If you’re not aware that housing is a big problem in Dublin, you maybe should check if you still have a head on your shoulders. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration that Sinn Fin’s promise to build 100,000 homes over the next five years played a significant part in their stunning election performance.
But we don’t need to look south to see housing problems. The situation in North Belfast is in some ways more shocking than the south’s housing problems, in that sectarianism gets into the mix in Belfast.
The online newspaper thedetail.ie carries this morning a report by Rory Winters, which shows that “close to 100% of social housing need in north Belfast is concentrated in predominantly Catholic neighbourhoods.” That means the need for social housing in Catholic areas is twenty-six times greater than that in predominantly Protestant areas.
We’re sometimes tempted to think that appalling discrimination of this kind is a thing of the past. Try telling them that in Ardoyne or Carrick Hill. It is more than scandalous that things have been allowed to reach this point.
Will this ghastly boil on the body politic be lanced soon? Sinn Féin’s Deirdre Hargey is the new Minister for Communities, and the NIHE is part of her brief. She says she’s very concerned with these figures and plans to implement housing allocation on need. This is the first time a housing minister has admitted to this appalling imbalance. DUP ministers were in charge of housing from 2011 to 2017. You can draw your own conclusions.
How have they got away with it? Basically by saying “There must be a Catholic-Protestant balance in housing allocation.” So even though there are massively more Catholic families in need of housing, this is ignored in the name of ‘balance’. If Deirdre Hargey can address this rank injustice and change the lives of many in North Belfast, the southern electorate will know Sinn Féin are in earnest when they denounce the housing policies of Fine Gael, supported by Fianna Fáil.
There’s a lot more detail (no pun intended) on this matter and its history in Rory Winters’s report, and I’ll leave the link to it below. Anyone who cares about creating a just society here in the north should read it.
Comments are closed.