The idea of roadblocks to keep people from their holiday homes sounds fantastical, but is it?
The scene opens ... it is early summer in
Connemara
. Dusk is falling. A black Range Rover with 27 D plates approaches Roundstone from the east. The driver slows, dims the lights and pulls over. The woman in the passenger side turns around and speaks to her two children in the back seat.
'Okay, kids, let's go over it again in case we are stopped by the men ... '
'Where are we going?' she asks.
'To
Clifden
.'
READ MORE
'Where are we staying?'
'The Clifden Arms Hotel.'
'Good.'
The woman turns back to the man. 'What if they don't believe us?'
'It's cool. I have made an online booking. We can cancel it when we get to the cottage,' he replies before driving off.
'Why don't the men want us to go to our holiday cottage, Mummy?' the girl asks. The woman pauses before answering quietly: 'They have nowhere to live, and they think it's our fault'.
'Is it our fault?' the girl asks.
The driver responds: 'No ... it's the Government's.'
Apologies to Paul Lynch and all other authors of post-apocalyptic fiction. The idea of roadblocks in Connemara to stop people getting to their holiday homes admittedly stretches credulity.
But until Wednesday the idea that a senior manager in neighbouring
Mayo County Council
would call for a boycott of holiday homeowners might have seemed equally so. The fact that he was taken seriously – to the point of him being interviewed on RTÉ's Morning Ireland – takes it closer to the level of plausibility.
In case you missed it, Tom Gilligan, the council's director of services with responsibility for housing and roads, emailed his colleagues in the local authority's strategic policy committee (SPC) over the weekend
floating the idea of a boycott
in the context of the housing shortage in the county.
'So, the objective around this proposed boycott is to highlight the impact of underused housing stock on local communities, encourage policy reform and taxation measures on vacant second homes. And also, to push holiday homeowners to either return properties for sale to the rental market or to the long-term rental market,' he told RTÉ.
[
'Nothing is off the table': Mayo housing official defends call to boycott holiday homeowners
Opens in new window
]
The thing about Gilligan's comments is that – as was said about Donald Trump during his first term – they should be taken seriously but not literally. Like Trump at his most intuitive, Gilligan has tapped into the resentment of a group that understandably feels its voice is not being heard. It is galling to be surrounded by homes that are unoccupied for much of the year in the middle of a housing crisis.
In Trump's case, it was blue-collar, rural Americans – mostly men. In Gilligan's case, it's people in rural Ireland who can't find a place for themselves, or their children, to live.
While both Trump and Gilligan have identified a group with legitimate grievances, neither seems to have a workable solution to their problems.
Trump's first-term efforts at protectionism were stymied by others in his party and Government, but the second time around he launched his disastrous tariff policy.
Gilligan's proposed boycott is misguided and even less likely to succeed than the tariffs. But Gilligan has hit on a word that encodes the anger of those who might agree with him.
As Gilligan pointed out,
the word 'boycott'
is synonymous with Mayo and the late 19th century protests against landlord Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. 'The local community at the time took it upon themselves to try a form of civil protest ... It's very important that we should never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world,' he told RTÉ.
It will be telling to see where Gilligan's idea goes from here. It will no doubt find favour with some frustrated people in the west of Ireland, but also the ragtag group of charlatans who comprise the far right.
If the idea of protest – rather than the unworkable concept of a boycott – does gain some traction with the wider community in Mayo, then this serious local issue could come on to the national agenda.
We shouldn't discount the possibility. Gilligan boasts an impressive CV and is very different from the angry self-publicists who spread their poison on social media. A qualified accountant with a MBA in local government from DCU, he has held various posts in the public service and the private sector.
He is also the founder of
VacantHomes.ie
, a national housing initiative developed to get empty/derelict homes back into use.
The real takeaway – particularly for holiday homeowners with Range Rovers – is that they underestimate at their peril the level of simmering anger felt by people who are locked out of the housing market in parts of the country where homes sit empty for much of the year.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Irish Sun
17 minutes ago
- The Irish Sun
Huge £17.5MILLION boost for England's ‘saddest town' where high street is dubbed ‘death row'
ENGLAND'S "saddest town", where the high street has been dubbed 'death row', has been given a huge financial boost to improve it's town centre. Advertisement 5 Barrow has been described as 'England's saddest town' Credit: David Nelson 5 Many shops and buildings have been boarded up Credit: David Nelson 5 The town is set for a £200m revamp Credit: David Nelson The Office for National Statistics has classified it as one of England's Police battle rampant drug gangs, and many buildings have been vandalised with graffiti and broken windows. Barrow resident James Riche previously told "I call it death row because so many of the shops are shut and boarded up. We avoid it." Advertisement Read more news stories However, the Cumbrian town's look is about to change. Barrow is home to the BAE Systems factory, which builds the UK's key military submarines - including the And because of its "importance to National Defence" has been granted a whopping next 10 years. This is on top of the £17.5 million of cash that was given to the town back in October 2021. Advertisement Most read in The Sun The council said: 'Extra funding made available through Team Barrow means significantly more money is now available and this has the potential to deliver a more transformational regeneration of the town centre. 'The additional funding from Team Barrow would be on top of the money already committed by Government for the current town centre regeneration works. Inside Barrow in furness' heroin gangs and derelict streets 'In recognition of the town's strategic importance to national defence and security, the Government has agreed to invest more than £200m in Barrow over the next 10 years. 'Team Barrow will use this money – and seek to secure additional private and public sector investment – to help transform the town, delivering improvements across health, education, transport, the economy and community.' Advertisement Plans for the regeneration are currently being finalised, but could include a new and improved theatre and events space, better food and drink offerings and leisure and market facilities. Simon Case, chair of Team Barrow, said: 'We have bold and ambitious plans for Barrow and this includes transforming the town centre. 'While these are very early stages, with a significant amount of work now required to develop these plans, we are clear in our vision that this must deliver more than simply high street regeneration. 'The Government's investment in Barrow presents us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address the challenges which face the town. Advertisement "This means that in addition to delivering a town centre that has a strong retail , leisure and cultural offering, we will also prioritise improvements in housing, health and education.' Bae Systems is set to drastically expand its workforce, due to a surge in demand, meaning that the population in Barrow is set to swell from 60,000 to 90,000 over the next decade. Some of the newly employed workers and their families will be housed in a new 800 home waterfront development, called Marine Village. Case has likened the regeneration of Barrow to the town of Bourneville, which was built specifically to house Cadbury's factory workers and their farmers. Advertisement He said: "With the pressure that we've got on getting the Astute boats finished, then Dreadnought and then Aukus, we started to focus on this two years ago for almost Bournville-like reasons.' "The town is a strategic national asset, although it hasn't always been viewed that way. 'Pretty quickly, we realised we needed Team Barrow to create an environment that would deliver that happy, skilled workforce we need to support the defence nuclear enterprise. "Thanks to Mr Putin and Mr Xi, the business case makes itself!' Advertisement 5 The UK's military submarines are made in the BAE systems factory in Barrow Credit: David Nelson 5 The town has struggled with drug problems Credit: David Nelson
RTÉ News
2 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Shortage of planning staff causing housing delays
Sinn Féin's housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin said a shortage of planning staff both in councils and in An Bord Pleanála is causing an excessive delay in building houses. Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said the Government has stated that the goal is to have 120 planners graduate each year, but it is not clear how this will be achieved in the Government's housing plan. He said that the Government has its "head in the sand" and is ignoring advice from the professionals. "Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael repeatedly have been told by the utilities, by professional planners, by people involved in public and private sector residential development what is required to get to the level of social affordable and private home ownership, new build homes that's required," he said. "We need a workplace plan from the Government and centralised planners are not necessary as decisions are best made locally", he added. He said that three years ago, the Government asked the City and County Managers' Association, the body that represents local authority managers, to do an assessment of how many additional planning staff they needed to meet the planning requirements at that time. Mr Ó Broin said the report, which was given to the department in 2022, said that local authorities needed an additional 541 planning staff. However, he said the parliamentary question that he got back from the minister last week stated that the Government provided sanction for 213 of those staff, but only 86 of those have been employed. "So less than half what was required has been sanctioned, and less than half of that again has been employed. And in my dealings with local authorities they're telling us all the time, both in their housing departments and in their planning departments, they have a problem with retention," Eoin Ó Broin said. "They don't have enough staff and there really doesn't seem to be any coherent plan from Government to address this," he said. "And the direct consequence is it is taking far, far too long, both for local authorities and An Bord Pleanála, who also have a staffing deficit, to make crucial decisions, decisions on underlying critical infrastructure, housing and renewable energy projects," he stressed. "We're not training up sufficient planners. We're also not able to keep all the planners that we're training and we're not making it as easy as we should do for people who might be, say, engineers in local authorities or related professions who want to scale up on the job and move across into planning," the Sinn Féin TD said. He also criticised the Government's "so-called resources plan" saying it does not say how many planners the country has, or how many it needs. "They say they want to get to 120 a year but they don't say how we're going to get to that number," he said. "I've met with the Irish Planning Institute, I meet with public and private sector professional planners and they've been shouting about this for a very, very long time," he stated. He said the Government can not plan for investment in water infrastructure or the electricity grid. "They haven't invested in a plan to ensure we have an adequate number of planners, both in the public and private sector side. And that's one of the single biggest reasons why planning decisions and planning decisions on housing are being delayed," he said. "We're about to have a revised national development plan and revised set of housing targets," he said. "If there isn't an adequate workforce plan to set out from 2025 to 2030, how many additional planners we're going to recruit each year, then the Government is not going to meet its housing targets, its critical infrastructure targets its renewable energy targets and of course that will make working people's lives ever more difficult," he concluded.
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Woman who died in Connemara house fire named as former US death row inmate Sunny Jacobs
A woman who spent five years on death row in the United States is one of the victims of the fire in Connemara which killed two people. Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs spent 16 years in a Florida prison over the murder of two police officers. She was named locally in Connemara as a victim of the fire, along with a man in his 30s who has not yet been publicly identified. Jacobs was in a car with her partner Jesse Tafero and her two children, aged 9 years and 10 months, when she became caught up in a fatal shooting incident at an Interstate 95 rest stop in 1976. READ MORE Jacobs and Tafero were sentenced to death while a third man, Walter Rhodes, who was in the back seat of the car, later confessed to the murder. Tafero was executed in 1990. Ms Jacobs was eventually acquitted in 1992 and released from jail. On a visit to Ireland in 1998 while she was campaigning at an Amnesty International event for the abolition of the death penalty, she met Irishman Peter Pringle. He had been sentenced to death in Ireland for the murder o f gardas John Morley and Henry Byrne during a bank robbery in Ballaghaderreen in July 1980. His death sentence, along with that of two other men, was commuted to 40 years in jail. Mr Pringle was acquitted of the killing at the Court of Appeal in 1995 after the court ruled the original verdict was unsafe and unsound. The couple married in 2012 and they moved to Connemara. Mr Pringle died in 2023. In 2008, Ms Jacobs published the bestselling book Stolen Time about her period in jail. Tuesday' fire broke out at a cottage near Casla, a village between Inverin and Carraroe, at about 6am. 'At approximately 6:20am, gardaí and fire services were alerted to a house fire at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann,' An Garda Síochána said in a statement. 'The fire was brought under control by Fire Services and the bodies of a woman aged in her 70s and a man in his 30s were recovered from inside the house.' A forensic examination of the cottage, of which the two deceased are believed to have been the only occupants of at the time, is being carried out. The bodies have been transported to the University Hospital Galway mortuary to undergo postmortems and the coroner has been notified. 'The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,' the Garda added. Three units of the County Galway Fire Service and fire personnel from Galway city attended the scene. An Garda Síochána is appealing to anyone with information about the incident to contact Clifden Garda station on 095 22500, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or any garda station.
