People before Profit meeting - Who Owns Ireland ?

national | anti-capitalism | news report Friday May 19, 2006 12:26 by Cathy Swift - People before Profit Catherine.Swift at may dot ie 086-0679708

Meeting 12th May, Cassidys Hotel, Dublin

People before Profit held their fifth public information and discussion meeting on the topic of "Who owns Ireland" on Friday 12th May. Speakers included Carmel McKenna (standing for People before Profit in Wicklow), Frances Corr (representing CRAI), Frank Connolly of CPI and Village and Richard Boyd Barrett (SWP and People before Profit candidate in Dun Laoghaire.)

Who owns Ireland?

At a meeting in Cassidy’s Hotel, Dublin on the 12th May, People before Profit held their fifth public meeting of the year on the topic of “Who owns Ireland?”. The meeting was addressed by Carmel McKenna, Frances Corr, Frank Connolly and Richard Boyd Barrett. There were also contributions from the floor.

The first speaker was Carmel McKenna, a community activist and ex-Labour Party member selected by the Wicklow People before Profit group to contest the general election. She began by interrogating the title - what was meant by “own”? Do we, as Irish citizens, “own” our democracy? Did we vote for coalition government ? Do we “own” our education system? She quoted Fergus Finlay: children are three times more likely to be illiterate if they come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Approximately 1000 children do not make the transition from primary to secondary school, mainly travellers. At third level, 80% of the children of those with professional qualifications go to college while only 28% of those defined as “working class” do so. Furthermore, there is an increasing trend of dropping out of college prior to taking the degree amongst the latter group.
On the issue of housing, she pointed out that we are encouraged to think of equity rather than of homes and that this government has dismally failed to provide the affordable houses which it has promised. On trade-unions – do we “own” our trade unions? Can we control their attitude to partnership? On current attitudes to philanthropy – too frequently we are asked to be grateful to wealthy and benevolent patrons who are providing public assets without being told what these same business men are being given in return in the form of cheap State land and other benefits.
As citizens, do we control the rezoning of land? Who is making the decision to build vast quantity of high-density, low spec apartments or to divide communities through forcing through specific road projects? McKenna would argue that local and regional governmental reform is needed to take power from unelected officials and given back to the people. Proper orderly and phased planning is needed where sports facilities and coastal amenities are given their proper place.
In short, she concluded, that we, the citizens of Ireland own Ireland just as the 1916 proclamation claims but it has been robbed from us by bad government and greedy developers. A revolution is needed in hearts and minds to challenge the prevailing consensus, protect our natural and historical heritage and to join with Wolfe Tone, Michael Davitt, Jim Larkin, James Connolly and the other 1916 revolutionaries in claiming the land of Ireland for the citizens of Ireland.

The second speaker was Frances Corr from Ringsend who spoke of the rampant development in what was still, despite its Dublin 4 status, a socially deprived area. Even the old dump, which closed less than 30 years ago, is now considered ripe for development and is worth millions. The extremely expensive sewerage scheme in Ringsend, designed to deal with the entire sewerage output of south Dublin, is still not working, apparently because it cannot cope with the increased demands made by hotels in the summer months. What will happen once the many new developments south of the river Liffey come on stream is not at all clear. The new incinerator, although not yet built, has already had its capacity increased from 500,000 to 600,000 tons which in turn means 40 trucks a day, 365 days a year making their way down a single access route. The old glass recycling plant is to be developed and the public right of way across the beach is to be closed off. Meanwhile, the local residents are spending their scant time and resources fighting for proper and transparent planning and to stop overdevelopment of a residential area.
She illustrated the problems Ringsend people faced with two specific examples. In local authority housing in the area, no provision at all is made for recycling. Instead, the argument has been made to them that since local authority tenants do not pay for their waste disposal, they will not sort out material for recycling if this option were offered to them. Thus the figures for raw waste are inflated, increasing the perceived need for an incinerator. Secondly, she pointed to a leaflet circulated by Minister McDowell in which he claimed to be against the incinerator and that it breached government guide lines. As Corr pointed out, if it breaches government guidelines, why can’t the Irish Minister for Justice stop it?

The third speaker was Frank Connolly, director of the Centre for Public Inquiry before it was prematurely shut down and now investigative reporter with the magazine Village. In his speech he recapped many of the points made in the Centre’s Corrib gas report (still available in Easons and other bookshops) and in his Village report of 11th May 2006 which he encouraged his listeners to purchase. He drew attention to the safety report by Dr Richard Kuprewicz of Accufacts in the CPI report which has recently been endorsed in the new government-commissioned report by risk analysts Advantica. He also drew attention to the political decisions which had been made by successive Irish government ministers from Justin Keating on. In his view, the concessions made to oil companies by Ministers Ray Burke and Bertie Ahern mean that the state of Ireland will gain nothing from the exploitation of oil and gas reserves off the west coast. This has been the case with regard to Kinsale, for example, which despite being in existence some 35 years has yet to yield a penny to Irish revenue. He disagreed with the argument that the oil companies had to be encouraged to investigate possible oil fields – pointing out that since Ahern had agreed to abolish royalties and allow the oil companies to claim tax write-offs against all exploration, development and shut-down costs, the number of explorations in Irish waters had actually gone down. In fact, investigation showed that the data which pinpointed probable locations for the oil companies to explore had, in fact, been originally drawn up by Irish scientists and paid for by the Irish state.
In his summary of his Village article, he pointed out that Tony O’Reilly’s Providence Oil had spent 11,000 euro for an exploration licence. Providence had now sold on the right to develop the field to Exxon Mobil for over 20 billion euros while retaining 16% of its stake and giving O’Reilly 7% personally of the total value of any find. This means that Providence Oil will make some billions of euros out of what had been a national resource belonging to the citizens of Ireland. He finished by quoting Tony O’Reilly’s comment made to Forbes magazine in 1983: “Since I own 35% of the newspapers in Ireland I have close contact with the politicians. I got the blocks he (his appointed geologist) wanted.”

The final speaker was Richard Boyd Barrett, a member of the Socialists Workers Party and the Save Our Seafront campaign who has been selected by the People before Profit group in Dun Laoghaire to stand as their candidate in the next election. He began by referring back to 1916 and supplemented Carmel McKenna’s quote with the statement, also from the 1916 proclamation, that all the children of Ireland should be cherished equally. He noted that while it has been represented in recent weeks as a nationalist revolt against an imperial power, 1916 was also the culmination of a war by the peasants and workers of Ireland to demand control of the land of Ireland. Now, this FF/PD government are running to hand over control of Irish land and resources to a new aristocracy composed of international corporates and mega-rich businessmen like Tony O’Reilly.
Next, he turned to the Health Service and asked the audience: do people really believe that Mary Harney was trying to solve the health crisis? If so, he disagreed. Boyd Barrett argues that the crisis is not the result of mistakes – it is being deliberately caused to facilitate the handover of public health resources to private businesses and he pointed to the investment of Larry Goodman’s investment in private hospitals in Galway and the Blackrock Clinic. Brendan Drumm is on record as hoping that under the new reforms, no-one should have to lie on a trolley for more than a month – is this a reasonable ambition or the treatment of human beings as packaged meat?
Thirdly, he spoke of the housing scandal and how there is a bigger crisis in house provision than ever before even in the biggest building boom ever known in Ireland. Again, he believes that this is a deliberate policy rather than accident: council houses ceased to be built in order to make profits for developers. Even the coastal amenities are under threat – what he described as a cabal known as the Dublin Regional Authority whose membership is made up of developers and councillors, are currently having unpublicised meetings in which plans are being made to create only privatised and commercial access to the seafronts.
Unfortunately, he continued, it is difficult to see where the opposition to the government will come from. There is no fundamental difference between FF and FG and Enda Kenny’s recent performance of Ard Feis was vacuous. Labour is rushing to the right, as witnessed by their recent call for immigrant control and their unwillingness to challenge the neo-liberal ethos. Even the Greens and Sinn Féin have indicated their willingness to do business with the right-wing parties. In that regard, People before Profit are absolutely clear that they will not go into coalition with right-wing parties and will instead work with grass-roots and community movements which are springing up all over the country in opposition to the authoritarian imposition of a neo-liberal ethos by an uncaring government.

Points made from the floor included the fact that since the Stardust fire, only one single fire officer has been appointed in Dublin, despite the huge increase in the population. Furthermore, Dublin’s chief fire officer has pointed out that on many of the new developments, there are no proper fire exits and that in the event of a fire, people will almost inevitably die. Another speaker from the south-west pointed out that it was a mistake to assume that those who paid health insurance get a good service – appointments to see cancer specialists could take up to 6 weeks and mammograms could take up to 6 months, even in areas of the country where the population had not boomed. Others referred to the Partnership negotiations and the attempts to introduce artificial distinctions between Civil Service grades when a favoured few will get pay increases on a grace and favour basis from their managers. Finally, it was pointed out that Haliburton (the American international once run by Dick Cheney) will now control the Fermoy by-pass until 2037 and will control the proposed Shannon tunnel till 2044.

Participants also asked that future meetings be organised by People before Profit on the disability bill and on the lack of democracy in local government. We would also welcome suggestions re future meetings from Indymedia readers.