Who shall be saved? That's today's question. It is a truism to say that slaps can be delivered to the head of any one of us - Henry V took an arrow in the face; Terry Pratchett's cortex emptied out; Phineas Gage's was briefly filled with an iron bar - but you'll respond better to life's tonks if you have money or connexions. How the dispossessed are treated is a measure of how civilized a society is.
It's not enough to aspire to cherishing all the children; elected governments have to allocate resources to ensure that the difficult cases get dealt with. From 2000 Kathy Sinnott took the Dept Education to courtS to vindicate the Constitutional right of her disabled son Jamie to have "free appropriate primary education based on need". Jamie got to vote before he got his rights! It's pretty clear that, in the 1916 proclamation, Padraig Pearse was cherishing all the children metaphorically not just the subadults. No grown-up nation should allow its citizens to sleep in cars, or in tents, or in at whim B&B accommodation. But that's where we're at. This last Winter there were 15,000 people homeless in Ireland a third of which were children. Not good enough.
Relying on private citizens to make homes available for those who don't have one might have worked sorta in the past. So long as you weren't black, an unmarried couple or <oof> with child. In 1975, with a newborn at foot, as students, we were able to rent a seafront property in Dun Laoghaire. The rent was about 2.5x that of the 2m x 2.5m x 3m shithole bedsit The Beloved and I had shared with a family of mice the previous year. I'm sure, the demeanour of patriarchy (and the accent) got us that room with a view of the sea. Through the noughties, I found that private rentiers could raise rents arbitrarily and evict tenants with impunity. It is only by being born at peak boomer and being lucky in the breaks, that we bought the farm 30 years ago and had a home for which we owned the keys. My correspondent G after 10 years in the private rental sector with her extended family, finally got a Council House in 2022.
I am relieved . . . happy . . . delirah to add my correspondent M to the list of those who have washed up ashore after years at sea in Dublin's rental sector. Whom shall we thank? Maybe Ned Guinness (1847-1927) [R, in his patriarchal prime] whose family had made a fortune in booze. At one time he was the richest man in all of Ireland. Having more money than anyone was capable of spending on racehorses and champagne, he allocated part of his patrimony to The Iveagh Trust [if you're reading from Baluchistan, don't bother clicking that bloatware link but get the gist from Wikipedia]. Still tl;? it's a provider of affordable housing in Dublin. They run a 200 bed homeless men's hostel, built the Iveagh Public Baths and the Iveagh Covered Market, and . . . a home for The Old. M is six weeks older than me and little bit more crocked up. After 50 years buffeted by the winds of change in private rental sector, M obtained the key to a teeny tiny apartment owned by The Iveagh and moves in Today!
All bets would have been off, if she hadn't been old.
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