Brendan Burgess
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Good article by Pat Leahy
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A useful principle for evaluating any plan for reform is to ask who will be discommoded, inconvenienced or annoyed by it. If the answer is “nobody”, then it usually means that nothing will really change.
....
In Monkstown — not a shoddy address either, by the way — locals were concerned about the loss of the largest surviving 19th-century garden in the area. People Before Profit — I’m not making this up — fretted that the scale of the development was “out of character with preserving the Victorian ambience of Monkstown”. Our friends in PBP, as you might have noticed, are not exactly shy when it comes to lambasting the Government for its failure to provide housing. Their commitment to preserving Victorian ambiences is less well known.
Of course, not every housing development is suitable for its proposed location. But is every single one unsuitable?
...
As long as we pretend that we can solve the housing crisis with some hitherto magical solution that involves simultaneously building and not building houses, as long we insist that we can reform the health service without asking people to change, then we won’t make much headway on these two pressing social crises.
Pat Leahy: Real change in modern Ireland means really annoying some people
Health and housing are examples of a pressing need for altered thinking on how to fix festering problems
A useful principle for evaluating any plan for reform is to ask who will be discommoded, inconvenienced or annoyed by it. If the answer is “nobody”, then it usually means that nothing will really change.
....
In Monkstown — not a shoddy address either, by the way — locals were concerned about the loss of the largest surviving 19th-century garden in the area. People Before Profit — I’m not making this up — fretted that the scale of the development was “out of character with preserving the Victorian ambience of Monkstown”. Our friends in PBP, as you might have noticed, are not exactly shy when it comes to lambasting the Government for its failure to provide housing. Their commitment to preserving Victorian ambiences is less well known.
Of course, not every housing development is suitable for its proposed location. But is every single one unsuitable?
...
As long as we pretend that we can solve the housing crisis with some hitherto magical solution that involves simultaneously building and not building houses, as long we insist that we can reform the health service without asking people to change, then we won’t make much headway on these two pressing social crises.
