Tag Archives: Gary Gannon

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From top: Gary Gannon; and Erica Fleming; Bill Tormey’s most recent tweet; Gary Gannon.

Erica Fleming, who secured a place at Trinity College while homeless, has been told she  is ineligible for the back-to-education allowance (BTEA).

Gary Gannon writes:

I often talk about the importance of education in my life. I am from a post code where less than 21% of the population have a third level degree so it isn’t difficult to measure the advantage my degree has giving me over many of my childhood friends who haven’t been so fortunate in this regard.

I am approaching thirty. I currently have two jobs which I enjoy and my rent is always on time.
It wasn’t education alone which changed my life though. There is a secret to university life that is known only to those of us privileged enough to have benefittd from it.

That secret is that for many people, the hardest thing about university is actually being accepted into one.

My life changed drastically on the very morning that I was granted a place on the Trinity Access Programme (TAP). It changed my identity; it altered the aspiration I possessed for my own future and it immediately enhanced my earning potential.

Very briefly, TAP is a pre-university year that provides an alternative means of entry into Ireland’s most prestigious university for students who come from socio- economic groups who aren’t strongly represented in higher education.

Erica Fleming is both a friend and a person I have the utmost admiration for. Having witnessed first-hand the affect that single room living can have on the mental health of those forced into this existence, I am constantly amazed at Erica’s strength in being able to stand and so passionately hold our system to account.

I met Erica in late February of this year. By that time she had already spent a considerable amount of time in single room accommodation with her daughter Emily.

She was organising a demonstration to bring further attention to the issue and was requesting any advice that I could offer in this regard. I was useless on the topic of protest but we got to speaking about our lives and I shared with Erica my story of Trinity and how access to education had radically altered my life’s course.

Erica spoke of how strongly she desired for her daughter Emily to go to college and I was surprised that somebody as obviously intelligent as Erica wasn’t considering university as a path that was in anyway open to herself.

I strongly encouraged Erica to apply for TAP as I was then as I am now convinced that she would thrive in such an environment.It took a little persuasion but Erica did indeed apply for the Trinity Access Programme and it was little surprise to me that she was accepted on to the course for this forthcoming academic year.

I miscalculated though and I was somewhat ignorant to the fact that the impediments to Erica entering college were much more pronounced than those which faced me previously. I had no children, a part-time job which funded my social life and I lived at home at the time.

This week the department of social protection saw fit to deny Erica’s application for Back to Education Allowance on the grounds that she was not in receipt of the appropriate payment from the department.

This decision is a consequence of Labour’s ‘activation’ reforms. Erica works part-time and as her daughter Emily is over the age of seven, she was moved from the One Parent Family payment to the more restrictive Family Income Supplement.

As you will imagine, Erica did not take this decision lying down and was once again this week being held up as the physical embodiment of poor government policies which are impacting so negatively upon the lives of real people.

Erica terrifies the establishment in this country as she does not fit neatly into their trite understanding of what a person of low-income looks, acts or sounds like.

As Erica has held a looking glass up the woefully ineffective policies of this State, she has of course had to endure quite considerable abuse not only from the conventional trolls of the online world but also from public figures who seem disjointed by Erica’s audacity in challenging them.

I watched in disbelief some time back as a former government appointed Senator not long out of office attempted to smear Erica by claiming that she was a ‘homeless campaigner’ who had in brackets, ‘turned down offers of help’.

It was one of the most egregious acts of smear that I have witnessed from a person who has held high public office towards a citizen of the State and as yet, that former representative has failed to elaborate upon or divulge her source of information in making this claim.

Former Fine Gael Councillor Bill Tormey was a lot more conventional in his abuse of Erica. In classic right wing fashion, the good doctor Tormey tweeted “How many taxpayers are needed to pay for this Fleming woman weekly” in response to Erica’s call for Minister Varadker to provide a common sense solution to these nonsensical policies of his predecessor.

In those statements, Dr Tormey captured perfectly the  ignorance of those who have long since used education as a means of locking in their privilege.

Erica has gone on record to explain that she saw university as her way of escaping poverty and even a crude calculation of that ambition can highlight the flaw in Bill Tormey’s ignorance and Joan Burton’s ‘activation’ policies.

If she was to accept her place in Trinity, it is Erica’s intention to pursue a four year degree in Social Studies while availing of a Back to Education Allowance of E219 euro a week.

Over a four year period, this payment would come to a total of E45,552.

The starting salary for a qualified Social Worker in Ireland is E43,000 per annum according to grad Ireland. At current rates of taxation, Erica would contribute E8,068 per year in taxes from her first year as a professional social worker.

The entire cost of Erica’s education to the State would be repaid within a period of nine years.

The thorough tragedy of Erica’s situation is that she is just a single example of a policy which will in the next couple of weeks prove to bar hundreds of young women and men from gaining the possibility of entry into our education system.

Bill Tormey and his ilk rarely raise their head when tax payers’ money is being wasted to the tune of some E46 Million per year on hotel accommodation for homeless families in our State while measures such as providing security of tenure against ever-increasing rent hikes or the building of social housing were ignored throughout the period of austerity.

It all comes down to who Bill and those who have written policy over the last couple of years have saw fit to place their trust in.

Providing greater access to education and investing in those who are seeking to escape poverty would reap considerable payback for the State.

We must seek to eradicate bad policies that have saw fit double down on the intersectional inequalities that are crushing real people in Ireland today.

Education shouldn’t be a tool by which people like me can be held up as an example of what others may aspire to when the reality is that this is not at all the case.

Erica Fleming is once again championing this cause but as with her campaign on homelessness, she is merely embodying the frustration of the thousands of people in similar situations to her who are experiencing the effects of poor policy formation from this disabling State.

Gary Gannon is a Social Democrats Councillor on Dublin City Counicil for Dublin’s North Inner City. Gar’s column appears here every Friday before lunch. Follow Gary on Twitter: @1garygannon

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From top: Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister for Public Expenditure  Paschal Donohoe in Dublin’s North East Inner City last monthl to meet with local community leaders; Gary Gannon

If Enda Kenny is serious about confronting the challenges of Dublin’s Inner City then he should  put an end to the falsity that the Inner City is an exceptional case.

Gary Gannon writes:

Just a little over two weeks ago the Taoiseach announced that 1.6 million would be invested into Dublin’s North Inner City as a consequence of the fact that in the months previous to this announcement, seven men had been killed on the streets of our nation’s capital in an increasingly violent feud between an international drug cartel and a local criminal outfit.

I should be happy.

The commitment of 1.6 million into a community that has throughout the last several decades witnessed considerable economic deprivation will undoubtedly have positive ramifications.

At least that’s the hope anyway but the recent history of the North Inner City has proven that this may not in fact be the case.

It is important to state that I do in no way doubt the earnest intent with which Enda Kenny has sought to implement this Inner City Taskforce.

I have personally attended three meetings with the Taoiseach on the subject and watched with great interest as a multitude of different community groups and interested parties detailed to him the many, primarily budgetary afflictions which have served to impede their work on a daily basis.

While the Taoiseach appeared more than willing to listen he seemed woefully ignorant to the fact that this is not the first time in recent history that the more dramatic manifestations of poverty in the Inner City have culminated in the State promising to readdress decades long indifference with the promise of a large pay-off for all those who had the confidence to pick up a microphone during the tumultuous periods.

The State appears to find a conscience in regards the affairs of the North Inner City once every decade and without question the greatest example of this can be found in the Gregory Deal of February 1982.

That many of the terms agreed between Charles Haughey and the late Independent TD Tony Gregory never actually materialised appear to have done little to hamper the fact that this special agreement for targeted financial investment into the Inner City area has long since furrowed its path into the annals of Irish political folklore.

It is less well documented but the most intense period of sustained investment into the community infrastructure of the Inner City was in the period after the murder of Veronica Guerin.

It was in 1996 that the fourth pillar of Social Partnership was added in the form of ‘The Community and Voluntary’ sector which may very well have been pushed into the North Inner City inside a large wooden horse.

It essentially resulted in the professionalising of community activism as a State response to the increasingly uncontrollable nature of communities who were self organising and mobilising against not only drug dealers but also against the apparatuses of State who were once again accused of neglecting the most marginalised.

The incorporation of the Community & Voluntary sector was an admission by the State that gang violence had gone beyond their control. The murder of a well respected journalist was a grotesque illustration that the violence was no longer confined to the flat complexes of the Inner City.

‘Tough on Crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was to become the mantra of Tony Blair’s New Labour which were swept into power in Britain in 1997 and this was not a markedly dissimilar approach to what was attempted here in the aftermath of this tragedy.

The Criminal Asset Bureau was established in the final year of the Rainbow Coalition but in the Inner City there also emerged a number of well intentioned community organisations that are still in existence today.

The Inner City Organisation’s Network (ICON), the North Inner City Drug’s Task Force and The Inner City Community Policing Forum are just some of the organisations that evolved from the street protests of the mid-nineties.

Social Partnership and the proliferation of community organisations charged with confronting the challenges of poverty have proven ineffective in stemming the tide of rising inequality, addiction and crime.

This is of course not the fault of these organisations whose work over the past two decades has been commendable but if Enda Kenny is actually serious about confronting the challenges of the Inner City then perhaps he should consider putting an end to this falsity that the Inner City is in some manner an exceptional case.

The marginalisation and social exclusions that exist in the North Inner City are replicated elsewhere throughout the State.

It is national policy and the choices that were and are being made by the governments which he has presided over which have created the conditions by which people are willing to kill each-other for control of illegal drug markets.

It was a choice of his government to cut the funding of community development projects nationally by 38%. This was of course we are reminded constantly a consequence of national belt tightening but the cut to community development was far more disproportionate than to any other sector.

As I sat in those rooms with the Taoiseach and the community groups some weeks back I was wondering if he was even aware of the impact that his choices had made not only on this community but on others like it throughout the State.

I appreciate that it was the violent killing of seven men which enamoured in our Taoiseach an earnest desire to intervene but I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Taoiseach was aware that the most recent figures available from the Health Research Board showed that 679 people lost their life to what the HRB termed ‘drug related deaths’.

I digress though. I of course welcome the  investment into the North Inner City but question the manner in which it is being allocated. Poverty is killing people on our streets and this will not stop that from happening.

If Enda Kenny is hoping to pitch his legacy to the development of the North Inner City then I would advise him that there is an actual metric for progression which has never been fully confronted in a meaningful way.

Only 23% of students in the North Inner City progress on to 3rd level university. That figure is one of the lowest in the country and provides a challenge by which radical change can occur in this community.

To make achievements in this regard will require a long-term strategy that must begin with intensive funding of early years initiatives which have an evidence based approach to breaking the cycle of poverty early on in a child’s development.

Of the investment, we are told that over a million euro is going to be spent on sporting facilities throughout the Inner City.

I certainly don’t doubt the importance of this measure but in seeking to provide ‘mini-pitches’ could we also ensure that are schools and centres of second chance education are equipped with the facilities to provide STEAM subjects that are suitable for matriculation into both our Universities and jobs markets as they currently stand.

The issues facing Dublin’s inner city are replicated throughout the State. If there is to be a specific intervention then make it meaningful and not merely concerned with containing rather than eradicating poverty.

Gary Gannon is a Social Democrats Councillor on Dublin City Counicil for Dublin’s North Inner City. Gar’s column appears here every Friday before lunch. Follow Gary on Twitter: @1garygannon

 

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From top: Clr Gary Gannon  at government buildings last month; Gary Gannon

The age of political spin is fading. What is emerging is a desire to understand what our elected representatives actually stand for.

Gary Gannon writes:

It has almost become a pejorative label in our society but I’m just going to come right out and say it; I am a politician.

I am currently a City Councillor who does aspire to be a national legislator and as such, I will contest the next general election in the constituency of Dublin Central.

I am a member of the Social Democrats. Along with others with whom I share similar values, I am committed to building this political party to the point where we can enact legislation and create budgets in the manner that we feel reflect the wishes of Irish society today.

The above is only really important in the sense that each week I intend on sharing my views with you, the readers of Broadsheet.ie on a variety of different issues.

You should be aware though that at an unspecified time in the future I will be requesting that you might place your trust in my party, over the others that may be on offer.

I won’t be overtly using this particular column for that purpose, but nor should I insult your intelligence by claiming that it isn’t a factor in my considerations.

Last week I wrote an article for Broadsheet.ie which detailed our inhumane system of Direct Provision. In the week previous to that I had requested the opportunity to present a weekly op-ed for Broadsheet.ie and was thrilled when the response came back positively.

I chose to write about Direct Provision first because it is an issue which often keeps me awake at night but I perhaps should have begun by outlining my reasons in requesting this opportunity in the first instance.

This week it was my full intention to examine the issue of alcohol-related health campaigns that are funded by commercial interests. At Monday’s [Dublin City] council meeting I had a motion passed which will in future prohibit the granting of advertising space to these campaigns so this column would have been a very obvious place to elaborate upon why I felt this was an important issue.

I very well may do so in the future but for the moment, it just felt a little wrong to dive straight into that type of conversation.

You see, I am conscious that I am not an impartial commentator. Nor am I an opinion writer or a columnist. These people play an important role in society in terms of generating debate or offering an alternative perspective to the topical issues of the day.

This country, or indeed this world, does not need just another moralising politician who can highlight the ills of society without actually offering a ‘So, here’s what I/we would do differently’ paragraph.

I strongly believe that a politician should have an actual opinion on a multitude of issues that they will potentially have to legislate for or against in the future.

I want a space where I can show to as many people as possible that yes, this is what I believe and this is why I believe that to be so. I requested this column not so much because I feel my opinions or actions are particularly revolutionary or inspiring; I requested this column because I want to be held to account for them.

The term ‘new-politics’ has been sullied recently but I am a person who believes in transformative politics which can re-imagine the cultural landscape of Irish society.

To embody those principles means that I really have no interest in shaking hands with people at the back of mass or finding the cleverest way of saying nothing at all.

Rather I feel what this country has lacked is politicians who are prepared to share honest opinions that may result not in the dreaded loss of votes but in affording citizens the respect of knowing what the person they are voting for actually represents.

It has only ever been in the rarest of moments in Irish politics that we have been presented with the opportunity to hear the true authentic voice of our politicians. We should know what motivates a person to seek an office where you will make decisions daily that will impact upon the lives of other people.

The age of political spin is fading. What is emerging from the electorate is a desire to understand what our elected representatives actually stand for.

Social media and online journals such as Broadsheet.ie lay down the gauntlet to us as public representatives to demonstrate the courage of our convictions by simply taking a position on an issue that can be challenged if necessary.

Gary Gannon is a Social Democrats Councillor on Dublin City Counicil for Dublin’s North Inner City. Gar’s column will appear here every Friday before lunch. Follow Gary on Twitter: @1garygannon

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From top: Mosney Direct Provision centre; Gary Gannon

it is time to open up Direct Provision institutions, give people facilities to cook their own meals and let the adults work.

We won’t be sorry.

In the first of a new Friday column, Gary Gannon writes:

February 19th 2013 was a unique day in my political lifetime. On this particular evening, Taoiseach Enda Kenny rose to his feet in Dail Eireann and spoke not only on my behalf, but on behalf of the entire nation.

His words were perfect and his passion in the delivery of each single syllable was matched only by the dignified courage that was emanating from the public gallery where twenty survivors of state sanctioned abuse sat gazing over that evenings proceedings.

It was two weeks on from the release of the McAleese report into the State’s involvement in the Magdelene Laundries and our Taoiseach was at long last, in the process of recognising the State’s role in that horror.

I felt personally that he was apologising for not only the State’s role in the institutionalising of women throughout our short history, but that he was apologising for us all through our societal complicity in what he rightfully described as ‘our nation’s shame.’

We will never truly understand the barbarity of these religious work-houses where women who had ‘fallen’ in the eyes of an ever moralising society where sent so that moral Ireland could maintain the veneer of purity.

The dark shadow of these laundries, mother & baby homes or the variety of other institutions where we banished the poor and the different should hang around our necks like an albatross but yet, does the existence of Ireland’s system of Direct Provision for asylum seekers show that old habits are indeed hard to kill?

The Taoiseach, in making that apology which I felt spoke for me and the society I wished to be part of said rightfully;

‘In a society guided by the principles of compassion and social justice there never would have been any need for institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries.’

I completely agree but I have to ask why then, in a society which claims now to be guided by those same values is there a need for 679 people* to kept in what are effectively privately run detention centres?

Why are adults who live in this country prohibited from cooking their own meals?

Why is Ireland, with our emphasis on compassion and social justice, one of only two European Union countries who restrict asylum applicants from the labour market for the entirety of their process?

A more important question, with our history of inhumane cruelty in regards the forced institutionalising of those we consider to be different to the mainstream, what arrogance is it that makes us think that this time it will be any different?

Many, giving the extreme depravity of the laundries or the mother and baby homes, will argue that there is no comparison between these institutions and the current Direct Provision centres.

Of course, there is no expectation on people in direct provision to clean laundry as a physical (profitable) embodiment of their sins being washed away, but rather, we expect children and adults to sit without opportunity for life progression for periods exceeding eight years in some cases while an unidentified official of the State makes a decision on their fate.

That is a cruel practice.

It is not to our credit either that we no longer charge religious institutions with the responsibility of caring (said very loosely) with the needs of those we consider unfit for inclusion in the agora of Irish society; instead we hand over that responsibility to our new gods, the private sector.

The post-apocalyptic Disneyland that is Mosney Irish Holidays plc, earned almost 9 million euros in 2009 after converting into a Direct Provision centre.

While we continue to prohibit many of our asylum seekers the facilities by which they can cook and prepare their food in accordance with their cultural preferences, East Coast Catering has received some 90 million euros from the State for services rendered in regards Direct Provision.

We have always been good at turning poverty into profit but at the same we ask adult asylum seekers to live off E19.10 a week!

This is not only State sanctioned poverty it is also a prime example of the State making millionaires out of those they consider worthy of catching the tears of the suffering.

Make no mistake about it, in these Direct Provision Centres there is an abundance of suffering that has been well documented and poorly acted upon.

The Irish TimesLives in Limbo’ series captured the voices and stories of those in Direct Provision in a manner that hadn’t emerged previously.

It was from that project that I first learned that an asylum seeker in Ireland was up to five times more likely to suffer from depression or mental health related illness than in the wider community.

It was here again that I got a snapshot into the conditions present inside where overcrowding, sub-standards of hygiene and families living in single-room accommodation that was infantilising adults while restricting the development of children were all described.

It was in this series too where I first read of the damning prediction that was made by Former Supreme Court Judge Catherine McGuinness who predicted that a future government will be publicly apologising for the damage done by the direct provision system.

That is terrifying and with our past transgressions in this regard so closely wrapped around us still, we, as in all of us must be quicker to respond.

The issue is of asylum is undoubtedly complex but our values, humanity and past experiences should always be to the fore-front of our considerations.

In that regard, open-up these institutions, give people the facilities and the means by which they can provide meals to their own families. Allow adults to work and the dignity that comes with this primal need.

Allow asylum seeks who have gone through the first two stages of our education system to compete for places in 3rd level universities on the same terms as their classmates.

As the children of Direct Provision become adults and more stories start to emerge, we may still have to apologise for this degrading system, but we can act now to prevent having to apologise for tomorrow.

Gary Gannon is a Social Democrats Councillor on Dublin City Counicil for Dublin’s North Inner City. Gar’s column will appear here every Friday before lunch. Follow Gary on Twitter: @1garygannon

* Number of people still in Direct Provision centres who have received citizenship here.

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Gardaí at Avondale House Flats in North Cumberland Street yesterday morning, stills from CCTV footage released to media

 

Further to the shooting of father-of-one Gareth Hutch yesterday morning outside Avondale House complex on North Cumberland Street, Dublin – which was captured on CCTV and distributed to media outlets

Dublin City Social Democrats Cllr Gary Gannon, who represents and was born in Dublin’s North Inner Cityl, writes:

Whatever you may think about the so-called feud and the people involved, at the end of the day, these are human beings and to circulate footage of a man being butchered on a city street is akin to circulating a snuff movie. It is grotesque and does society a huge disservice.

If we allow these victims to be dehumanised in such a way then we, as a society, abdicate responsibility for maintaining law and order and protecting all citizens equally.

Whatever about those who released the footage I firmly believe it is incumbent on our media not to provide a platform for this type of footage which has the effect of sensationalising these murders as if we were dealing with an episode of Love/Hate rather than a real family and their loved one.”

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