Fine Gael Minister Charles Flanagan's attitude to refugees is worrying
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- Category: Foreign Affairs
I had planned on saying something other than what I am about to say because I find it difficult not to run across the Chamber. It was upsetting listening to the Minister. He said that we needed to prevent conflicts from starting. How in God's name can he say that? He is allowing Shannon to be used as a US military airbase. We are giving permits for munitions and armed troops to pass through Ireland on the way to war fronts. How can the Minister say that we are interested in preventing conflicts from starting? That is too bad.
According to the Minister, the Turkish deal is tackling the business end of the problems and will stop the smugglers. On what planet is he living? We are feeding the smugglers. Turkey is a disaster and the deal is nonsense. Approximately ten people per week are being killed because of that deal. We are actually killing people with EU policies. We are drowning them. The Minister said that we would protect them. Five hundred people died ten days ago in one of the boats in question because of the Turkish deal. It will drive them across the Mediterranean, not stop them from coming. Closing off borders and building 30 ft. fences will not stop them. This is crazy.
Deputy Clare Daly: I would wait until the Minister finishes his conversation.
Deputy Mick Wallace: No, he can talk away. He obviously does not listen even when he is looking at me.
An Ceann Comhairle: Minister, I think that the Dáil-----
Deputy Clare Daly: It is a disgrace. His conduct is despicable and shocking.
An Ceann Comhairle: Deputy Wallace, please proceed.
Deputy Mick Wallace: As the Minister knows, we were in Calais and Dunkirk two weeks ago.
Deputy Charles Flanagan: That is the place for you.
Deputy Mick Wallace: The smugglers there are the only people who are doing well. And they are doing really well. They are making more money now than they were six months ago because it has become more difficult to get in. Most people will get into Britain anyway. They just have to pay. Families are paying £20,000 to get to Britain from Dunkirk and Calais. As to where in God's name they are getting the money from, their cousins and other relations back home begged, borrowed and stole to get it. God help them if they believe that they will be in the promised land when they get to Britain or Ireland, but that is neither here nor there. The smugglers are making a fortune. They have doubled their fees lately. The minimum for an individual is £8,000. Most children are still chancing their arms on trucks. They try to jump up between the cab and the trailer in the middle of the night while it is still moving to get onto the roof or into the back. People are dying doing this.
We met so many young people, it was not funny. It is bad. We met many Irish people there working as volunteers who really cared. We met a man called Dylan Longman and another called Dave in Dunkirk. They have given up their lives to try to help people. Karen Moynihan, Sinead, Barbara and Fintan were in Calais. Many Irish families would like to help.
We were invited to dinner in a makeshift cabin in Calais by a man called Khan. Nine men, all from Afghanistan, were there. A couple of them told their stories, but most said that they could not because they were too upsetting. The youngest was 14 years of age, but the average age was 16 or 17. These are children. Could we do something just for minors? Could Ireland become a champion of refugee minors? Could we go to Calais and Dunkirk, process some of these people and see whether we could take them in? It would not cost the State a penny. Irish families are prepared to take them in. I promise to take one in myself.
I met a child of 15 years. He lost all of his family - his brothers, sisters, mother and father - on the Iran-Afghan border. He is 15, and he would like to come to Ireland or Britain. We have often argued in the Chamber that Ireland has great potential to play a positive role in world events as a neutral country, but we have been silent and complicit in the role played by the US, France and Britain in the militarisation of the planet. The Minister said that we wanted to address the causes, but we are quiet about Palestine and the genocide that Israel is trying to carry out there.
Someone from the Government should go to Calais - maybe someone has - and Dunkirk to see what is happening. The Afghans told us about a man who had to leave Afghanistan because one of his family members had worked with the US army, so the Taliban was after them. He spent six months in Calais, but could not take it anymore mentally. He turned himself in to the French authorities and they sent him back to Afghanistan. He was dead within two weeks. Afghanistan is controlled 50% by the Taliban and 50% by ISIS. Its Government is a sideshow. It is not a country to which people should be returned.
Calais is dominated by Afghans and Dunkirk mostly comprises Kurds. I would love to see people from those two nations welcomed in Ireland. The people whom we met were such good people. They are not looking for a free ride in any form. They would like to work and make new lives in Ireland where they would not be afraid of being killed. They are not terrorists. They are running from ISIS and the Taliban.
There is the potential for Ireland to take a different approach. We can do things differently. We can show that we care. I believe that most Irish people do, but the Government's approach has, sadly, been abysmal. I plead with it to send representatives to Dunkirk and Calais and set up a process whereby individuals can be screened, even if they are all under 18 years of age. Let us take minors. We cannot go wrong with that. The Government will find Irish families that are prepared to taken them in. They will not be a burden on the State. They will not have to go through the difficult direct provision process, which I had planned on discussing but will not now.
We are blessed in Ireland with opportunities. We are not afraid of bombs falling on us at night while we sleep. Generally speaking, we are not worried about where we will find our next bite of food; we are not dying of hunger. We seem to forget that these are not even economic migrants, which all of the Irish who left Ireland were. There are millions of Irish people all over the planet. Imagine if they were as unwelcome as the Afghans, Kurds and Syrians are in Ireland.
Please, let us consider this matter again.”
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Mental Health in Wexford.
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Mental health was the health issue raised most with me during the election campaign in Wexford. Problems with mental health are not confined to Wexford but the county did have the highest suicide rate in Ireland in 2015. That is not unrelated to the fact that Wexford has the third highest level of deprivation in the country or that the HSE deals abysmally badly with the problem there. A person who is feeling suicidal or has any form of mental illness in Wexford after 5 p.m. or at the weekend has serious problems trying to get help. The person will eventually end up at an accident and emergency department in Waterford where he or she might get a referral and get some professional help or a space in the unit in Waterford.
We now hear that the HSE might want to cut one-third of the ring-fenced money from the mental health budget. This did not start overnight. In the 1980s, 13% of the health budget was spent on mental health services but in 2015 it was 6.2%. In 2010, the year that Wexford and Waterford mental health services amalgamated and all acute beds were moved to Waterford, the suicide rate in Waterford was 11.5 per 100,000, while the rate in Wexford was 11. The following year, the rate in Wexford had almost doubled to 20 per 100,000 and Waterford's had remained steady. Wexford has had roughly double the suicide rate of Waterford ever since. New figures from the Central Statistics Office show that Wexford now has the highest suicide rate per capita in the country. It would be hard to find a more striking example of what cuts in this area of the health service can do. They literally kill people.
I am not advocating that we reopen units such as St. Senan's in Enniscorthy. However, when it was closed, next to nothing was put in place to fill the gap.
A serious national conversation and re-evaluation needs to take place about how the State provides mental health care and how we understand mental health issues. We need to look at models that work for people and help them lead healthy and productive lives in the community. We need to take away the stigma that surrounds mental health issues. Central to facilitating this change is questioning the dominance of the medical model approach to mental health problems, the prevalence of the notion that the pharmaceutical industry can provide us with magic bullets to treat so-called mental illnesses. There is overwhelming evidence that the anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs are dangerous if used as a long-term solution to mental health problems and the outcomes for those who receive psychotherapy are much better.
In 2012, the Minister of State with responsibility for mental health met the former assistant State pathologist, Dr. Declan Gilsenan, the psychiatrist, Professor David Healy, and others to discuss the dangers of anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications. Professor Healy has spent the better part of his career researching the effect of these drugs. He found that pharmaceutical companies are systematically blocking efforts to detect problems, and ghost-writing scientific articles that hide the dangers of new drugs while making it financially attractive for the psychologists and psychotherapists who they see as the real clients of their products to promote and push these products on a public that is not warned of the dangers and have little or no recourse when these professionals prescribe them a substance that has damaging and sometimes fatal effects. However, the warnings of these professionals are being ignored. The number of prescriptions is rising as are the number of people reporting mental health issues and the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.
During the general election campaign I met a woman in a pharmacy in Campile. She was alarmed at the rising level of use of drugs by young people to address mental health problems. She said there was not enough education on the matter and that drugs were seen as a fast-fix solution, but they were not working.
If it was true that the magic bullets worked and we were pursuing the right approach with these revolutionary drugs, should there not be a drop in mental illness problems? The most successful mental health programmes are ones that involve care in the community, psychotherapy and the use of drugs only in extreme cases and on a short-term basis. We need to move to something along these lines and the sooner we re-evaluate where we are going in this area, the sooner we will start to save lives, and improve the quality of lives of these in distress and the lives of those around them.
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Another Neoliberal Government will not solve our Housing Crisis...
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- Category: Dail Work
32nd Dáil - Dáil Diary no 20 - 8th April 2016
Most people in Ireland realise at this stage that we have a Housing Crisis, which is directly linked to Homelessness , but there are times when I suspect that neither Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil have really grasped it. The country's two largest parties are unashamedly right wing Neoliberal's and so tend to have an ideological problem with the idea of the State directly supplying Social Housing to those who need it, through our Local Authorities.
Last week, among the measures proposed by Fine Gael include linking funding for Local Authorities to their return of vacant social housing units and the examination of tax relief proposals for landlords who deliver a greater supply of private rental accommodation. So starving our local authorities of the necessary funding and keeping them on a shoe string, looks like remaining part of the plan, while continuing with the failed policy of relying on the private sector to meet the housing needs of those who can't afford to buy.
Meanwhile Fianna Fáil are now looking for NAMA to supply 20% social rather than 10% on State owned land - what would be wrong with NAMA supplying 50% social units in their plans to build 20,000 units, on land owned by the people of Ireland? NAMA say that they expect to be selling Private units for around 300,000 euro - how many of the people who are victims of our present housing crisis could possibly afford to buy one of NAMA's bargains?
Answers on a postcard please...
The Neoliberal policies of Fianna Fáil/Greens and Fine Gael/Labour led to a rise in inequality in Ireland, which has caused untold damage to our society. Ireland does not need another Neoliberal Government ....
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Fine Gael / Labour Government’s decision to allow NAMA sell much of Ireland to US Vulture Funds has worsened Housing Crisis…
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- Parent Category: Dail Work
- Category: Finance
32nd Dáil -
Dáil Diary No 1- 29th March 2016.
Last week the Dáil opened for one day, Tuesday March 22nd, and I got the opportunity to speak for the ten minutes on the housing crisis in Ireland today. For 5 years, the last Government failed to deal with a problem that continued to worsen every day of the lifetime of the Fine Gael / Labour Government. Just like the Fianna Fail/ Green government before them, they were happy to pursue a neoliberal agenda which prioritises the interests of the Financial Institutions and Big Business., and not the interest of the people of Ireland, whose living standards were eroded by Austerity. Hence, the low priority given to the peoples need for quality, affordable housing. While their 'Keep the Recovery Going' line came a cropper in the election, as little more than 20% experienced it, the biggest achievement of the Fine Gael / Labour Government was how it managed political spin and controlled the mainstream media, locally and nationally, which happens to have a vested interest in the status quo and neoliberalism. Here’s my ten minute Dáil contribution. -
"I also want to avoid repeating what we have been saying here for the past five years and I want to look at what we should do now. We should learn from our mistakes over the past five years. I remember on 15 January 2014 having a serious argument with the Minister for Finance about inviting and encouraging the investment funds to avail of huge tracts of property in Ireland, having to pay no tax on it, no tax on their profits on the rental and no capital gains if they stayed for seven years. It was a crazy arrangement.
The idea that we now have a professional landlord and that everything will be cleaned up and it will be great for everybody does not make much sense if a person cannot afford to pay this new fancy landlord who is charging 40% more than was being charged before. The price has gone off the Richter scale. There are huge problems in every sector of housing and there are huge challenges for the next Government. We have to get over the idea that the State should not build local authority social housing. Doing this is a challenge. I noticed only two weeks ago that the British Shadow Chancellor recommended that Britain should now take a five-year exit from putting infrastructure money on the books and making it subject to the usual fiscal rules. Germany and France broke that rule in the past and got away with it. We need to borrow money on the markets at 1% and invest in local authority social housing. It is imperative that we do it and we should not have to use PPPs and pay 15% to do it. That is 15 times the money and it does not make sense. If Europe turned us down, given that we have a housing emergency, it would mean Europe just does not care about us anymore. It would not make any sense.
The private sector had been driven out of the market by NAMA and the banks conducting fire sales of assets and sites for less than half their value. One can say that no one knew the value of the assets. We have had that debate here several times but things do have value. A house has the value of what it cost to put there on the day it is sold. NAMA has been selling property for less than half what it costs to build on that particular day. That, for my money, is bad business and I do not see how the State could have allowed it to happen. How in God's name did the Government allow Project Arrow to be sold last December by NAMA? Residential units in the Republic of Ireland were sold for peanuts. The only ones winning are the investment funds. The Irish people are paying the balance of the money that is missing and then the investment funds chase the individuals concerned for a second whammy. One could not make it up.
Let us say the EU gives us permission to break the fiscal rules for a five-year period. Will the next Government then be prepared to borrow in the region of €8 billion or €10 billion to invest in local authority social housing and how should we best go about it?
We have not got enough time to discuss the ins and outs of it but regarding Part V and the question of 10% versus 20%, I do not agree with Fianna Fáil's point. We will get nobody to build if we take 20% of units off them. I do not think they understand how the system works because when the builder provides Part V units, he gets only the agricultural land value for his site. If he pays in the region of €100,000 per unit for it, he loses that. If he loses it on 10%, fair enough, but if it is on 20%, we will not get him to build at all. I suggest that we need the State to buy out 20% of it from the builder. The Central Bank rules are solid. The idea that people would have to come up with 20% of the money to buy their house is not the craziest notion in the world and there would be fewer people running into trouble. However, it places a new obligation on the State to provide housing. We need to provide quality State housing and not ghettos, and there has to be a whole new way of thinking about how we build them, in terms of whether the will be fit for families. We have never built apartments in this country that were fit for families. The legislation before Christmas reducing the quality of the unit in order to entice the private sector in is not what is required. That was an own goal and is a crazy way to go. It will not help matters. That was not the big factor keeping the private sector out of the market.
We have to take a whole new approach. For starters, if the Central Bank rule is to stick, and I think it should, social housing will have to come to about 30%, up from between 10% and 15% over the years. I would argue that every development that goes up in Ireland today should have 30% social housing. The builder would provide 10% of it and the State would buy out 20% of it because we want to stop ghettoisation. This idea of building huge blocks of units that are all social is nonsense; it has not worked. We need to get away from that and we have to look at the type of unit we are building because we cannot cover the country in concrete.
We will have to go down the apartment route for living space, for the long term rather than, as it is at present, for transitory purposes. People cannot raise a family in an apartment block in Ireland today; it just does not work.
If the State is prepared to borrow money at an affordable price and challenge Europe so that we can borrow money at a rate of 1%, the State would be able to go out there and build units, and buy 20% of all private developments where there was already a 10% social provision. As a kick-start, the 20,000 units that NAMA is supposed to provide, which are currently 90% private and 10% social, should be 50:50.
The biggest problem facing housing today is unaffordability. People will not be able to buy the apartments or houses that NAMA intends to build for the private sector. They say there will be an average selling price of €300,000. How many of those who are in trouble today with regard to keeping a roof over their heads will get the money to buy a unit for €300,000? Bugger all. Therefore, these units are not for those who most need them. It is outrageous that private housing will outnumber social housing by nine to one on land that the Irish people already own, which is NAMA's land.
At present, nobody in the private sector wants to build in Ireland. The banks would not even finance it. If I had a site tomorrow and I got planning permission for it, I would not get funding from a bank in Ireland for it because it is not attractive enough for banks. I recall that when the Government came to office five years ago it stated that it would set up a State investment bank that could do these things. Let the next Government do it. We need a functioning State investment bank that will lend to people to build.
The other matter I wanted to raise with the Minister, on which I argued tooth and nail in here with him and the Minister of State, Paudie Coffey, is land-banking. My God. How big a problem is this? It is crazy that the Minister has refused to do anything about it. His vacant site levy was a joke. A person who owned land and who had borrowed money for it did not have to pay the levy at all, and if he put a few horses on it, it was not even vacant. It was an absolute joke of an effort to deal with the issue of land-banking. Will the next Government have the appetite to do it? It is a no-brainer. It drives the cost of land up to an unbelievable degree. They are building three-bedroom houses 20 km from here today that will sell for €345,000. I can tell the Minister that if he travels 20 km outside any city in Italy, he can buy a house for less than half of that.
Is the Minister aware that if a house is sold in Ireland today for €300,000, more than 50% of this ends up in the State coffers? The high price of housing in Ireland has suited the State. It has not suited the Irish people. We need the next Government to take an honest approach to every aspect of housing."
Good soundness is a result of proper food and hygiene. How can medicaments hels up? Circumstances that can influence your choice when you are buying medications are different. Below are basic reasons about cialis vs levitra vs viagra which one is better. Surely there are also other momentous questions. Choosing the perfect treatment edition for a racy disease can get really confusing considering the advantages and disadvantages of the existing treatment methodologies. When you buy remedies like Cialis you have to bear in mind about levitra vs cialis vs viagra. The most significant thing you must look for is which works better viagra or cialis or levitra. A long list of prescription drugs can lead to erectile dysfunction, including many blood pressure medicines, pain remedies, and most of antidepressants. Sometimes the treatment options may include erectile malfunction remedies or hormone treatments.
