€1,400 a month to rent this room, with shared bathroom.
Dear sweet jayzus almighty.. ..what a fucking kick in the teeth, eh? Over a hundred years since we rose up to gain our independence and what are we doing to our own people? Discarding them and their children to a fate of life on the streets with nothing available to rent and no way to even get on the ladder. Do we think it's bad today? Then consider say ten years from now, then fifteen years from now? Better or worse? Even more homeless or less homeless? Still legal to hand a sleeping bag and tent to an incoming refugee/migrant and send them down to the canal?
Let's say it's the year 2045?
Work, low grade: menial tasks: full of what sort of people?
Work, self-employed contractors: with trade skills and lots of experience - required by whom?
Work, the wealthy - who don't need to work but do it anyway so they can influence/manipulate the system for them and theirs?
Work, the upper-upper echelon: international relations/local politics/international politics?
The national debt: is that going to be as much of a burden on your immigrants as it is on the indigenous Irish people themselves? Will they even be in the loop to pay down the historic debt or will they get a free ticket because it '
wasn't their fault' and you'll get another boot in the throat?
The housing
crisis nightmare: how are you going to catch up with the current needs? You'd need to be building at least a dozen houses a day for the next year to even begin to tackle the extremes/worst case scenarios. Who's going to pay for that? The state? Don't think so, the current '
hands-off' approach (
with a tinge of added melodramatic spoofery such as '
let the markets dictate prices') has only seen politicians with lots of experience run the fuck away from all of it lest they get dragged down with the sinking ship.
Twenty years from now: will it be all
Star Trek/2001: A Space Odyssey with well-dressed and strictly disciplined lizard people and cross-dressing earthling transsexuals, homosexuals, and multi-coloured people with blue/green/orange/insert choice type hair who prefer anime to the real world? Will our meals be floated to us on a zero-gravity holiday-space ship designed for taking a break from the planet and all her woes? No money, just credits. Nobody on the lower tiers owning anything, not even the clothes on their backs.
Or will it be more dystopia? More bullshit-politico '
let's find human solutions' while hiding said solutions in plain sight and telling the earthlings they're merely paranoid and they ought to be grateful for everything they've got, which can fit into a small suitcase - the type you need for Ryanair flights? More homeless people or more laws
outlawing homelessness with a shoot-to-kill policy in place to keep the numbers in check? Will nationality matter at all? Will it even exist in the form we understand today? If we're living in a time of everyday space travel for all - why would we need a passport? Insert a chip in the brains of newly-born earthling children, that'll set them up for life with minimum fuss for the powers-that-be to control and order about.
Sometimes I think it has fuck all to do with not enough houses: it's more like not enough abortions, not enough early deaths.
That's the situation from one angle, and it's fairly disturbing.
Death credits? Let's say the family is in debt to the degree that they'll never be able to pay it off? Credits in the form of suicide/euthanasia? '
Kill one adult and two children and you too can enter the draw for this beautiful anti-gravity motor-mobile!!!' ? Parents committing suicide in a family ceremony where drinks and treats abound and then the kids get to flip the switch and the parents say their final goodbyes and drop through the floor with a rope around their necks - their remains used to make glue and jelly-tots?
Life has little value in Ireland.
Maybe it's down to us all being born into the chaos of a war that was taking place just out of earshot but close enough to cause fear and anxiety?
Maybe it's down to the fact that we see human lives treated as political/medical/social/financial problems that our hearts are immune to the horrors we take for granted every passing day. I don't think I could continue with my life in Ireland given the mess she's in today. I mean, I knew I wasn't sticking around from an early age, but for the time I have spent there I'm still trying to get my head around Irish ways and Irish laws. They don't seem very Irish to me. But then again, I'm out of there. Long since departed. I see lives like the one I used to live being snuffed out in all sorts of ways. I knew that much was coming down the line for me, so rather than stick around and see if I could hold steady, I gathered up my entire Irish life and handed it back to Ireland. She can do as she likes with it.
I won't be returning for some time.
Family issues only, the rest you can ram up your hole.
www.thejournal.ie
