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LATE LAST MONTH the Irish Times published an article entitled (an appropriate word) ‘‘It’s my property, I’ll do whatever I want with it”. The quote comes from the owner of a vacant property who was contacted by the Peter McVerry Trust at a time when over 12,000 people were homeless. The rest of this article is directed at such vacant property owners.
About two-thirds of our income levels are determined by the country in which we are born. Most of the other third is determined by other accidents of birth. The good news is that people’s economic status, whether they are born at the top or bottom of the pile, eventually reverts to the mean. The bad news is that the process takes about 350 years.
Any reasonable person born into a position of privilege would have the good sense to act with a bit of humility and self-awareness. Few of us manage to climb far up the economic ladder in one lifetime. One of my favourite books on inequality is ‘The Son Also Rises’ by Gregory Clarke. He argues that the chances of moving from the middle of the pack to the top half a per cent in a generation are about one in five hundred million. To put this in context, it is unlikely that anybody in England has ever accomplished it. The probability of moving from the bottom half a per cent to the top of the pile is essentially zero. Nobody in human history has ever managed it.
Why do we tolerate this level of inequality of opportunity and outcome? Many of us just take it for granted. The most insidious forms of inequality are often so embedded that we don’t see them. Those who do, often feel powerless to change much, though not opposing property taxes or new buildings would be a good start.
A planning system that gives voice to the people who live in an area but not the people who would like to is inherently flawed.
Several years ago, I included a pitch for a vacant property tax in a pre-budget submission on behalf of a state-funded organisation. For reasons best known to himself, the head of a state body insisted that it was removed. Why argue against a proposal when you can silence it?
Residential property taxes are standard fare in much of Europe. Housing is a major component of wealth everywhere. The average renting family in Ireland has net assets of just €5,000. Owner-occupiers are 60 times wealthier, at €303,000. And yes, this is net wealth, so accounts for mortgages. For most of us, having a second property that we care about so little to leave it vacant is unfathomable. There are some good reasons why houses may be left empty and fortunately, we have the data. In many cases, people are in hospitals or nursing homes, or the houses are being rented or sold.
But an astonishing 48,000 houses or apartments were vacant in both the 2016 and 2022 censuses, representing 2% of the housing stock and enough to house all the homeless families in the state several times over. Remarkably, nearly half of these houses were also vacant in 2011. The usual excuse is that they are in remote areas. Again, however, we have the data, and this is patently untrue. Dublin City has more vacant units than anywhere else in the country.
For over 3,700 of these properties, we have no idea why they are vacant. This constitutes a major moral failing, by both individuals and the state.
Houses carry ongoing costs to the state, like servicing and lighting adjacent roads and providing fire, police, water and sewage services. They are thus a significant burden on society. The most sensible thing (and again the standard in much of Europe) is to apply an annual tax directly. Instead, we have collectively decided to do this primarily through general taxation, which favours homeowners. Why we insist on subsidising some people twice, when they show so little regard for the rest of society, is very difficult to understand.
Ciarán Casey is an economics lecturer at the University of Limerick. He is the author of ‘The Irish Department of Finance, 1959-1999′ (IPA, 2022) and ‘Policy Failures and the Irish Economic Crisis’ (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).
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BRT would be great if implemented properly with dedicated lanes. Hard to imagine how well that could happen though with the typically narrow streets around Dublin.
@Shane Corry: the swords20 idea and things like it are interesting too. Driving a car into the city these days is just awful. http://swords20.com – this uses the tunnel and the Luas line.
@Martin Byrne: This would be incredible as a Swords Express user. Its shambolic how long it takes to move up the quays
This ‘rapid’ bus network obviously doesn’t take account of recently announced reduced speed limits into the city.
@Chris Kirk:
I think the point is that they bypass the city
If you look really hard at pic 3 you can see a pig flying !
Payment options should be welcomed, assuming they’re implemented properly. There should be no need to interact with the driver at all, get on, tap your card/phone/watch, get to the destination, tap off.
@OU812: I get what you’re saying in that people can board a lot faster without help – most of us don’t need to interact with the driver at all.
If the card won’t scan, if a passenger or tourist isn’t sure what to do, if the WiFi fails for an online payment? There’s every reason for a driver to sort it out and keep people moving. If the bus is already full, there’s still every need for a driver. Several times I’ve been happy to let the driver sort out confusion and get people on and off efficiently. I believe there will always be a need for a driver on public transport to sort out and help people to use the service, including children, the blind users and disabled and new bus users, just saying.
Tallaght has the Luas and they get BRT as well? Why not focus on a less well served area?
@Seth Cheffetz: tallaght is very big. It’s the size of Cork city. This is from the other side. Stíl brt is useless. Should be rail
Should be up and running in no time I’d say.Start queuing now.
Does this mean more short term solutions from a government which can’t see further than their finger tips. More buses in Dublin will obviously add to congestion and more air pollution. When we now need long term solutions like provide a rapid rail network especially to Blanchardstown and get Busarus shifted out of the city centre.
@Chris Kirk: Why would you want Busaras shifted out of the city centre? Most people want to travel to the terminus in the city centre, don’t they? If you wanted an extra bus centre added, maybe, but why? Are you saying that people should be able to go from Dublin airport without entering Dublin city?
@Chris Kirk: More busses and less cars means less congestion. Dublin bus is moving to non oil fuels so less pollution. Bus terminals are traditionally in city centres
@Kal Ipers: How can you be sure that there will be less cars while there are no controls over cars entering the city. Busarus is the Bus Eireann terminal and as most people who travel on BE will tell you that buses never run to time because they usually get held up in the city congestion, especially between Blanchardstown and the city centre. I often travel on the 109 from Cavan scheduled journey just over two hours and sometimes takes three hours. A rail link would be a fast way of getting into the city without congestion. Busarus would be better in Blanchardstown as it is the nearest M50 link from the M3 & M4.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: When was the last time you travelled Bus Eireann, why would someone travelling from the west if Ireland want to go to Dublin via the airport.
‘Bus” and “Rapid Transit’ are a conflict of terminology
They need to put a congestion charge in Dublin city centre, and put limits on the amount of time Public workers can strike for. I. E. An hour a day, or two hours a day wont shut down the economy, but weeks without end is just too much.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: The M50 is the city bypass. Congestion charges are coming it is just a matter of time.
@Fiona Fitzgerald: The M50 is the city bypass. Congestion charges are coming it is just a matter of time.
It’s a great idea if it’s done properly. Express buses on all routes at peak times ie 6am to 9am then 430pm to 630pm. They do this in Sydney and makes the bus system so much better.
I’d imagine they’ll use the existing fleet they have.
Swords has a fantastic privately owned bus service called swords express. Travelsave and leap cards accepted, top quality service that uses the port tunell.
Regretfully dcc prefers free car parking on the North quays instead of a bus lane.
If only small changes were actually implemented instead of money spent on grandiose schemes that will never see the light of day………
@Ciaran Morgan: Swords express are also planning using Apple Pay and contactless for payment from next week!
Way ahead of Dublin Bus!
This, if it goes ahead (and I pray it doesn’t), would prove to be a very damaging, and congestion-incrasing waste of road space. Creating more useless “bus corridors”, when there are very few buses driving in them, will only create more traffic havoc and gridlock in our capital city by narrowing and reducing yet further the lanes that car users (who constitute the vast majority of commuters) can drive in.
Dublin needs a real change in leadership from the far-left (Sinn Fein, Green Party) crowd who currently control Dublin City Council. They are destroying Dublin with their anti-motorist (essentially anti-independent travel) ideology. We also need to see a big change at the bureaucratic level in Dublin City Council, with new, common sense leadership. We need a new DCC chief executive who recognises that motorists will be a big part of the future in terms of commuting to and within Dublin City: we need policies to make life easier for ordinary motoring commuters, allowing more efficient travel around the city, not more ideological policies which seek to artificially frustrate drivers getting in and around the city. Such policies should include building more tunnels under parts of the city which motorists could use, as most European cities do, this would greatly increase the efficiency of car travel; We could and should also widen the lanes which private cars use, this would help to increase the ease of travel around the city. We also need to remove so many of the superfluous traffic lights around Dublin (someone in Ireland is making a lot of money from selling and installing traffic lights!), and we need to remove the unnecessarily long time it takes for traffic lights to change from red to green in the city.
At a national level, we need a taoiseach (and we might get one soon) who is determined to help Dublin by having the metro underground railway system built. If we build an underground railway system, it will begin the process of finally offering a viable and efficient alternative for many road users. Hitherto, there is no efficient alternative for thousands of private car users. If we, very soon, build the Metro and the Dart Underground, it will genuinely help to relieve congestion in the city in a way that does not seek to cruelly and counter-productively punish motorists (who have a right in a free society to use their cars for travel).
For the record, this BRT proposal is neither new nor innovative. It was pitched a few years ago as “Swiftway” but died a death when:
A: it was clear that what was being proposed was just a few new bendy-buses like what they had not long before removed from the Nos. 4 & 10 routes, and
B: it was clear that the Swords route was being pitched by Pascal Donohue as a cheap alternative to Metro North.
So, they wait a few years and republish their report as new? There’s more money being spent on writing reports about what could be done than on actually doing what they’re writing about. I guess that’s the problem with pushing everyone through university and getting rid of ANCO and the trades.
@Brian Lenehan: there’s remnants of the Swiftway plan still on the NTA website (http://www.swiftway.ie)
If only 300million has being “committed” where will the other 700million euros come from? How much on-street parking will be removed and how many local business will loose customers and staff?
Is the leap card obsolete already ? Isn’t that cashless integrated ticketing ?
How much of the 1billion will be spent on actual buses and actual drivers
Anything that makes public transport more convenient/feasible for commuters is a step in the right direction, although I would prefer if these projects were being put in place before/ in tandem with the traffic restricting projects they’re introducing to the city
@Darren Tully: There is nothing convenient about a bus that takes three hours for a scheduled two hour journey. The transport minister is flying kites, because he knows nothing about bus transport into Dublin from rural Ireland
Clondalkin has the worst bus service ya need to get 2 buses to the local hospital
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