greens talking rubbish on housing

a story about the greens here....

Speaking in Dublin today party housing spokesman Ciarán Cuffe said: "We will end the culture of development-led planning, which has left many communities without the basic amenities of schools, hospitals and access to public transport.'' (1)

what a complete load of arse, all these problems have been created by the slow, bureaucratic responses of the government departments involved. politicos seem to give the impression that developers, apply for and get permission, and then build an estate in about 2 weeks. nobody could see this coming, it's all the fault of the greedy developers (boooo).

as anybody with an eye in their head could tell you the time from planning application to even the start of construction takes at least months and possibly years. they can be seen coming. even the much shorter period from getting permission to construction lasts at the very least a month.

even when the estates are built the basic amenities are still not provided, how can you blame developers for that? the primary school in the town where i work has been gathering pre-fabs for the past few years. surely the shock of estates appearing out of nowhere should have been overcome by now and new buildings provided?

one of the ''solutions'' that i've heard mentioned is for planning permission to be withheld until facilities are built. a marvellous plan i'm sure save for the massive retraction in the number of houses built while we wait for the government to get the finger out. it's pretty amazing that developers and builders are made out to be the bad guy because they do what they do (i.e build things) well. apparently not allowed to show up government

(1) in fairness the greens are not the only ones who talk this crap, the article just happened to be about the greens. hardly matters now of course, unless bertie decides he needs their support.

oh no the meedja are out to get bertie

the times today has a selection of letters from people who seem somewhat irked that journalists and papers might dare to question the taoiseachs receipt of £30,000 from his landlord (???).

standard pooh-poohing that you tend to get from party hacks or from true believers, with plenty of illogical rubbish masquerading as some kind of opinion.

letter writers 1 and 2 try to imply that it's unimportant and implore the times to get back to real issues like health, crime, education, blah, blah, blah....

letter writer 1 tries the sob story approach, bertie's being ''hounded'' by vincent brown, the break up of his marriage and so on. (is that a violin i can hear playing mournfully in the back round?)

letter writer 2 says (this is the best)....

i am sick and tired of reading about bertie's £30,000 sterling (equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player) during this election.

equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player? is that all? trivial, laughable really, ha ha ha. not really worth worrying about then is it? but then i remember that 30,000 sterling is around 40,000 euro give or take a few thousand, and that's not adjusted for 13 years of inflation. that works out as one and a half times my yearly salary (at least) so no i don't think it's unimportant or trivial.

letter writer 3 thinks the coverage is unfair and unbalanced, bertie shouldn't be questioned on it 'cause kenny didn't get 30,000 from his landlord, so kenny can't be questioned about money he didn't get so it's unfair.... or something. anyway it's unfair.

i used to think that these kinds of letters could only be written by party members as damage control, until i got in a conversation in a pub (i know) with a guy who thought that this story was all down to the fact that the irish media wanted to like the british media, media peer pressure if you will. and nothing else. needless to say i wasn't convinced by that hypothesis.