Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy TD and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar

IN a new blog posting, Journalist Eamonn Kelly writes:

Neoliberalism is a cuckoo in the liberal democratic nest.

Once seen in this light you can then alter your approach on how to deal with neo-liberals. For instance, if the ineffectual performances in the provision of social care by the current cabinet occurred in the private sector, which they champion so loudly, all of them would be sacked.

But only an idealistic liberal democrat with a belief in rational argument would argue that the failure of this government to address the housing and health crises is due to ministerial incompetence.

A neoliberal leadership, such as the one we have in Ireland, seeks to destroy liberal democracy from the top down, using all the powers and freedoms of that liberal democracy to do so.

That the neo-liberal takes political office at all is the first deception.

That the housing crisis has worsened under Varadkar is not because the problem is “complex”, as he recently claimed, or because his minsters are incompetent as their critics claim, it is because the neoliberal philosophy that they represent, cannot allow for a public work’s programme to build social housing.

The only complex part of the Irish housing crisis is the part where the Irish people seem to be asleep to the fact that there is a neo-liberal fox in the henhouse; an unelected taoiseach who quite openly represents business and business alone and who stated in the Dáil when asked about social housing that people can’t expect a “house for nothing”.

Judge them by their works, a wise man once said.

Neo-liberalism is a very simple philosophy. It is social Darwinism. [More at link below]

Eamonn Kelly is a freelance journalist

The Exhausting Futility of Arguing With Neoliberals (Eamonn Kelly)