If you ever go across the sea to Ireland

If one of the pretenders to 10 Downing St turned up in Wexford, you’d expect that it would be newsworthy, wouldn’t you? You’d think that it would be up there in our media if not page 1 nationally well at least mentioned in dispatches?

In politics, they say timing is everything so perhaps it’s not silly enough for the silly season, but last week we had a visit from Stephen Crabb MP, one time challenger to Theresa May and former UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Last week he traveled to Rosslare Europort to meet with newly appointed Minister for State Michael D’arcy to discuss the future for West Wales and the South East Ireland post Brexit. Mr Crabb is MP for Pembrokeshire which contains Fishguard and Milford Haven, 2 hugely important ports with considerable links to Ireland.  As Britain lurches from shambles to catastrophe over their departure from the EU there is growing concern in West Wales at how trade and jobs will be impacted once Britain leaves in 18 months time.

One might have thought Mr Crabb would have understood better than most the need for timing in politics. You see Mr Crabb is one of the foremost campaigners for Brexit and one might have expected that he would have come here to see the possible impact before he threw his weight behind Farage, Gove and Johnson. Presumably it was his desire to get into No 10 that prioritised his personal ambition over that of his constituents.  Now in the wake of Tory infighting it’s very much a case of every man for himself and he has to be seen as fighting for his local interests.  The reality is that another election in the UK could see the Tories beaten out the door.

And that’s why he set sail from Fishguard last week, following in the grand maritime tradition of Cook, Nelson and Drake. Exploring foreign lands beyond the Tuskar Triangle to see what trinkets he could bring home to astonish the natives. His foreign frolics feature in the Welsh media this week. The concern in Fishguard and Pembroke is that a return of a hard border will see less Irish trucks using the land bridge to Europe given the departure of Britain from the customs union.  The increase in inflation, the strength of the pound and drop in growth forecast for the UK economy into 2018 suggest that personal taxes will increase leaving less to spend. That will mean a reduction in exports to the UK from Ireland but add to that the likely levies applied to Irish goods in Britain and vice versa it makes for grim times ahead both here and across the water.

For all his new found concern in his local economy, Crabb cares little about Wexford and the Irish economy nor for the wider social and economic consequences of Brexit.  Brexit simply sounded good at the time and as a concept explains perfectly how Tory men use narrow nationalism as a vehicle advancement.

During the week I went to see the movie Dunkirk.  Dunkirk was a national humiliation for Britain that fixed Britain’s resolve to undo the disaster of Dunkirk and to ensure the UK could have a role in Europe. In 1940 Britain didn’t know where and didn’t know when but it still knew it had a role to play.

I once had an Uncle, long deceased, who was rescued after 4 days from Dunkirk.  Uncle Monty returned home after World War 2 and stood for the Labour Party in a local election in his home town. Monty eventually became Mayor. As a teenager I remember once being in his home and reading his election literature. What struck me about his leaflet was how he said he’d lived all his life in the town except between 1939 and 1945 when he served his country. He didn’t have to add anything else. That generation understood a sense of wider communal duty to put your community ahead of yourself and serve because someday things can be better. Many in the present generation of UK politicians and indeed in Ireland espouse the exact opposite.

Which brings me back to Mr Crabb. Once firmly en route home to Wales, Minister D’arcy tweeted to him, a tweet which Mr Crabb in turn retweeted.  At some stage Minister D’arcy appears to have had second thoughts about his away day with the Welshman and he deleted his tweet.  

It was that sort of day in Rosslare.

The tale of 2 café’s

About 30 years ago Rosslare Harbour morphed into Rosslare Europort.  Central to the rebrand was the new terminal at the harbour which won award after award for its design. 2 railway stations rolled into one with walkways to the ships. Integrated services for foot passengers meant that trains and ships ran together.  I remember travelling from Dublin on the 13.30 and transferring to the ship for Le Havre with just a 20 minute stop over. On the other hand arriving in Le Havre meant a shuttle bus to the railway station where you had a full 90 minute wait for the train to St Lazare.

Ferry services to Le Havre are a thing of the past. Rosslare Europort has also lost its sheen. The train no longer draws up at the platform. About 10 years ago it was relocated overnight to a new platform to the rear of a redundant engine shed.  Foot passengers have dropped off as  the focus has moved to cars and road freight.

One causality of the times has been the cafe and bar.  About 20 years ago, I recall watching an Ireland game one afternoon as I waited for the steam train to be turned on the turn table before we came back to town.

Rosslare has ferry links to 4 other ports. One of them is Fishguard.  Fishguard never got the  level of investment from the British government that Rosslare got. Let’s park the legal anomaly about the Fishguard Rosslare Harbour Railway Company. Stena owns the railway station at Fishguard Harbour. While the cafe and bar at Rosslare are a thing of the past, travellers to Rosslare may be interested to know that the cafe on the platform in Fishguard is still going strong. A few weeks ago i had a bite to eat there as I waited for the boat home. For less than a fiver I got a plate of chips with a sausage roll and a cuppa. That was much less than what I’d have paid onboard the ship home.

This is the bit I find interesting. Rosslare has significantly more foot passengers than Fishguard presumably with more money to spend. Yet the café at Rosslare is closed while the one at Fishguard operates.  There’s an opening for someone in the catering business were CIE prepared to offer a realistic lease to re-open the café.  And judging by the price I paid for a simple meal there’s an opportunity for someone to compete with the monopoly that ferries enjoy once the set sail if CIE were prepared to rent out the former café.

Let’s face it, there is no business with a bar. Attitudes to drink have changed. The prospect of BREXIT will eventually mean a return of duty free and the dreaded booze cruises. Who’d invest long term in a bar when the shipping line might possibly undercut you? But food is different. 

CIE asked for a bail out from the state about 4 years ago. Nobody asked them if they were maxing their assets to ensure that all possible revenue streams were contributing to the company. But then senior civil servants in the Department of Finance are rarely found supping tea while waiting for a ferry to Ireland.

Trashed!

Those of you who follow my blog will know I’m big into Tidy Towns. I’m not on my own. Wexford is big into   tidy towns.  In the last few years there’s been a steady improvement in the town’s score, an increase in those joining tidy towns and progress from bronze to silver medal status.

Wexford tidy towns meet up every Saturday morning at 10 AM and Wednesday evening at 6PM. 

Today was no different and we had a good turn out. I spent the morning at the corner of Bride Street and Clifford Terrace weeding and planting on a patch of land beside a derelict house.

Therese and I cleared out weeds and planted geraniums and lilies. We took out a bag and a half of weeds in 90 minutes. So imagine how proud we were to have lifted the black bags onto the back of the council truck. We cracked a few jokes with the council workers and went for a cuppa pleased with what we’d achieved.

So a few hours later when I passed up the street you can imagine how surprised I was when I discovered a black plastic bag sitting on the side of the road, exactly where we’d been working. Had we forgotten a bag of waste? Had we been more effective than we thought?

No, is the short answer. I went over to take a closer look. It seems that by an amazing coincidence  a sack of domestic rubbish had arrived hours after the truck had left.  That’s the innocent explanation.

The cynic may think that someone spotted an opportunity to dump waste and piggy back on the work of volunteers for tidy towns. And the cynic may be right. It isn’t the first time that this has happened and it may be happening more often more recently.

A few weeks ago I was in Zambia. They don’t have bin collections there. It was a frequent occurrence to smell smoke from the burning of rubbish on the side of the street as I walked around Kabwe. Scorches were frequently seen on the side of roads which were often unlit in years as the council simply doesn’t have the money for street lighting and where pavements are as rare as hen’s teeth.

I returned home in the middle of a debate about whether bin charges should be on an annual basis or by the kilogramme.  Rubbish has to be collected. For years we have accepted the principle of the polluter pays. Still some people simply don’t get it.  We can have a town as good or as lousey as what citizens want.

If the polluter doesn’t want to pay, why should I or you? 

Echo of the Sunday Tribune

Local media is something that is fundamental to a functioning and transparent community. So when a local paper closes, the scope to interact with a community is lost.  A free and fair media is central to any society.  One less newspaper means one less perspective on life.  I miss the Sunday Tribune and The Irish Press. Their demise didn’t mean that readership of continuing titles increased. A newspaper says something about it’s readers, it’s a badge and you can tell a lot about a community by the titles they read.

But the loss of a paper takes something away from a community. So when the Wexford Echo suddenly closed it is easy to see why there is a sense of loss in Co Wexford. There was no warning, the termination in publishing was fast and rapid. The Echo group publishes 4 titles, one in each of the 4 districts in the county.  The paper was strong on local sport and the arts. As recently as 5 years ago the echo won a national award as the regional newspaper of the year. The paper has been a breeding ground for many journalists who went on to bigger and better things on the national stage.  So how can this happen?

The mainstay of the group was the Enniscorthy Echo which was the dominant title in what was for a long time Co Wexford’s second town.  Enniscorthy’s economy has been in decline for sometime. Shops are closing and the main street has seen footfall decrease.  Where were Enniscorthy’s political representatives down through the years when all this was going on? Enniscorthy is now reaping a bitter harvest of political neglect by Fianna Fail for decades.  Less business in the town means less ads. Advertising is crucial to any newspaper. Readership is important too but freesheets prove that cover price is not absolutely essential to the mix.

Newspaper readership is in decline as punters look to online and more immediate sources for their news. Put the 2 factors together and you get the picture of what has been going on in the background. The group was sold by a local family to the Examiner group from Cork in the early part of the decade in a multi-million deal.  

It’s over 2 weeks since the paper shut up shop. There were early indications that another buyer may be interested in purchasing the 4 titles within the county and to re-launch the publications.  Where that suggestion is at the minute is top secret.

While there are hopes to revive the titles, it is certain that any return will be under a different cost structure.  It will remain to be seen as to how a revived Echo newspaper group can be put together working on the new  business realities in the media. I’ll declare an interest. I write a column for a freesheet which is owned by the rival stable the People Group Newspapers.  But I believe there is room there for 2 groups in Co Wexford.  

In the round newspapers are fair to all involved in politics. If a politician feels hard done by one week, they do balance it in time.  I’ve found the journalists I’ve dealt with down through the years to be honest, hard working and well briefed with often a good sense of humour thrown in!  A newspaper gives all its readers one singular set of facts that readers can either accept or reject communally. At a time of fake news and instant spin this commodity is becoming rare.
Fingers crossed the group can be revived for them and their reader's sake.

Keep the spirit

I’ve never done anything as difficult before in my life, nor have I ever done anything as ultimately rewarding. It’s one thing to see a problem from a distance, it’s another to see it close up.

Two weeks in Zambia has been both an eye opener and a back breaker. Eye opening to how a people can be affected by an environmental, social and a chronic disease. Eye opening in the realisation that there are no easy fixes to the deep problems that thwart Africa. Back breaking in enduring the physical work to build classrooms using pick axes, shovels and bare hands. Back breaking in the run in to raise funds to get there and back. The gardening work was enjoyable. What can be better than tending soil and growing veg??

Sables Nua is a shelter and primary school for homeless children on the edge of Kabwe.  You can walk in 20 minutes from its gate down the road to the pit where one of the earliest hominoid fossils was discovered almost 90 years ago. About 10 miles past the pit stands the bush school at Kangombe. Drive off the tarmac, onto the dirt track and turn right onto a trail past the medical centre. You’ll never complain about potholes on Irish roads after you’ve driven this route.  On the second day that we were there, a tyre on the 4X4 burst as we transported a patient to the hospice. Welcome to the real world.

One of the children that I met on my first day n Sables Nua was a boy called Andrew. Andrew was from Malawi.  When Andrew’s father discovered that he had infected Andrew’s mother with HIV AIDs, he sent them packing. Andrews mother took him to Zambia where she sought treatment. There is no central data base for medical records in this part of Zambia. Andrew’s mother kept her record in a book. In February Andrew’s mother disappeared. She told Andrew that she would be away at the clinic but would be back soon. And that was the last he’d heard of her.

Andrew and his mother survived by sheltering under a stall in the fish market. The smell of rotting fish acts as a magnet to rats. After a few days when his mother didn’t return, concerned stall holders brought Andrew to Sables where I met him. They brought Andrew and his few belongings with him to Sables Nua. His mother's book and a few contact numbers were inside his bag.  Attempts to track down relatives through the phone numbers ran into the ground/ Months later Andrew still asked for his mother and worried that she would never find him. Attempts to track her down proved fruitless.   It was reckoned that his mother wanted to spare him the ignominy of finding her dead and had walked into the bush where she would inevitably die.

I asked what was Andrew’s legal position as a foreign national whose father wasn’t interested in him. What would become of him? The shelter had no legal grounds to take care of him. Nothing existed on paper.

Women in Africa are second class citizens, but a woman with HIV AIDS is even lower again.  So many times, I’ve been told that when a woman becomes infected with HIV, her husband solves the problem by kicking her out.. Oblivious to the reality that he infected her in the first case, off he goes to form another relationship where he will in turn infect another woman.

All the presumptions, that we Europeans make, go out the window. On a visit to one market I took a picture of the group with the stalls in the background. Hearing voices of stall holders raised around me I asked the social worker who accompanied us, what had I done wrong? Had their privacy been breached? The answer was that there was nothing wrong. They simply wanted to have their picture taken with me!

Each of us saw something different in Zambia. For me it was the echoes of stories that my own father told me about teaching in rural schools in 1940’s Ireland.  The principal of the bush school addressed the school and the Irish students and translated a saying from Bemba. He was thrilled that his school was getting rebuilt and valued the work that was being done and the determination to see the job through. The saying goes “Keep the Spirit”.

Pretty sound advice to an Irishman.  We Irish need reminding of the people we once were and where we’ve come from.  For many who set out on the road to Zambia there was the intention of doing something positive and leaving that behind us.  But here was a rural principal, giving us sound and worthwhile advice to take home with us. If we did nothing else than to take on board that saying then the trip was worthwhile.

But before I finish off, remember Andrew? Well 2 days before we left, out of the blue Sables Nua got a phone call from a hospital in Lusaka. It was Andrew’s mother. She had been confined since February but had recovered enough to be discharged. She returned to collect Andrew. But before she left she signed an order committing Andrew to Sables Nua in the event of her death.  Sadly her HIV condition is progressive and terminal. But before she dies, she loved Andrew enough to make sure that he could have an education and a future she never had.  He will not have to live out his life wondering whether the only parent to care for him ever loved him.  Andrew has that certainty. It’s not the Hollywood ending that we westerners like to expect but it’s an ending that is better than what many more cynical like me had feared. 

The curious incident of the receiver and the apartment

I listened closely to playback yesterday.  It featured an item from Liveline during the week. The caller had recorded how bailiffs had entered his home to evict him, his wife and his child.  Nobody disputed that he hadn’t been a good tenant or paid his rent.  He was being evicted because his landlord was bankrupt and the liquidator was seizing the property with a view to putting someone else in. His belongings will end up on the side of the street.

And it brought back to me a most recent case here in Wexford. About a month ago a Bulgarian couple received a solicitors letter instructing them to leave within a week.  The couple have poor English and left it about a week before they came to me.

Their story was that they had rented their apartment in March 2015 through a Wexford town agency and it was owned by a man who was in severe financial difficulty. In February this year a liquidator ad contacted them and said that in future they were to pay rent to a new renting agency.  They’ve done this and have an exemplary record of never missing a date. They both work, not on great money, but they are triers.

In September they had a little boy.  And this is when the trouble started. First a letter from a Limerick based solicitor telling them to get out arrived. The couple didn’t understand the significance of so, they left it for 2 weeks before they contacted me. Their English is not great but when there’s a new arrival in the house your world is turned upside down. Priorities go out the window.

Under Irish law a landlord can only evict in the case of someone of that duration in private rented accommodation if there is anti-social behaviour or if they have a relative that needs the house.  Neither applies in this case. The receiver is by all accounts a heavy hitter. He was behind a major closure of a business premises in Dublin last year following a lightning move to shut. So I knew there was real trouble on the way.

I contacted my Labour colleague Aideen Hayden who heads up Threshold. Aideen told me that where as the law between a landlord and a tenant is clear that the position of a receiver is a grey area when it comes to tenants rights.  Having got good advice as to how to proceed we got an appeal into the PRTB in Clonakilty.  There is a term limit of 28 days on submitting an appeal. 

The couple called to other renting agencies.  Availability in Wexford was not good.  The best on offer was in Clonard Village and was about 20% more expensive.  And at the back of it all was a letter setting out no reason as to why they should go and one that showed no understanding of the reality that it was a family the receiver was dealing with and not a property.

Why is it that it seems to be non national families who get this type of treatment? Why is it that a revenue stream in rent wasn’t enough for the mortgage bank who were hell bent on getting their pound of flesh? Why is it that the law that applies to landlords is not the same as that applied to receivers?

If a landlord sent the type of letter I’ve seen he’d been strung up. But a receiver acting for a bank that we the taxpayers have bailed out seems to sail on regardless.  That is until an abrupt phonecall from the agent brought the matter to a rapid conclusion. 

The letter was all a misunderstanding. The solicitor got it wrong. You can continue to live there and yes of course, please send us the rent through the usual channels. Relief all round, a young family with a new born baby boy won’t be homeless in the run in to Christmas. But of course if they were, it wouldn’t have been the first time, would it?

A hurler on the ditch or a spectator?

Nature abhors a vacuum.  There are those that believe nature is externally controlled by a divine force. Some of these folks refuse to accept that science can explain many things that are fundamental to understanding life; like evolution or global warming.  

Donald Trump seems to have made good on his promises to the US electorate and surrounded himself with people who not just buy into this view of nature but go further and buy into conspiracy theories. 

I don’t think the sales of British right wing magazine “The Spectator” are too high in New Ross.  

However I’m more than surprised to find that a New Ross (not New York) councillor considers some of their articles  worthwhile enough to retweet them approvingly to his followers.

The Spectator in the recent past had Boris Johnson as its editor and it is generally regarded now as a mouth piece for the Tory party and BREXIT. In the past it described the Anglo Irish agreement which recognised the right of the Irish Government to have input north of the border as fraudulent .  Last year it described SF economic policy as a basket case.

So I’m quite surprised that it is in fact the local Sinn Fein Councillor Oisin O’Connell who finds common ground with a libertarian Tory but there you go! New Politics isn’t just for Enda Kenny, it’s for everyone now!

Cllr O’Connell tweets “Like the inappropriate application of an antibiotic, the incessant misuse of these terms has created a superbug" and links to an article which in a self congratulatory tone defends Trump and his ilk from attacks of being bigots, homophobes and misogynists.  Trump is no bacteria. He’s a parasitic virus against which no antibiotic works.

SF obviously don’t do irony.  Superbugs would never have evolved were it not that those using anti-biotics ignored best advice which was to finish the course to its end so as to eliminate the threat. 

And then I remembered last Easter when we marked the centenary of 1916.  You remember that? Inclusivity, Equality, fraternity and all that malarkey?  Seems that Sinn Fein in Wexford have dropped that like a hot potato and are off chasing the latest populist guff from creationists, homophobes and deniers of all sorts.

On a personal level I respect Cllr O’Connell’s honesty. He at least isn’t engaging in the “on the one hand this and on the other hand that”.  The politics of it stinks to high heavens.  A self proclaimed republican party giving the nod to a fascist.And the reason why is clear. It’s all about Sinn Fein tapping into US cash to fund their party here.   But principle? It is lost in Yonkers by an Irish mile.

All falls into place at this link! http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/donald-trump-could-make-sinn-fein-ally-peter-king-counterterror-chief-in-white-house-35227644.html