Moriarty Tribunal Report
Joe Higgins - Socialist Party TD Press Statement- 20th December 2006
- Haughey's Corruption not an Historic Curiosity;
- Society Continues to Pay a Heavy Price;
- Taoiseach's Refusal to Curb the Speculators Continues Haughey Legacy
Joe Higgins T.D., The Socialist Party
Fianna Fail would like to write off the Report of the Moriarty Tribunal on the corruption of Charles Haughey as an historic curiosity. That is a convenient way of attempting to evade a chilling reality - society today continues to pay a very heavy price for Haughey's corruption.
Two burning issues confronting this State are the exorbitant cost of a home and acute gridlock in Dublin and other major centres.
The carte blanche for developers and big builders to engage in obscene profiteering in land speculation and house building can be traced to the late 1950's and 1960's when Charles Haughey himself engaged in land
speculation under the tutelage of the Gallaghers' big building
contractors. This relationship developed into the Taca fund-raising
venture for Fianna Fail and continues to this day.
Proper planning for communities, which should have involved major
infrastructure alongside the massive housing development was fatally
compromised. The catastrophic gridlock now a feature of daily life in
Dublin and elsewhere directly results from the unrestrained right given
to developers to profiteer from house building without being required to
provide for efficient public transport system.
Similarly first time house buyers are also paying a monstrous price for
the speculation and profiteering which has been allowed to go on
unhindered by the Fianna Fail/ Progressive Democrat government.
The Taoiseach and the Government continue to allow the Haughey legacy to
blight the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Joe Higgins T.D. can be contacted at (01) 618 3038
Appendix: In the Dail, Joe Higgins T.D. holds Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to account after Haughey oration:
Leaders' Questions, June 21st, 2006
Pointing to a Report outlining an increase of Euro300,000 in the price of an ordinary home in Dublin in ten years, Joe Higgins said:
Joe Higgins: This happened on the Taoiseach's watch. He failed
cataclysmically to stop the unbridled speculation by developers and house builders. Of course, that was deliberate. The matter goes all
the way back to the devil's pact made between Fianna FAil and house
builders and speculators in the 1960s. They bought the party's
councillors, who in turn corrupted planning in Dublin and, perhaps,
other areas and created the nightmare we now have. They got everything
they wanted. They bought the party's former leader, who the Taoiseach
eulogised unstintingly last Friday. The VIP pen in the Donnycarney
church was like a major house builders' convention.
The Taoiseach said nothing to indicate that house prices will stop increasing and gave no indication of a Government measure to stop the increase. Is that because the Government has no such measures or
because the clatter of developers' helicopters as they descend on the
Fianna Fail tent at the Galway races is drowning out the calls from tens of thousands of young people and their parents to stop this scandal of unbridled profiteering in the housing market?
The Taoiseach: Deputy Higgins loves asking questions but never wants to listen to any answers. He would love to return to the days of pathetic poverty when de Valera and Lemass built social houses, when no other houses were being built. People were living in council houses and had to emigrate because they had no jobs and no future.
Joe Higgins: Fianna FAil was in power when that happened, not me.
The Taoiseach: .That is the great tradition Deputy Higgins and his
merry warriors want to bring back. We are building at a greater rate
than the United States, Europe or the UK. We are providing new homes to
the working class and young people at a rate matched by no country in Europe.
Joe Higgins: The population is increasing so that is not surprising.
The Taoiseach is in the pockets of speculators.
The Taoiseach: Does Deputy Higgins wish to drag us back to a time when
people had no salaries and no jobs? He has a failed ideology and the
most hopeless policy pursued by any nitwit. He is a failed person who
was rejected and whose political philosophy has been rejected. He will
not pull people back into the failed old policies he dreamed up in south
Kerry when he was a young fellow. Now go away.
Other articles on corruption in Irish politics
are available here.
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