Beware of shysters bearing promises ... !

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

Homeless on the streets of Galway, May 2019

In my part of Galway, a young man running for the local elections told one of my neighbours recently that he had never heard of Direct Provision.

The system which the Irish State has used to detain asylum-seekers for almost two decades somehow slipped under his radar.

A system which has made some business people, no doubt many of them supporters of his party, very rich indeed had never entered his consciousness before he began to canvass householders across the city.

But, sure, it doesn’t matter.

He’s a sound lad and he used to be a mighty footballer.

He's the new face of the most popular political party in the land.

He wears a shiny suit and, sure, what more do you want from a local politician? He might even swing a planning application for a member of your family sometime in the future.

Another young(ish) man from his party, who happens to be the Minister for Housing, announced this week that young people in our cities should be “excited” by the prospect of co-living apartment schemes.

The en-suite bedrooms proposed are smaller than the recommended minimum size for a disabled parking space and young workers or students should be delighted to fork out €1,300 per month for these tiny rooms with no kitchen facilities.

As a young man in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember being shocked by the tiny bedsits some of my friends were living in on weekend visits to Dublin.

It seems the solution to our appalling housing crisis, with 10,300 people now homeless, is to return to the bedsits of the 20th century or the tenement slums of the 19th century, while business people in suits – the kind of people who vote for Fine Gael – can celebrate the huge profits to be made from other people’s misery.

The scale of the homelessness crisis is unprecedented

But we vote for these people, don’t we?

We vote for the kind of people who left my 93-year old relative lying on a hospital trolley for 48 hours last summer.

As I sat beside him for hours and hours, losing hope, I didn’t dare to complain.

Because that’s not the Irish way, that’s just the way it is, and anyway you might just be punished if you dare to speak out.

You wouldn’t want to be left an extra day without a bed because you made a complaint now, would you?

Third world conditions in an Irish public hospital

We all know there have been crises in health care and housing for a decade and yet here they are again, knocking on our doors, filling us full of promises five years on from the last round of promises which led to very little or no action.

In my city, the men in shiny suits tell us we badly need a bypass.

As the climate teeters on the brink of catastrophe, an urban roadway through one of the most beautiful parts of the city is the solution to the city’s chronic traffic problem.

No talk of buses, trams, or bicycles, when planners cannot think beyond the car, even as some of the children of the city are experiencing an obesity epidemic.

At the primary school I pass every morning, the road was widened on both sides to make more room for the parents’ cars. And yet they still double or treble park when dropping off the youngsters in the mornings.

It never entered the minds of the planners, or the local politicians, to look for alternatives to the car or to point out to parents that it might be a good thing for the youngsters if they could walk, cycle, or take the bus to school.

Plans are in place for a motorway to destroy a green area of Galway

Across the city, in another ward, a councillor in a shiny suit has become adept at making slick videos.

He walked through the city centre last year to make a video about buskers. Only he didn’t actually speak to any of the buskers themselves.

In the Capital of Culture 2020, it’s all about business and not so much about culture. Why bother talking to the artists who give the city such a welcoming atmosphere when there are businessmen to listen to and bucks to be made?

Funny, I have never, ever met a tourist who has told me he or she has left Galway with treasured memories of the British-owned shops along the high street.

They tend to love our city for its street life, for its vagabond performers, but try telling that to our local politicians who are more interested in looking after investor landlords than solving the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who are struggling to pay the rent on time.

The street performers, the artists, the vagabonds, and the ordinary working class people are being driven out of our cities and out of their homes by politicians who have done so little to provide social housing or control spiralling rents since they last came knocking on our doors five years ago.

It’s actually monstrous that so few people (investors, landlords, bankers, developers) are benefiting so much from the troubles and struggles of so many.

So many people I know have no money at the end of each month.

So many with “zero hour” contracts or par-time work barely earn enough to pay the average rent in Irish cities.

So many people worry at night that they are just a week or two without work, in jobs with no security, away from not having enough money to pay the ridiculously high rents on their homes.

So many people I know believe – sorry, know – they inhabit a different planet from smooth talking Government Ministers like Eoghan Murphy, with his proclamation that the young should be “excited” by paying €1,300 per month to live in a shoebox on the edge of town.

But I guess it’s our own fault.

After all, don’t we vote for these “shysters” with their promises time after time?

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.

Ask them!

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

When it comes to housing, our politicians are letting us down

Here he comes in his shiny new suit, primed for action and full of the joys of life. He wants your vote and he’s ready and willing to engage with you on your doorstep. As long as you don't delay him for too long!

Funnily enough, you haven’t seen much of him for the last five years or so.

There’s football on the telly or you are engrossed in your favourite soap opera and you wonder if you should bother answering the door.

But you should!

Because this is the one time of the year when your local politicians will truly listen to what you have to say.

They are desperate for your votes and some of them are running scared. It’s your chance to tell them what you think.

Such as your disgust that the beautiful green space next to a historic castle, where you like to take an evening stroll, is about to be turned into a four lane urban motorway.

You haven’t spoken to him in five years and maybe it’s time to ask him why he and his colleagues have no imagination when it comes to transport in your city. The medieval streets are clogged and they can never imagine life beyond the car.

Maybe it’s time to tell him how healthy you feel because you abandoned the car and now you cycle to work or school.

But also how unsafe you feel in the mornings because you are so vulnerable on the road.

It’s time to ask why the roads are so eerily quiet during the school holidays and why so many people are so reliant on their cars.

Our streets are gridlocked with cars

Why, in the past five years, have he and his colleagues done so little to provide your neighbours and friends with viable alternatives to their cars?

And why are we building motorways when the very future of your planet depends on less reliance on our cars?

You could tell him that you wrote articles about wonderful plans for a state-of-the-art tram system a decade ago, only for them to be discounted by the "powers that be" at the time.

You could ask him about the scandalous rent prices and how some of the people you work with are spending more than half their wages just to keep someone else’s roof over their heads.

You can ask why local authority meetings can end in furious arguments over issues as trivial or irrelevant as whether or not they should have a monthly prayer and why his party doesn’t feel ashamed that there are now so many homeless children in this city.

You could ask him why a national emergency wasn’t declared when the number of homeless people in this country passed the 10,000 mark for the first time.

Homeless in Galway, just two minutes from Eyre Square

And you could ask him if he felt even a tiny bit of embarrassment when the man in charge of housing people in this city “slept out” for charity last Christmas. All for a glorious photo opportunity, admittedly for a worthy charity, alongside the auctioneer who thrives on pushing up the prices and the businessman who put half of his staff out of work last year.

He might tell you that health care has nothing to do with the local authority, but you might tell him how I felt when I saw my 93-year old father spend 48 hours on a trolley in the Emergency Department of our local public hospital last summer.

About the despair I witnessed all around me and the fear in the voices of people who felt they would be punished or further delayed if they dared to complain.

Only for you to see a smug, happy, smiling Minister for Health post a photo of his dog on social media the following week, seemingly without a care in the world.

You might tell him how hollow the great national “recovery” seemed as you sat there, hour after hour, watching the stressed out hospital staff struggle to cope with the sheer number of bodies in that overcrowded corridor.

Our public hospitals are crowded as the economy "recovers"

You might ask why so many people you know are frightened, clinging on to private health care they can’t afford in the full knowledge that they are only one pay cheque away from being left without a home.

You might ask why so many of your friends and neighbours are struggling, when it still seems that a tiny elite of select individuals can make a "killing" from lucrative Government contracts which are beyond the reach of 99% of us.

You could ask why those who are scraping a living in insecure jobs are forced to pay the deeply unpopular Universal Social Charge, or why the council doesn’t seem to build any houses while so many people are relying on emergency accommodation.

If it wasn't for those charities, or the kindness of friends, how many people would be forced to sleep out in this city every night?

 . . . Or you could leave the telly on and not bother to answer the door!


Got a story worth investigating or a business blog to be written? Email ciaran@ciarantierney.com

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world. 

Welcome to the City of Bluster

Did you know there was a "prayer crisis" in my city this week? No?

Well, I guess you might be more familiar with the homelessness crisis.                                  

It's festival season in Galway, but our councillors are
bickering over their pre-meeting prayers

At this time of year, Galway is buzzing with life. The pubs and restaurants are packed, the arts venues are heaving, but every night visitors are taken aback by the number of people they see bedding down in shop doorways.

They can’t imagine what it must be like to bed out in the most western city in Europe during the cold, wet, and windy months when tourists don’t fill the hotels and the rain and winds sweep in from the Atlantic seaboard.

The scenes in Galway this year are unprecedented, reminding me of the alarming level of homelessness I witnessed in San Francisco - where at least the climate is much better - two decades ago.

The problem in Galway has become more and more acute and more visible. Last winter, for example, homeless people could be seen to brave the harsh elements in a shelter in Salthill for the first time.

Photos circulated of the number of people lying in doorways on Forster Street on the morning of the funeral of a prominent campaigner for the homeless in the city. The sad irony was not lost on his family members and friends.

What the tourists don’t see are the women and children in distress, who have escaped from domestic violence in order to stay in safe houses run by charities at locations throughout the city.

Or how those safe houses can be full to capacity at certain times of year, forcing the members of some families to sleep in cars or on friends' couches.

You won’t see them lying in shop doorways, huddling together in sleeping bags, but they are homeless all the same.

On a special Facebook page, people literally beg for rooms and offer favours as students compete with workers to find places for the academic year.

There have been very few houses built since greedy bankers and developers bankrupt the economy almost a decade ago, putting a massive strain on accommodation as the economy continues to recover.

With rents rising alarmingly, and tourism booming, ordinary people feel they are being squeezed out of their own city and the waiting list for local authority homes includes hundreds of families and individuals who have been stuck in a limbo for years.

There is a transport crisis in my city.                                                    

The people who run this beautiful city spent 75 minutes
arguing over whether they should pray at meetings

In their infinite wisdom, city planners built hundreds of homes on the west side of the city for people who would then find work in factories on the east side.

They have planned everything around the car, in a city which was built for pedestrians or horses when it was founded over 500 years ago.

The roads are choked with traffic, to such an extent that friends living in Dublin tell us it takes them as long to get across Galway on a Friday evening as the entire journey from Dublin to the eastern outskirts.

Every morning, we hear about the huge tailbacks experienced by workers stuck in traffic on their way to the city from satellite towns and villages. They all sit, frustrated, in their cars for hours because nobody ever thought about providing decent public transport for them.

They rage against the city planners, because commuting times are comparable to those in cities ten times bigger than Galway. There is no sign of a decent bus service, safe cycle lanes, or the kind of light rail tram which would encourage so many people to leave their cars at home.
                             

The Catholic Cathedral dominates the city's skyline

There is a health care crisis in my city.

People living as far away as Donegal or Sligo have to come to Galway to spend hours upon hours waiting for treatment in our choked up public hospital.

The frustrations of dealing with illness, or visiting close family members or friends who are ill or in need of urgent treatment, are magnified by trying to negotiate gridlocked roads.

When they manage to make it to University Hospital Galway, they find the cost of parking prohibitive – if they are ‘lucky’ enough to find parking spaces at all. They don’t have the local knowledge to try to find a cheaper parking place in a city where the local authority views car parking as a serious source of revenue.

You’d imagine these important issues would be of huge concern to our local representatives, given that Galway is the European Capital of Culture for 2020 and this beautiful city relies so much on its reputation for friendliness to generate tourism revenue.

But, if you look at the local paper, the biggest issue to engage the members of Galway City Council before their lengthy summer break this week was a dispute over whether or not they should have a Roman Catholic prayer at the start of their regular meetings.

Flags flying over Galway City Hall, scene of this week's
enlightening 'debate' over the pre-meeting prayer

Housing, homelessness, or the health care crisis did not get a look in when the councillors managed to spend 75 minutes arguing vehemently over whether or not they should retain their Catholic prayer.

This week, before the break, they only had one thing to talk about – their precious Standing Orders and the prayer. The meeting had to be adjourned twice by Mayor Pearce Flannery (FG), on one occasion to allow the City Councillors to “cool off” during a heated debate.

There were even allegations of bullying and grandstanding among the pious Fianna Fail members of  Galway City Council, who were enraged that their precious prayer was being disposed of.

For non-Irish readers, these are the members of the political party which managed to bankrupt Ireland as recently as 2008. You might imagine they have more pressing issues on their minds.

So, to their shock and horror, the Councillors will no longer have a prayer in Irish before their meetings from September. They will replace it with a short period of silent reflection.

During the course of more than 20 years of reporting on the local authority, I always found it extremely odd that councillors, officials, journalists, and members of the public were expected to join in a Catholic prayer at the start of every City Council meeting.

I even felt distinctly uncomfortable about it during the 1990s, when the Irish people were being rocked by a succession of scandals involving the Catholic Church.

What kind of message did that convey to Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans, or people of no religion, to see that those who governed them lived by an ethos of a “Catholic country for a Catholic people”?

Tourists enjoying the vibrant street culture of Galway

The council chamber hardly felt like the most inclusive or welcoming place when one religious group was given preference above all others at the start of every meeting.

Scrapping the pre-meeting prayer was surely a no-brainer in a society which may hope to welcome one million Protestants to a secular, pluralist United Ireland some day. It should have been abolished decades ago, despite the heated – and vocal – protestations of the Fianna Fail representatives.

They actually did not move on to any other issue because the councillors became so animated in their debates over the precious prayer.

If they can get so animated over a matter as trivial as a divisive prayer, imagine how heated the exchanges will be when they get around to solving the city’s housing and traffic problems.

Oh, wait … That’s not actually on their agenda!


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and Digital Storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. You can find his Facebook page here

To hire a writer or blogger, contact Ciaran via http://ciarantierney.com

Breaking down the barriers

When I was a youngster, the only British people I knew wore uniforms, pointed guns, and seemed to have hatred in their eyes.

For a couple of years in the 1970s, my parents lived right beside a militarized border which contained watch towers, a barbed wire fence, and was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers.

Crossing the bridge between Donegal and Tyrone was an ordeal; my parents and their friends had to psyche themselves up for routine journeys to places like the nearest supermarket or dentist's.

On one occasion, I remember my father being hauled out of the car by the men in uniforms after he dared to speak back after a long and tiring day spent visiting cousins in Monaghan.

The people of Lifford never knew whether or not they would be hauled out of their cars at gunpoint by young men from places like Sheffield and Sunderland who probably hadn't a clue why they had been sent to Northern Ireland in the first place.                          

Nigel Farage MEP addressing the European Parliament yesterday

Even though I was only five or six years old, I can still remember the agonizing fear in the car as we used to approach the border; our parents cajoling us to be as quiet as mice in the back in case we'd antagonize a hostile, or perhaps even trigger-happy, young soldier.

I remember a customs post up in flames or bombs going off, lighting up the night sky across Lifford and Strabane.

Some neighbours used to celebrate terrorist murders because some of them really believed that the victims deserved to die and you could almost feel the tension and hatred in the air.

People never mixed with the "other side". They'd go to separate schools, play separate games, work in different places and live in different neighbourhoods.

"Our" side had the GAA and Catholic schools, "their"side had cricket or rugby. To this day many people in places like Derry cannot bring themselves to support the Northern Ireland football team which is why James McClean, from the Creggan, plays for the Republic even though he grew up North of the border.

Two teams, a nation divided, and yet we live in peace in 2016.

In the 1970s, some members of my tribe, the Catholics, used to claim that there was no point in even looking for a job because discrimination was institutionalized. In those days it was almost impossible for a Catholic in Derry to get a Council home.

When 14 unarmed people were shot dead during a Civil Rights march my parents decided they'd had enough and they managed to orchestrate a move back to Galway. They did not want their five children to grow up in such a tense environment.

That tension was still in the air when I used to travel to Derry to cover Galway United games for my local newspaper in the 1990s.

You always felt fear or discomfort when you crossed that border and watched the military helicopters flying over the Brandywell on Sunday afternoons, even though the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the deeply unpopular police force) had an unwritten agreement with Derry City that they would not enter the football ground.

Years passed before I really got to know English people. Even when, as a third level student, I spent lengthy summer holidays working in London, I only really mixed with the Irish or Jamaicans; there was a lot of distrust of the Irish, while the IRA "campaign" provided a negative backdrop to our experiences as young migrants in the British capital.

It was in London that I first encountered casual racism, but I knew that didn't mean there were more racists in the UK than back home in Ireland. In those days, you could probably count the number of black people in Galway on two hands.

For me, strangely, the catalyst for change was my love for scuba diving. My two regular diving buddies on the west coast of Ireland both had young families and didn't have the time or the money to travel with me on my underwater adventures.

So I booked the first of many holidays to Egpyt and - shock, horror - found myself on a boat full of English people. I braced myself for a tense week and, yes, sometimes there were cultural misunderstandings or comments made through ignorance rather than hatred.

My fears were unfounded and I even began to make life-long friends who would contact me twice a year to see if I'd like to join them on trips to the Red Sea. By mixing with each other, by sharing our passion for a wonderful hobby, we broke down barriers which we had allowed to build up over generations.

During a wonderful gap year in 2010, I became a professional scuba diver. Every day I mixed with English people at Blue Planet Divers, some of whom had military backgrounds and had even served on tours of duty, pointing guns at Irish Catholic people in Northern Ireland.

Some of them also became life-long friends.

At the turn of the Millennium, I also renewed my love affair with Liverpool FC, honed as a child in the 1970s back in Ireland. I travelled all around Europe with Scousers and could not feel more accepted or have had more fun.

I'm never going to sing 'Rule Britannia' or 'God Save the Queen', but by mixing and having the 'craic' with English people I have completely banished the prejudices I built up in my mind as a child.

With the Brits having voted to leave the European Union this week, Ireland is in shock as many of us worry about an uncertain future as an isolated island off the north-west coast of the vast continent.

Everyone is focusing on the perceived racism and xenophobia of some of those who voted for Brexit last Thursday.

How quickly we forget how undemocratic, or even anti-democratic, the EU has become.

When our parents voted to join it in the 1970s, the European Economic Community led to economic prosperity on an island which had been ravaged by decades of stagnation, unemployment, and hopelessness.

They didn't vote for a system which would allow bureaucrats in Brussels to bully small countries such as Ireland, Greece, and Portugal.

They didn't vote for a dictatorship which would tell the Irish people that they made the "wrong" choice when they rejected the Lisbon and Nice treaties.

They didn't vote to impose severe hardship on the Greeks or to make a murky deal with an awful Government in Turkey, just to keep the migrants out in the face of growing racism across many of the 28 member states.

They didn't vote for the annihilation of Irish fishing rights or a loss of power by nation states which ensures that the Irish Government no longer seems able to decide whether or not it can abolish deeply unpopular water charges.

They didn't vote for a parliament which refused the right to Irish MEPs to comment on a vote which will have more of an impact here than anywhere else yesterday. Luke 'Ming' Flanagan MEP, from one of the most remote regions in Europe, claimed that he and the other MEPs from the Republic were effectively being 'gagged' yesterday.

But Brexit proved one thing, emphatically - ordinary people across Europe feel alienated from the EU institutions which govern them.

The EU needs reform, it's just that people like the racist Nigel Farage MEP (UKIP) and opportunist Boris Johnson MP (Conservative) are not the ones to provide the solutions.

It's a sad day for Ireland when our nearest neighbour and biggest trading partner leaves the EU, but in all of the noise over xenophobia and racism let's not forget that there were very valid arguments about how undemocratic the EU has become during the Brexit debate too.

This is a time for healing wounds and building bridges.

Nobody wants to see a militarized border separate the Republic from the North again.

Luke 'Ming' Flanagan MEP,
not allowed to speak yesterday

And few want a divisive vote about a United Ireland right now, either. Not while a million people see themselves as British, even if the Britain they know seems to be falling apart.

Before we talk about that we need to start following the same teams, drinking in the same bars, living in the same neighbourhoods and mixing with each other to break down the barriers.

I had to go all the way to Egypt and Thailand to learn that I could make friends with ordinary English people, and be accepted for who I am, yet how many of us have made no effort to find out about the "others" who live just down the road.

Racism and xenophobia only fuel ignorance and offer no solutions, while isolation is simply impossible in the 21st century.

I do think British people made the wrong decision last Thursday, but only a fool would claim that the EU is not in need of sweeping reforms.

As for the border; well, nobody, but nobody, wants a return to the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s. There are too many connections between our two islands and our communities within this island to allow that to happen.

It's a time to build bridges, not to put up new fences, customs posts, passport controls, and watchtowers, long after many of us were so happy to see them being dismantled.


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So we were fools ...

So we were fools, were we?

According to an opinion piece I read in a national newspaper at the weekend, the hollowness of the “anti-austerity” campaign was exposed by the failure of the Greeks to overturn the harsh measures which were imposed upon their country.

The Greeks were fools for voting for Syriza, it seems, and we were fools for supporting them in their hopes that a democratically elected Government might just stand up for ordinary people.

But the newspaper columnist, who might as well be paid by the Irish Government to spout pro-Government propaganda every week, believes that we fell for the “seductive slogans” of populist politicians.

He didn’t write a word about the injustice of ordinary, poor people in Greece, Ireland, or Spain “bailing out” a tiny elite of bankers, politicians, and developers who plunged their countries into a mess which was not of their doing.

Instead, he almost revelled in the failure of Syriza to take on the powers that be in the European Union.

So the Irish politicians who flew out to Greece to campaign for Syriza last January should now be eating humble pie.

Those of us who thought there might be another, better way have been forced to concede that austerity is the only option for societies which were riddled with debt by bad right-wing Governments and tiny, smug elites. Or so it seems.

Yes, we’re fools. Fools to think there might be an alternative. Fools to think that people who are struggling to put food on the table should not have to pay for the crimes of the few.

Fools to think that elderly patients should not be lying on hospital trolleys, while our Government slashes and burns – implementing a harsh ‘bailout’ programme – with such a relish.

Or that we shouldn’t have to pay twice for our water while lucrative contracts are handed out to the cronies of the people who happen to be in power.

A street meeting to oppose the installation of Irish Water meters in Galway

The same columnist warns us that our choice is between “stability” and “chaos” in the next election.

In a country in which 54% of the wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population, it could be argued that what he means by stability is really maintaining the inequality of the status quo.

The views of the jobless, the homeless, the patients on trolleys or the couples struggling in negative equity are not taken into account, just as Stephen Collins' cynical dismissal of Syriza's "populism" fails to acknowledge the fact that ordinary Greeks have suffered considerably under austerity in recent years.

His nightmare scenario is that a host of Independents and left wing types will be returned to the next Dail, as opposed to the wonderful people who have led us out of the chaos over the past four years.

When commentators view Irish political life through the exact same prism as our leaders, you wonder about the future of Irish journalism. Surely we need people to question the cozy consensus, to show that there are thousands upon thousands who are still struggling to survive in the Emerald Isle.

When people keep telling you that the Government is doing a mighty job, that the “recovery” is well under way, you wonder if you are even living in the same country.

This remarkable recovery is not evident in the thousands who are still choosing to emigrate, to seek new lives in Canada, Austraila, or Britain.

It’s not evident in the protests against Irish Water which were evident in housing estates all across Galway City over the past few weeks. People in the Westside, Shantalla, and Mervue demonstrated in numbers because they knew they were being asked to pay for a scam.

Who owns the meters? How much are the people at the top getting paid? Is the plan to privatise?

The recovery is not evident in the overcrowded Accident and Emergency Department where I’ve witnessed dozens of people lying on trolleys overnight in recent weeks.

It’s not evident in the Department of Social Protection Office, where people are being constantly urged to join JobBridge schemes – to get their social welfare plus €50 – in order to “massage” the true jobless figures.

Hell, someone was even looking for an experienced solicitor to undertake one of these nine month internships a few weeks ago.

It’s not evident in the homelessness crisis across our cities, or the way in which students are finding it impossible to find affordable places to live.

Homelessness only became an issue last winter when a poor man from Co Kilkenny died within metres of the Dail. Yet charities like the Peter McVerry Trust tell us that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.

It's not evident in the thousands of people with crippling mortgages, legacies from the "boom" days. People who work hard all week but can barely afford a night out on the town because they've been trapped into crippling property debts.

But, according to the newspaper article I read on Saturday, the “recovery” is well underway and the only alternative to the “stability” of our current Government is “chaos”.

It must be great for the Government to know they have such well-paid cheerleaders, urging them on with scare stories about the lack of alternatives every week.

Even if it leaves you feeling that some people inhabit a parallel universe, a long way from the working class housing estates where people have maintained a four week vigil to ensure the Irish Water meters have not been installed.

The article on Saturday might just leave you with a feeling of dread, that we don’t really live in a democracy; and that efforts by parties like Syriza are futile – because the interests of big business and a small elite take precedence over the rights of ordinary people all the time. 

Syriza’s failure to get better terms for the Greek people did not expose the party as “populists” with seductive slogans, it rather underlined the futility of seeking democratic change within the confines of a far from democratic European Union.

But, of course, we are fools for believing that any alternative is possible.