About to be unpopular.
Ireland, Thursday, listen up please. Then spread the word, talk to people.
Ireland, Thursday, listen up please. Then spread the word, talk to people.
2/ Then there have been a range of actions and activities which seem to be falling below any general 'newsieness' radar on social media and public forums / comments boards ... For instance here's a headline from a few weeks ago in The Sunday Business Post:
3/ "Hub Ireland probed over fundraising activities The charities regulator said that it has “received a concern that The Hub - Ireland appears to be operating as charitable organisation while not registered" By Jack Horgan-Jones
4/ So, if you're not Irish, for an awful lot of Irish the construction of a kind of money-funnel trying to operate as an unregulated enterprise, or by superficially acting as if it were a charity, or credit-union, co-op, or other type of resource structure which already exists in
5/ this country is an unwelcome, retrograde superfluity,likely to have certain strong ties (possibly not known to many of the worker-bees involved) to kinds of organised crime which have been causing mayhem and deaths of various kinds in our communities, whether that be quickly
6/ or slowly, for years. If you are donating, or supporting a 'political' action, or lobbying for something, at least do your research properly and try to make sure you know exactly what it is that is behind what you are endorsing and supporting. Homelessness is an emotive topic
7/ and a real concern. There are other interesting elements to the topic too, one third of the exponential rise in homeless people recently.are from outside the country, a lot, though there are other interesting areas too, from E. Europe. A lot of these are relatively recent
8/ arrivals. It's the same story, just with a different scale and fewer Syrians. Don't fall into its tropes and systematically negative, divisive 'culture-grabs'. THINK. If any person or organisation were ACTUALLY concerned about homelessness and about doing the work necessary to
9/ make sure that the situation continuously improves in a sustainable way THEY WOULD NOT BE TRYING TO UNDERMINE THE VERY AGENCIES - BODIES - PEOPLE AND ACTUAL CHARITIES which have been doing this work and incrementally lobbying and building more and better systems, welfare
10/ structures, and actual housing of varying types. No one is saying it's perfect, or finished, or it couldn't be better - BUT IT DOES EXIST IN A MORE REAL WAY THAN IN MANY OTHER COUNTRIES. Why would a 'charity' set up to 'help people with debt' and advocating they go to court
11/ for their mortgages, ask citizens to donate money to it? In Ireland? In the EU? Where people are entitled to free legal advice and representation at a variety of levels and degrees for just such kinds of eventualities? Is that not a kind of the dreaded 'fake news',
12/ disinformation otherwise known as bulls-it? Go & check out their site, then remind yourself that the legal advice anyone in difficulty needs is freely available & widely advertised / known of from a number of other sources, including Citizens' Advice, MABS & Free Legal Aid..
13/ So for e.g. anyone can begin with following a link to (or walking into or phoning a centre to have them do it for you) citizensinformation.ie…/housi…/losing_your_home/ and then citizensinformation.ie…/overview_of_mortgage_de… and the objective of MABS (within a range of
15/ other accessible and free services) is to prevent anyone who does not want to lose their home from losing it through mortgage arrears or debt. All the legal advice is there, free. flac.ie/help/centres/ And if you need more help and really can't pay (i.e. it would render you
16/ or your family unable to eat / have heating / keep up with school, etc So it is not a punitive or negative assessment of being able to pay where every thing you have is counted against you) citizensinformation.ie…/civil_legal_advice_and_… So, let more people know please,
17/ and ask them to let more people know, because the way to a more equitable society is not through lying to a well-meaning public, scamming them, robbing them and potentially taking a lot of peoples' hard earned cash which if they had given it to say, Novas or the McVerry Trust
18/ or at least 6 other things I can think of, would have all gone directly to help homeless people in an organised , transparent and accountable way which has been producing effective results and better outcomes for people around the country. Playing on ignorance, lack of
19/ education or lack of English language skills is not empowering or enabling, it's exploitative. Shove it. And now I am likely to be exceedingly unpopular in some quarters. Again. You know what, that doesn't matter, but sorting out how our society and its systems work does,
20/ as does preventing the exploitation of vulnerable people. If you think you're on the far-left of a political spectrum and what you do in effect mimics and repeats what the far-right opposite end of that same spectrum does, then you have a lot of hard questions to ask yourself
21/ That's not 'radical', that's derivative and parasitic. Not to mention the question of the application of any ethical issues in practice.
Apologies to those wise enough to be informed.
And thank you for your patience reading this.
Onwards.
Apologies to those wise enough to be informed.
And thank you for your patience reading this.
Onwards.
