Tom thumbs nose at city houseless and homeless

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

‘’The last war was housing,” said Tom Parlon. “The war we’re in now is around infrastructure,” added the director general of Construction Industry Federation.

It’d make you wonder what parallel universe this guy is living in.

Tom, you will recall, is the former Progressive Democrats TD and junior minister, who supported the Fianna Fáil-led Government during the 2000s when Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy was championing ‘light touch’ regulation of the financial sector.

And we all know how that ended up – with Johnny Foreigner coming in telling us how to come back from the brink of economic catastrophe.

Now, here Tom is, at the National Infrastructure Summit on Wednesday, referring to the ‘war on housing’ in the past tense, as if it is over.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the homelessness crisis is solved; that soaring rents are consigned to history; and we all live in a Little House on the Prairie utopia.

Tom might have a house – in cloud-cuckoo land – but he might take a break from lecturing us, and have a look at the length of the Galway City Council waiting list. Or the 20 people on average who are sleeping rough every night in the city.

Or has he any idea how much money the local authority is paying every night to house the homeless in city hotels and B&Bs.

Over? Have we missed it? The housing war is over, Tom?

Cop on to yourself – for most people the Government hasn’t even drawn the battle lines.

We may need investment in infrastructure, but wouldn’t it be more in Tom’s line to urge his developer and builder members to get off their arses and start constructing a few more houses again, to meet the demand, which is fuelling house price inflation and hikes in rent, before he starts waging war on other fronts?

Tom and his ilk would make you long for the days when the Troika ruled this banana republic.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.