Cead Mile Failte Tents!
January 12, 2024
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee was on the RTE Radio1 this morning 11.01.24 speaking about government policy on asylum seekers. She didn’t know much, she couldn’t answer a question on what might be on a proposed White Paper to be brought before the cabinet in 2/3 weeks by Minister for Integration Roderic O Gorman https://www.thejournal.ie/roderic-ogorman-interview-6256121-Dec2023/
She said Government is doing everything it can to put a roof over the heads of International Protection applicants, but women and children must be prioritised. Either she was telling the truth or she was lying. She was not telling the truth.
If she was telling the truth, she can do no better than oversee a situation where 500 asylum seekers are living in tents in this freezing weather, she should be fired with someone else put in her place to do the job. Nobody is fired for incompetence in Ireland.
Her incompetence is contributing to the fact that government is now on its way to exceed 500 Protection applicants living in tents, that number can very quickly rise to 1000 Cead Mile Failte Tents.
Let’s examine possibility she is lying and there is more that can be done to house asylum seekers. It’s possible, indeed extremely likely, there is a lot more she can do to avoid asylum seekers seek Cead Mile Failte in a freezing cold tent a danger to health.
Abundance and oversupply of office accommodation with poor planning has allowed too many office buildings built, compared to apartments and homes required for housing accommodation.
We could re-prioritise the building of office blocks converting existing office block accommodation to bespoke accommodation for asylum seekers.
A less incompetent and more enlightened system would reprioritise building of office blocks to build affordable apartments. Construction workers building empty office accommodation could instead be re-designated to building much needed affordable homes. Outsourcing and remote working provide for this.
We know that poor housing for our upwards of 13000 homeless does harm children’s health and development as set out in recent ESRI report. Building homes we could bring down the cost of health care and save lives.
Given lack of affordability, lack of supply of housing, we might reconsider targeting the retrofitting of homes, its labour intensive aspect using such workers to build emergency accommodation to a high energy standard. Energy efficient, DIY conversions of homes are within the scope of most homeowners.
Nothing is being done, there is a considerable lack of joined up thinking that will contribute to the establishment of an Ireland of tented accommodation, that may grow and grow into ghettos of a worse kind than the slums that were prevalent in the 1930’s. Expect homelessness to contribute to riots on our streets and the emergence of lawlessness.
“For nearly 150 years, the wretched, squalid tenements of Dublin were widely judged to be the worst slums in all of Europe. By the 1930s, 6,400 tenements were occupied by almost 112,000 tenants. Some districts had up to 800 people to the acre, up to 100 occupants in one building, and twenty family members crammed into a single tiny room. It was a hard world of hunger, disease, high mortality, unemployment, heavy drinking, prostitution and gang warfare. But despite their hardship, the tenement poor enjoyed an incredibly closely knit community life in which they found great security and indeed, happiness. As one policeman recalls from over half a century ago, they were ‘extraordinarily happy for people who were so savagely poor’. ( From Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dublin-Tenement-Life-History-Slums-ebook/dp/B00JMEUKL4)
Not only are we failing to deliver housing, we cannot even plan due to incompetence at the highest levels in government, a strategy and plan to aim for to end homelessness, never mind put that roof over the heads of those living in tents.
(Download here 284237)
One recommendation in the report:
“A key recommendation from Sweeney (2022) is that a national agency such as the Land
Development Agency be used to acquire and regulate the use of land for residential
development. Such a body would have the capacity to acquire public and
private land to develop 
for residential purposes. This would result in the
speculative component of land prices greatly reduced resulting in a
potentially sizeable reduction in a key cost of housing construction.”
We’ve had the LDA since 2018, its built virtually nothing. Its perhaps more under resourced that our dysfunctional Planning system. Its filled with a suffocating and bureaucratic incompetence with a performance result clear evidence it needs binning.
According to the ESRI Planning for the Future has not taken into account our expanding and ageing population. The report ends with the ludicrous observation.
“It has also become a concern that An Bord Pleanála, the State planning agency, is substantially under-resourced. The government has, however, passed a bill which seeks to
reform the planning system considerably – the Planning and Development Bill.”
Clearly the ESRI is compliant to the dictats of government with obedient, subservience to the status quo. Its lacking in creativity and wearing a blindfolding lack of ideas.
Sadly, the report does not critique the supposed reforms of An Bord Pleanala to give us a detailed synopsis of these reforms, or whether it regards such reforms are adequate.
At most the ESRI is window dressing of government policy with lack of any cohesive direction that should be followed other than vague notions regarding the building of modular homes. Its not an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_hydroelectric_scheme that brought electricity to the homes of Ireland importing thousands of workers from abroad to do the construction work.
It also has the ridiculous assertion: “It is one role of government to set policy priorities and it is not possible for analysts to rank objectives such as housing, climate and healthcare. However, analysts can provide frameworks and approaches which aid the task of
prioritisation, especially across competing projects. It is in that spirit that our
recommendations are presented.”
IT manages to censor itself lest it might make any policy recommendations worthy of note by government.
I would have thought its main priority is to advise government on what government should prioritise; not be less meaningful than a Greek chorus in Shakespeare.. a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.
Let me nudge the ESRI by suggesting instead of money spent on retro fitting homes, that the building of homes with roofs be prioritised:-)
Undated handout photo issued by the Department of the Taoiseach of Gormanston military camp in Co Meath, which will be used to house up to 350 Ukrainian refugees in military tents as an emergency measure. Issue date: Monday July 18, 2022.
In Poland, with a more enlightened attitude to asylum seekers than that found in Ireland, offices have been turned into shelter for vulnerable refugees, check out the following link
There has been little debate in Ireland on this subject:
“A housing expert has said creating accommodation for asylum seekers in office blocks “is the right way to go”.
“We have to house people in whatever way we can that is fit for human habitation,” Professor Tom Phillips told Newstalk radio.
Prof Phillips, from the school of architecture at University College Dublin, was commenting on the announcement that former office blocks in Galway and Santry are to be used to provide accommodation for international protection applicants.
The Government is also planning to tender for floating accommodation to house asylum seekers amid unprecedented pressure on the State’s integration system, which Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described on Tuesday as a “major crisis”.
However, if it proceeds, the use of so-called floatels is not expected until later in the year, meaning it will not help the Coalition’s push to drive down the current number of “unaccommodated” asylum seekers.”
The above was published by Vivienne Clarke
You do notice the lack of discussion of the topic on RTE by Helen McEntee or indeed by Minister for Integration Roderic O Gorman in the latter part of 2023 or indeed hitherto in 2024.
Whether it is incompetence by this government of FF/FG or by some hitherto unknown foreign edict that comes from the top in Brussels perhaps in the European Central Bank, there is staunch resistance to the institution of any public building programme not undertaken by private funding from cuckoo funds or elsewhere.
Sadly, with the experience of the long delayed National Children’s Hospital, hypothetically, even if there were at this late stage plans afoot to house asylum seekers in office accommodation, the trope of delay and deny, would set such long term Planning and Delivery targets, as out of the question in satisfying the needs of those in tents enjoying our government’s Cead Mile Failte.
Other conspiratorial theories postulate it is the European Central Bank specious arguments regarding Fiscal Space that prevent real government action on our housing and construction sector with adequate Public, Social Housing Programme ready to begin affordable housing. Perhaps they’ve manacled our current government in the wake of previous Bertie Ahearn led building programmes that led to ghost estates. There again there are a plethora of landlords in government making a fortune out of rents who may not want the price of houses to reduce.
Without the above, given that incompetent government is failing to provide affordable, social housing for its own homeless, its inevitable consequence is that the likelihood is, in flaunt disregard of international rules governing the treatment of asylum seekers, asylum seekers face further abuse by our dysfunctional housing market and dysfunctional government.
The asylum seeker offered the 1000th tent should be given a special Cead Mile Failte prize in honour of that glorious occasion!
There is abundant accommodation available to house asylum seekers. In Poland there are many examples of office accommodation upgraded to small apartment living. In Ireland remote working along with hybrid remote working creates opportunity to re-designate emergency provision of office accommodation.
Incompetent government has failed to grasp the nettle and re-designate office accommodation that can be set aside to provide the emergency needs of asylum seekers.
The reason is unquenchable support for cuckoo funds at the expense of the needs of people. Cuckoo funds are the main sources of funding for office, commercial type accommodation. Government needs to step in with smart plans to address the oversupply of office accommodation and end its cruel and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers.
Both in health and education incompetent government ministers trumpet empty promises to end our housing crisis that is now leading to a crisis in education with teachers unable to afford rented accommodation in Dublin. Lack of planning alongside a dysfunctional planning system is guiding young graduates, nurses, doctors and teachers out of our Health and education service where they head for distant land possibly never to return here.
If planning in health and education is mooted by government, it is derisory and inadequate and delayed composed of more denial than any semblance of effective leadership.
University Hospital Limerick is still the most over crowded hospital in Ireland. “There are currently 626 patients currently waiting for a bed in Irish hospitals, new figures show.” There are plans for an extra 138 beds to be delivered in 2 yrs, perhaps double that again some years after that. But there is no guarantee staffing will be guaranteed. So such beds may lay vacant if they are built. Juding by delays with the National Childrens Hospital now due to open in 2025(?), I woouldn’t bet on it.
It might be prescient to require Irish graduates to stay in Ireland a number of years following their graduation. Increasing numbers of training places in Irish medical colleges or training colleges for teachers are not part of government discourse.
Delay and denial in the politics of housing construction has led to a wasteland of provision of Irish housing stock that until recently was building ghost estates across the land?
The word incompetence is not one to be chosen lightly but the standard of appalling lack of delivery of basic services people require continues to worsen downward with spiralling house prices and scarcity of accommodation and increasing unaffordability.
Government plans to tackle the crisis becoming more nonsensical by the day.
Keep counting those tent numbers.
Cead Mile Failte.
till again….
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