Mespil Road
Briefly • Cohesion – this year will see the fruits of the work become visible. • New CDPs may be set up in the future. The initiatives will be based on data coming from the CSO’s Small Area Statistics. • CDPs on islands – no change. • When relations between CDPs and local authorities break down – call the Department, and if there is no improvement, call either Minister. • Limerick’s regeneration was never going to work until the local people came up with a plan themselves and saw the need for change clearly. • Highlight the blight of urban deprivation. • Childcare Scheme changes were not a u-turn. – Minister
Do we take disadv - asks Minister Ó Cuív “I KEEP getting labelled ‘rural, rural, rural’” complains Minister Éamon Ó Cuív, “when there is a real need to everyday highlight the blight of deprivation and particularly urban deprivation.” “The greatest inequity, particularly for our young people, is in urban deprived communities. It’s amazing that the one thing you cannot get society in general excited about, unless there are shootings, is about tackling once and for all urban deprivation. Unless we have a shootings, you can’t get a debate.” “Do we as a society take disadvantage seriously? I think the Government do, but do we as a society do so? And how committed are we to dealing with urban deprivation?” It is unlikely the Minister is for a moment saying everyone should move to the countryside, but he strongly believes a rural dweller has better life-chances. “I’ve tried and tried and tried for the last five years to point out that in social terms, rural houses give extraordinary good outcomes for young families, with 70% going on to further (third-level) education.” URBAN PLANNING DISASTER He said urban planning was a “big disaster” where we create urban communities “where only one in a hundred children have any real expectations of getting to a third level college, where we create the type of situations we find ourselves in Limerick where we virtually have to knock down half the city and rebuild it.” “It amazed me that some of the major shakers and movers in Irish society couldn’t see that the biggest planning scandal in Ireland has been in urban planning - the social segregation is costing us millions in social problems, in prison populations. And it
is causing huge social misery at the human level.” He said it was not a case of putting more money into more CDPs, that the problem needed much more than that. He welcomed the regeneration schemes that are starting up in Limerick. In 1989, he first visited Southill, on a Senate canvass with a friend.
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MINISTER WANTED TO LEAVE SOUTHILL “I never saw in all of my life anywhere like it. I’ve been to a lot of places,” said the Minister, mentioning the Short Strand and Ballymurphy in Belfast, the infamous Garvaghy Road, and Ballymun and Fatima Mansions in Dublin. “But Southill was one place I wanted to get out of fast. All the boarded up houses and so on just gave me that feeling.” “Southill was always on my mind after that and I raised the issue of urban renewal relating to Southill and what I was told was ‘Unless the Limerick people came with a plan to deal with the social issues, there was no point in knocking down the houses and building new ones.’ And what has made regeneration in Fatima Mansions and Ballymun different is that it has come from the inside. To a point, you had to wait until the penny dropped with people themselves or otherwise you were coming in from the outside and doing it and you wouldn’t get the results right. “For some reason, Limerick City has by far the highest number of local authority housing (43%) of any city in Ireland.
Include male victims in Code o THE Code of Conduct recommended to CDPs and Family Resource Centres (FRCs) on the issue of domestic violence should be widened to include reaching out to male victims, according to Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Éamon Ó Cuív. “My gut would be it should cover all domestic violence victims. I accept that violence against men is not as frequent but it does happen. (The Code of Conduct) should deal with domestic violence for men,” he said.
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Minister of State Pat Carey agreed: “Instead of having a code of conduct on domestic violence against men or women, it should be one addressing domestic violence against adults.” The Code of Conduct was adopted to guide CDPs and FRCs on the issue of domestic violence. Such groups, notes the Code, have a primary role “to enable individuals in the community to acccess relevant services and to promote the development of a communitybased response.” However, the Code was criticised from within the
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