The minister was a wooden one who it seems ended up on Prime Time as a result of a short straw. No one else in government wanted to do it.
O’Reilly was good up to a point, which was when she was asked why her party opposed certain house building projects. There was nothing wrong with her answer – her party objected to public land being handed over to private developers. Anybody who has ever worked for one will realise what drives them – unbridled greed. O’Reilly’s problem is that house building, even by private developers on public land, seems such a good idea in the midst of a chronic housing shortage that few are going to row away from any port in a storm on some ideological ground. People in need prioritise practical homes over an ideological dislike for who builds them.
O’Reilly seemed uncomfortable when answering the question, not because her answer was wrong, but because in today’s climate the public ear is not receptive to what she was saying. When a party fails to raise the level of public consciousness to its own ideational plateau it risks being dragged under by the drowning person it is trying to save.
Sinn Fein might yet come to consider that it is best to park its opposition to private developers building on public land, work on it later when the problems posed by private developers look more stark to the public, and get more people into homes now. In Gramscian terms, the common sense at present is that homes are to be welcomed from wherever they come. Realistically, there is little else Sinn Fein can do given its all consuming desire for office and willingness to jettison all ideological baggage in order to get there. It is simply unwilling to think outside of a framework where capital might be brought under democratic control.
The threat posed by the current Coalition government and their allies in the landlord class grows by the day.
Neary 5,000 eviction notices were served on tenants between July and September last summer, new figures from the Residential Tenancies Board have shown.
This means a lot of people facing homelessness, beginning at the start of next month. The cruel irony of wakening up on the first day of April to the government shouting April Fool for trusting us; the landlord is kicking you out with our blessing.
Citizens in this society should not be exposed by the government they place in office to the voracious appetites of unscrupulous rentiers and landlords determined to put profit before people. A government, whatever its composition, that will stand up to the profiteers rather than evict people at their behest is the bottom line for a just society.
Our government is not that. The limits of its imagination will not stretch much further than sending Eamon Ryan out to promise new green benches in public parks (not on private land) for the homeless to sleep on. And just to ensure equality before the law the rich will not be arrested for sleeping on them as well.
⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.
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