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THERE WAS A positive development recently for a disadvantaged social housing community in Dublin’s inner city where I have been working for many years. Planning permission was submitted by Dublin City Council for the first phase of the much-needed, and strongly campaigned for, regeneration of Dolphin House.
The tenants and community organisations there had been campaigning on a human rights basis for a number of years, highlighting the terrible living conditions suffered by the 900 residents. This included sewerage invasions inside their homes and levels of dampness and mould that had serious health implications.
Dolphin, along with other neglected local authority ‘flat’ complexes that had suffered from inequalities in education, unemployment, and poverty, had been promised regeneration through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) during the Celtic Tiger. The PPPs involved the demolition of the estates and the creation of new communities through a mix of social and private housing and commercial units. Developers were given the public land to deliver the projects.
However, as the property market collapsed in 2008 private developers withdrew from the PPPs as they were no longer deemed ‘economically viable’. Thousands of local authority tenants, like those in Dolphin, were thus left living in substandard conditions. Despite the issues most tenants wanted to stay living in the areas as they had strong family and neighbourhood connections.
In response to the PPP collapse, tenants and community workers in Dolphin (including me) came together and decided they were not giving up and were going to fight to save their community. They developed a unique human rights based approach involving activist community development, training and educating tenants, organising public human rights ‘hearings’, media work, and lobbying politicians.The campaign pressured the Irish State to fulfil its obligations to the tenants, as “rights-holders”, arising from various international human rights treaties that various governments have signed up to.
The‘hearings’ gained considerable public attention as experts, including the Irish Human Rights Commission, and leading academics criticised as‘unacceptable’ the substandard housing that tenants had been left living in for years.
It was a difficult and long campaign for the tenants. Despite the challenges faced by their disadvantage, they were empowered through the human rights campaign to stand up to their landlords and the Irish state that had, for decades, denied responsibility and blamed tenants for the problems.
It was extremely brave of this vulnerable community to engage in such public critical action. It is an indictment of the level of neglect and oppression on the part of the state that it was left to the community to identify the existence of the problems. Not only that, but they were left with no choice but to have to engage in a public campaign to force the state to act. The community also understood the importance of continuing to work with the City Council to develop innovative solutions including regeneration plans that would serve the needs of the community.
Significantly, in this instance, the state responded positively. Towards the latter half of last year Dublin City Council (through Department of Environment funding) refurbished approximately 30 apartments that were most severely affected by damp and mould on the estate. Now as part of the long term solution to the problems, plans have been submitted for the complete regeneration of the estate including demolition, refurbishment and new build of social housing, a park, new community centre and community support.
The first phase is due to start in 2015. The regeneration, according to Fergus Finlay, Chair of the Dolphin Regeneration Board, needs to:
Provide physical, social and economic regeneration so as to create a new and sustainable Dolphin estate. The process must involve residents as equal partners, sustaining the existing community, placing equal emphasis on the social aspects such as safety, unemployment, education and health and meeting its human rights by addressing key housing, urban design and social issues.
The necessity of this is apparent from the 2011 census figures which show that the third-level education participation rate in Dolphin House is only 4.6 per cent while unemployment is 29.9 per cent.
Providing such social housing regeneration through direct state funding marks a welcome shift away from Public Private Partnerships and the associated displacement of communities. Regeneration can be a‘win-win’ scenario delivering an employment stimulus for the local communities and using public land to address the spiralling housing waiting lists. It offers people an alternative to the private property market and places the primary value of housing as a home – and a right – not a commodity.
The Dolphin community, however, is concerned that regeneration could still be delayed given the reduction in government funding allocated to regeneration nationally from €121 million in 2008 to €80 million in 2013. Other estates have been completely abandoned and had their plans significantly scaled back and delayed. The cuts to community development projects, employment schemes, youth services, local Gardaí and health services are also hitting hard.
For disadvantaged communities in our cities and towns, therefore, the human rights approach offers an important way to organise themselves collectively to oppose the austerity that is being disproportionally enforced on them – and to pressure government to fulfil their right to adequate standards of housing and community living conditions.
Dr Rory Hearne is a community worker, policy analyst, occasional lecturer and has been active in social movements and left politics for many years. He is author of Public Private Partnerships in Ireland: Failed Experiment or the Way Forward for the State (Manchester University Press, 2011).
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’15,000 people were known to police in France as having been radicalised’
Islam….the religion of peace…………………………not!
Exactly my point. I’m french. Let me tell you that the police in France are verrrryy incompetent
@oliver I believe they are not so incompetent when it’s about harassing refugees…
@al ca The number of Muslims in France is estimated to exceed 4 million. But it’s ok to just ignore a fact that make your comment sound just irrelevant.
Ok so not incompetent? Explain to me what happend in the case of Jacqueline sauvage? If she went to show them her bruises they would have laughed at her. Tu est francais? Ce problem avec les Arab cest merci Sarkozy!
@oliverjunelle
The problem with the ‘Arabs’ in France is a problem for a very long time now and has more to do with your colonial history and a failed immigration and integration policy going back decades!
Sarkozy was still a little school boy when the problem started!
In all fairness the French treat the Muslims in their Country as second class citizens. They do not help themselves.
Are you really blaming the innocent French citizens for the savagery by Islamic terrorists!! Unbelievable
Rebecca, in fairness the French treat all foreigner’s in their country, as second class citizens.
No wrong. They isolate themselves into there own communities and seldom go beyond that. Just like parts of England like bradford
Yes I’m aware of that. I was talking about the social tension! That’s the fault of Sarkozy
@ Oliver it’s a social issue. .. Foreigners, with low incomes, were parked in the same areas by local administration. It’s well known. Also it started long time before that thing called Sarkozy showed up.
Yes I agree. But are those area’s walled off from society? No. They chose to isolate themselves of there own free will
You don’t see a contradiction there… people were kept away from city centres and miles away from where the jobs were. Besides there were no transport for years until people protested.
I spend a lot of time in France. You ask a French person what they think of Muslims and they call them every name under the sun.
I know plenty of French Algerians as I have Algerian connections and they integrate and behave like French but get treated like sh**. Give out all you want but I have first hand experience of this.
Cholly. This has been going on since the 19th century. Look up the French Algerian war. Educate yourself and then argue with me.
So you are blaming the French citizens? Are you a Muslim Rebecca?are you sympathising with the terrorists?
The problem with Islam in France is two things…one is that the French have bent over backwards in accommodating Islam without any demands..failure in integration is not talked about due to the thin line between racism and the truth, the ‘us and them’. The other is that many Muslims don’t speak out against so called extremists because they see themselves as the victims. They’re Muslim before their French.
@prouesse/prossie….more mumbo jumbo nonsense from you….if you’re going to draw attention to yourself with your apologist rubbish, at least form coherent sentences…lol
Oliverjumelle, would you say that the ordinary French citizen is unaware of France’s colonial history? I was surprised to discover that a large percentage of English citizens knew nothing of their own army’s history of operations around the world, and especially in Ireland. Is it a colonial thing, drawn from fear, similar to the WW2 German citizens isolating themselves from their army’s attrocities? I’m just wondering what the reasons are for citizens isolating themselves.
@mistart Not my fault if you can’t read… I won’t apologize for that either.
These are the people and the ideology LÊ James Joyce are ferrying into Europe by the boatload.
How do you know?
No they’re not its all home grown , very little of the terrorist or the one who plotted terrorist attack came with the refugees, not making apologies for their actions but it’s a fact . France isolated Muslim population from ww2 onwards in suburbs you wouldn’t house your dog in . They have no feelings of belonging into neither France nor the country where there grand parents came from and therefore are very easily indoctrinated.
So France deserves whatever it gets…?
What the current wave of migrants and the French and European jihadists have in common to some extent is their religion (those arriving now from Libya are a far more mixed group). And a fundamentalist version of Islam is the ideology that supports violent jihad against unbelievers. Some of the migrants will already be extremists since there are active jihadist groups in most if not all parts of the muslim world. A proportion of the others will adopt that ideology over time – it’s statistically inevitable. So yes, migration is connected to home-grown terrorism.
No one deserves to have innocent civilians butchered not even Iraq Syria or Libya… My point was it is not refugees perpetrating those atrocities its homegrown been in France Belgium or Germany and I was just explaining why it’s so east to recruit jihadists in those countries
That explanation holds no water whatsoever. There are millions if not billions of people around the world who experience discrimination, prejudice, racism, persecution etc. The overwhelming majority produce nothing comparable to violent jihadist movements. And violent jihadist movement exist in places where muslims are the majority population and are in no way oppressed (try Bangladesh for starters). It is a global phenomenon which has existed for 1400 years in a multitude of conditions and cultures. The single connecting thread is fundamentalist Islam.
If you understand that ideology you will understand why one of its expressions is a sense of victimhood and persecution where no such conditions objectively exist and even where your group is in fact the persecuting group. It’s a victimhood internal to the belief system and independent of objective conditions. Thwarted supremacism looks and sounds exactly like genuine victimhood.
‘victimhood’ three times in the last paragraph: you need a thesaurus
William bayle- at the end of the day france was still helping these people by housing them and so on,why didnt they educate themselves or their children and move on if they dont like it so much,make something of themselves for their younger generations, useless pieces of shit. Too used to taking for free,they have a totally different look at human life rared to be like that. I dread to see europe in 20 years
Sean…i have to agree with you there.
@sean France was helping those people by housing them ? What ? France went recruiting in its colonies to get cheap labour to rebuild the country after ww2. They housed them as cheap as possible in 30 storey high towers away from everything, those buildings were not even maintained properly. Would have been very hard to integrate. You say they should have educate themselves, fine true what medium ? Very little service was provided to them to help integration not even buses to go to the nearest town . I agree with you on one point I would hate to see France and Europe in 10 years never mind 20
Yes i do believe that william. They where given the option of going to france to seek refuge from their worthorne country’s they wer not forced to slavery yes it did help france in rebuilding itself economicly. Ok maybe housing and loacating them had a different standard compared to todays world but i can garuntee u that there where french citizens familys in thoses area’s too who have evolved much differently. Same goes for syria today, europe taking in the refugee’s is good from an economical view, it will boost the economy in the long run it wil provide cheaper labour to area’s that need it eventually when they start working… Look at Our children these days all want to go to college be educated and get brilliant jobs for themselves and so on compared to 100 years ago. who picks up the small jobs that are left vacant? Refugees mostly! It happens everywhere where the economy and the standard of life is growing faster than the population turn over
“15 year old boy”….or in Ireland – A vulnerable young person.
you don’t find 15 year olds vulnerable? thats worrying
15,000 + 1,000,000+ migrants.
God help Europe. Lots of terror to come
God is the problem, she’s not going to help…
A Mormon id say
A fifteen year old with mental health issues, prozac will cure him.
Damning video of Clinton fainting at 9/11 ceremony today she had to leave early and lost a shoe.
She’s a liar and now she’s been caught again.
I’m sure the journal will get around to covering it in a day or two once they’ve picked up the correct spin from the Clinton campaign.
What’s damning about the video?
prats
Said it before. And will say it again. Devils Island. Perfect for a European Gitmo. Round every single Islamist on every European Security Service watch list and ship them out.
there’s no need to repeat yourself
If I was an Islamic terrorist organiser and had control over these 15,000, I’d tell them to act chill and continue waiting for the number grow.
“if”? sure….
Fook Pisslam.
Here we go again with the same non-sense some commenters love serving here: migrants – though the article has nothing to do with them – mean terrorist; Muslims are bad bad people; the situation is not complicated at all, it’s just a matter of political willingness to jail anyone in sight or not… And so on!
Where in my comments did I say muslims were bad people?
who says its you?
Here we go again with the same apologists sticking their heads in the sand, unable to recognise that Islam is causing more horror among its believers and to others around the world.
Tourettes Tariq should be along shortly to offer moral support to Prouesse the fucķtard
It’s a French thing. I said that the problem with Arabs in France is the fault of Sarkozy and she implied that by saying the word Arab I ment all muslims were bad. Typical French thing to do. She used a snippet of the point I was making which got a lot of thumbs up. And used it against me. Using it to mean something opposite of what I ment. I know she is French too. I looked at her profile
Brain Damage is a little angry animal that keeps on pushing little grunts.
@ al .ca You seem to have a very selective way of looking at things. Read the previous comments, and the non-sense you can find actually contains some variations.
2017. Pour Hollande? Macron? Sarkozy? Ou le Penn? Given your comments I’d say your a supporter of the latter!
Oliver, it’s not solely a French thing. It’s a standard response across Europe to those who point out integration problems. They deliberately misrepresent what you said and assume things you haven’t said or implied. It’s also used by the Islamist propagandists and those are what you’re dealing with here. Judge for yourself but I’d advise against treating them as if they were genuine.
Yes but the French are notorious for doing it constantly
I believe you. That would explain a lot about the state of the country. What’s the cause do you think?
Angry animal? You must have me confused with your child rapist prophet, fůcktard
Brain damage, you may call yourself anything you want.
Oliver I doubt a FN voter would follow the FOG. Look at my profile again… “the French” do this and that. .. just speak for yourself for a start.
@Marlow “they deliberately misrepresent what you said”… then you add “it’s also used by Islamists propagandists and those are what you’re dealing with here”. Great demonstration of contradicting what you say by your own actions.
Fdg* not the FOG …
Le Penn is compleatly against any kind of immigration to France. Same as her father was. Forgive me for making a judgement based on your comments. Le Penn wasn’t against the German occupation of France and beleaved in the one race policy his daughter marine is preaching today. The current problems regarding the anti Muslim views in France stem from the 13th November attacks. Which were committed by Belgian born jihadists! So that puts the current views of racists in France to bed
Le pen I should say
I see what you mean. The attacks in Charlie hebdo and the Hyper Casher obviously traumatised people. Some actually argue the problem regarding terrorism in France v started way before. Don’t forget what happened in 1995. This started vigipirate.
Your verbal diahorrea is getting worse, fůcktard.
I’m not forgetting 95 or af 8969! Af 8969 was hijacked because France imprisoned algierian government opponents during the civil war in 1994
These communities refused to integrate with the outside world
I’m not saying that. The Charlie hebdo attacks were terrible yes. But it that could have been avoided and so could the hyper cashier if the police had acted on the radicalization of coulibaly.
@Dain….thats exactly what it is, incoherent rubbish. That vile thing never makes any sense
@mistart and brain damage you surely fit together.
@oliver
The problem with the attack on Charlie Hebdo is that Charlie Hebdo had received several threats. That wasn’t the case for the Hyper Casher. So saying the police could have done this and that, might be valid in the case of Charlie Hebdo only.
And no, “these communities” did not refuse to integrate at all! They had to fight to get some attention and a few infrastructures. But it’s not over yet. For example, it could be nice to see experienced teachers in schools in difficult areas instead of sending those who just finished their training. “Those communities” don’t decide which teachers they can find in schools. Get it?
Look I’m from Bordeaux. I have a friend of mine who is a secondary school teacher in Marseille. In one of those schools. She got punched in the face by a group of Moroccan thugs from one of the cites. Luckily the police did something as the attack was caught on cctv .and your saying they want to integrate? I’m not saying that the hyper casher had got threats. The radicalization of coulibaly should have been flagged by the police when he left prison. And plus 2 hours after the bataclan attack abdelsalam got passed a police checkpoint in northern France on his way back to Belgium!
have your say