Fine Gael shut the door on our homeless crisis
FOR years we’ve been wondering why the Government isn’t pulling out all the stops to deal with the homeless crisis. Now we know, there is none.
This week the message went out loud and clear from junior housing minister Damien English there would be no scandal if not for the media. He even went further Bob Geldof by claiming reporting the truth about rough sleepers is “damaging to Ireland’s international reputation”.
The Taoiseach has also claimed homelessness here is not high compared to other countries, which is more than can be said for his salary. The arrogance and lack of empathy from Mr English is symptomatic of a party moulding itself on the Tory party under Maggie Thatcher.
This has been coming for a while because in September in the same week two homeless people died Leo Varadkar was pondering where he was when he heard about Princess Diana’s death. It appears his spinners have been working overtime reprogramming aides to turn them into right-wing bots in his own image, the Leotards.
Even the Director of Dublin Region Homeless Executive has been bitten by the Thatcherite bug.
Eileen Gleeson said we should be “under no illusion here” when someone becomes homeless it doesn’t happen overnight, “it takes years of bad behaviour probably, or behaviour that isn’t the behaviour of you and me”.
How low can you go blaming people for not having a house in a county where the Taoiseach describes a property costing more than €300,000 as “affordable”? Ms Gleeson also hit out at do-gooders in the “tents and soup” brigade who hand out food and blankets to rough sleepers.
Better to leave it to the experts such as herself, or maybe even better still to take the full corporate approach and hand over the lot to the private sector as they have with jobseeker services.
When the Taoiseach and Mr English say homelessness is not a terrible problem, what they really mean is it’s not a pressing matter for the Government.
They know the homeless will never vote for Fine Gael.
But the fact the media keeps highlighting that people are dying on the streets and a generation of homeless children are growing up in hotel rooms makes it a big problem for Leo’s spin machine to counter. magine Mr English claiming this reporting is “damaging to Ireland’s international reputation” when the land of Leprechaun economics refuses to take €13billion in tax owed to us by Apple.
Where were the worries when Fine Gael and their Labour lackeys were selling off property portfolios to funds at cheap prices in a move that helped cause the housing crisis?
A country that imposed austerity on its citizens to pay off banks and bondholders turned itself into a vulture sanctuary and has a tax dodge called after it, the double Irish, has no need to worry about reputations. It doesn’t have
Ione. A report out this week has found Ireland is the worst in Europe for carbon reduction and Dublin second bottom in the continent for quality of life and the Leotards are worried about our reputation.
Up until recently Fine Gael have been blaming most of the ills of the country on the previous Fianna Fail government but as they approach seven years in office, that just sounds plain stupid. While the current leaders may dislike the homeless, their real enemy is the truth and that is the main reason the Taoiseach is spending €5million of our money each year to subvert the facts with spin.
Isn’t it amazing how Mr Varadkar wants to change legislation to make it easier for tax-dodging giants such as Apple to build manufacturing plants but won’t change the law to deal with the housing emergency? During the Fine Gael leadership race it was claimed Mr Varadkar was a show horse and not a workhorse and those who made the claims have been proved right. He’s also a man who is as short on empathy as the country is on social housing.
As for Leotard English, when we have a junior housing minister who is more worried about what the neighbours think than the plight of the 3,000 homeless children involved, it will remain a case of: Crisis? What crisis? Damien English