LETTER: Nobody fooled by spin on housing

SIR – A group photo doing the rounds of Dáil government ministers Heather Humphreys, Leo Varadkar and Eoghan Murphy, when they announced their ‘grand plan’ to ease the housing scandal in the distant future, is a prime example of wriggling off the current hook with related bluster and inaction on the housing crisis.

The silly and permanent smiles of those who nowadays try to convey that while everything has the ‘we never had it so good yet we will make it even better’ spin, this fools nobody.

There has hardly been enough social housing built in the past 10 years that would satisfy an Irish village, and nonsense talk of the Land Development Agency is yet another longer-fingered promise which will do nothing to help the people who are in immediate danger of having family life ruined because of a decade of absent housing policy.

We are in an era of false and red-herring governance, which sees frivolous pseudo-references to our Constitution which affects vocal minorities on issues the general public are not aware of, yet are now replacing and taking priority over the real and desperate needs of the population.

Don’t take any hope or even notice of, I’m sad to say, what this government tell us. The same goes for their ‘coalition’ partner Fianna Fáil, the cuckoo policies of Sinn Féin, and the tried-and-tested failure of Labour in government. 

Where do we go and what we do as voters? I just do not know, and that we live in a wonderful country otherwise, we are ill-served by our leaders who ignore us. 

It is as if we do not matter within the hollow circle of the EU, and the distant policies of Brussels and Berlin are adhered to, as we pander to the whim of that overlord who doesn’t know or couldn’t care less that the Irish cannot afford a mortgage and are being evicted in the midst of the fiercest local authority housing shortage since the foundation of the State. 

Is it unmannerly now to mention the poor and the ‘new’ poor, because those who do so (even pensioners) could be told to ‘get a job.’

There was a time when trust and hope in our rulers held out some chance; those days are now gone. Sell to the overseas vulture funds and make families homeless with government approval is the real face of ‘liberal’ Ireland.

Robert Sullivan,

Bantry.