Sir, – It is hard to know what purpose Nail Ginty (December 5th) was seeking to serve by comparing homeless figures in Dublin and Edinburgh, but it had all the appearance of trying to make a case that the Dublin crisis is somehow okay on the basis that the problem is worse elsewhere.
I am sure that the Scots are well capable of addressing any problems that they may have. Given the protracted history of the problem in Dublin, it is safer to conclude that the will to tackle the crisis may not exist here, and seeking to emolliate the extent of the problem with spurious comparisons will do nothing to get the relevant authorities off their backsides and deal with this shameful issue once and for all. – Yours, etc,
JIM O’SULLIVAN
Rathedmond,
Sligo. Sir, – The key cost in providing new homes is the price of land. In particular in Dublin city centre and its immediate area which is “suffering” from spiralling inflation.
In every major city globally, in which land is at a premium, the closer to the city you get, property has gone in one direction. Towards the sky. If we want to house people in an affordable manner, in close proximity of the city centre, we simply have to go up and beyond the maximum four storeys we allow for residential buildings. We need to learn from the past with no repeats of building high-rise slums, which happened in the 1960s in the UK and Ireland.
We need to build quality, with a mix of family units and single-person units. We cannot leave this in the hands of developers to create expensive high-rise apartments for privileged classes who want a city pad, and we must not build social housing which can be speculatively sold off in a social-housing sell-off, another error of the past we need not repeat.
To fit the housing we need on the footprint of land we have in Dublin, we have to think beyond what we have now and look to the sky. – Yours, etc, BRENDAN QUINN Enniscrone, Co Sligo.