Taking Parlon to task on property

A Chairde,

As a member of the Oireachtas All-Party Committee on the Constitution, examining the issues of private property in the context of the 1937 Constitution, I would like to address comments made by Mr Tom Parlon TD at the Parnell Summer School last weekend.

While I must give Mr Parlon credit for learning so quickly at the feet of Charlie McCreevy and Michael McDowell, his attempts to woo his PD colleagues by demonstrating his right wing credentials in advance of a leadership battle with McDowell are as transparent as they are pathetic.

The Constitution Committee must act in the interests of the thousands of Irish people and their children who are deprived of the right to adequate housing, because this government certainly has no intention of doing so. It has abandoned those who find themselves unable to afford current house prices; who are trapped in an unregulated private rented sector; who are on housing waiting lists or are homeless.

A smiling Tom Parlon was recently pictured in the Irish Times wielding an auction hammer during a publicity stunt to promote the sale of state property to the same speculators whose 'rights' he does not hesitate to valiantly defend.

However, if he thinks Parnell and Davitt prosecuted the land war to create a state in which the rights of profiteers would be so inflated as to deprive ordinary people of housing it is time he re-read the history of that period.

Tom Parlon currently defends the rights of speculators to hoard land and sell it at grossly inflated prices as increasing numbers are left homeless. During the Famine, certain landlords exported Irish grain as the people starved to death.

Parlon would, no doubt have defended their right to do so on the basis that they must not be penalised for taking initiative.

The land of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland and the right of people to housing must take precedence over the profiteering of speculators.

Meanwhile, in typically populist fashion, Fianna Fáil is using the Constitution Committee to mask its own inaction against speculators and developers involved in hoarding land. The mere fact that this crisis has been allowed to get so out of hand illustrates the necessity for clarity in the Constitution to give a more explicit protection to the common good.

Arthur Morgan TD

Sinn Féin spokesperson on housing
Leinster House
Dublin 2