs of wanting to do things differently. But the movement is too slow, too tentative.

Demography demands that we do things differently. The real goal should be to own the issue rather than insisting that all of us should be preoccupied with owning property.

In baseball parlance that would be a home run.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator and serves as a Green Party councillor on Cork City Council. His column appears here every Thursday. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

RollingNews

There’s a reason why stars appear to twinkle and it’s this: constantly moving pockets of slightly off-temperature air in the Earth’s atmosphere that distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects.

But how to counter the blur caused by this atmospheric turbulence? To wit:

The telescope featured in this image, located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, is equipped with four lasers […] tuned to a colour that excites atoms floating high in Earth’s atmosphere — sodium left by passing meteors. These glowing sodium spots act as artificial stars whose twinkling is immediately recorded and passed to a flexible mirror that deforms hundreds of times per second, counteracting atmospheric turbulence and resulting in crisper images. The de-twinkling of stars is a developing field of technology and allows, in some cases, Hubble–class images to be taken from the ground. This technique has also led to spin-off applications in human vision science, where it is used to obtain very sharp images of the retina.

(Image: Juan Carlos Muñoz / ESO; Text: Juan Carlos Muñoz)

apod

US boffins have shown that pigs can use a digital screen and joystick, operated by their snout, to move a cursor around for rewards

So pigs, if they’re given joysticks
Can be taught to do several tricks
On a computer screen
It remains to be seen
What problems this news may now fix

John Moynes

Pic: Candice Croney

From top: Terenure College; John McClean

This afternoon.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court

Details of the abuse of children at Terenure College over a period of 27 years were outlined the ahead of the sentencing of rugby coach John McClean.

Via RTÉ News:

The 76-year-old is a former rugby coach and English teacher. He was also involved in fitting costumes on boys for school plays.

He abused nine victims in an office, eight during preparation for the school plays, three during sporting activities and three in the classroom.

The court also heard today that a school principal had been told about the abuse in 1979, but did not accept the allegations were true.

The details of what McClean did to six of the boys has so far been outlined in court.

The court heard they were 12, 13, 14 and 15 years of age at the time.

In their victim impact statements, the boys, who are now men in their 50s, spoke of how the abuse damaged their lives.

One said he can never forget it, while another spoke of subsequent failures in relationships with women.

Some told how they left the school early, did not complete State examinations and were deprived of an education in life.

Former Terenure College teacher abused boys in office, class, during sport and before plays (RTÉ)

Previously: Guilty

Thanks Blueshirt.

Via Wikipedia:

Dillon temporarily resigned from Fine Gael in 1942 over its stance on Irish neutrality during World War II. While Fine Gael supported the government’s decision to stay out of the war, Dillon urged the government to side with the Allies.

A passionate anti-Nazi, Dillon described the Nazi creed as “the devil himself with twentieth-century efficiency”. His zeal against Hitler drew him the ire of the German minister to Ireland Eduard Hempel, who denounced him as a “Jew” and “German-hater”.

Even Eamonn De Valera, then Taoiseach, was not spared the fierceness of Dillon’s rhetoric; when the Taoiseach ridiculed Dillon’s stark support for the Allies, noting this meant he had to adopt a Pro-British stance, Dillon defiantly retorted

“My ancestors fought for Ireland down the centuries on the continent of Europe while yours were banging banjos and bartering budgies in the backstreets of Barcelona.”

Olé.

FIGHT!

Slightly Bemused writes:

There are few things more wonderful as a father than receiving a call from your daughter. Which can be followed moments later by a terrifying term: ‘I need your help.’

Visions of the world ending, desires of being superman to turn up and save the day. And then you breathe a sigh of relief when she tells you what. ‘I need help with my homework!’ Nearly as terrifying, but maybe less daunting.

Last time she asked me for help, it was for her Maths homework. Since I was in school they have changed the way maths is taught. I was terrible. I knew the answers, but the method and that whole ‘show your work’ thing really tripped me up. As Mr Incredible commented, they changed math!

This time was easier. She was asking about the tin whistle. I actually knew something about that. I still have mine, a C silver, although which box it is in still eludes me. In school we had Wednesday afternoons for music class, and I recall many hours attempting to get the pitch right. Breath control was never my strength. But my teacher tried, and Fáinne Gheal An Lae was massacred many a time. O Ró Sé Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile did not do much better.

But I have friends and family who are much better than I. And of course we have the virtuoso talents of so many across the country. And the fact that a new development, the feadóg íseal, was developed within my lifetime. Music evolves, instruments evolve, but sometimes you do not expect it to while you are around to see it.

I used have one of those pairs of trousers with the long whistle pocket. I guess I lived in hope. I think we lost them once the superstores started getting trousers from other places, and I realised that for the past 18 years I have bought most of mine in shops in the US. Arising from my first visit where I literally arrived in the clothes I was standing up in. A fire in my apartment where I nearly lost the mother of my daughter meant I lost my wardrobe. I have never and will never regret that decision, but I have to be honest that fire terrifies the living daylights out of me even now.

I arrived the night before Thanksgiving, into a very busy Chicago. And there was a possibility that an air of diesel fuel still clung around me (it was a diesel heater went up and took down the apartment). I still remember the face of the immigration official. There was (maybe still is) a small green card that you said what you were importing. And I did not fill one out because I did not actually have anything.

I was also sincerely whacked by the long journey, and I wonder what I must have looked like to that poor officer. But he looked me in the eye for a few moments, grunted slightly, and cleared me for entry. It was late, so off to my lady’s brother’s place, and a shower. JC Penny had to wait for the morning, but that night I was treated to an incredible band while the man who would soon be my brother in law quite literally cooked up a storm. An incredible chef, he cooked the cake for our wedding.

This was before September 2001.

What has any of this to do with tin whistles? Well, I bought one for my daughter a few years later. Bringing it in through customs in the US at that point was a little more interesting. Understandable, so this is not a complaint. But I think the customs official has Irish ancestry. Whatever it looked like on the scan, once I opened my bag and she saw it, she chuckled, and after checking everything else, I was cleared.

When I arrived at her home, I gave it to my daughter. Now, I mentioned that I struggled with breath control. She was just coming up to her 8th birthday, but she just took it, wandered through a few scales, and then rattled off a beautiful tune she had learned on violin. She was 8, she had just been handed a new instrument she had never used before, and in moments was rattling off classical music. Her mother was a piccolo player, so maybe not surprising. I struggled for years to get a straight tune.

If anyone is interested, it was a D scale in brass.

Her next project is on bagpipes. That will be fun :-)

Slightly Bemused‘s column appears here every Wednesday.

Pic: Naomi Tin Whistles

Broadsheet.ie