Ballymun Residents Wondering What Government Means By ‘We Don’t Want Another Ballymun’

WITH the housing crisis showing no signs of abating, the government have been asked by Ballymun residents to clarify what they mean by ‘we don’t want another Ballymun on our hands’.

As it emerges that NAMA offered 507 housing units to the south Dublin Council only for them to take just 65 for social housing despite nearly 9,000 people on the waiting list, the government line remains that they do not want to place too high a concentration of people in need of social housing in the one area.

Towing a ‘we don’t want another Ballymun on our hands’ line, the government seem to be inferring that they don’t trust people in need of social housing of behaving themselves when all placed in the one area, negating the fact that the problems that emerged in the north Dublin housing complex largely stemmed from a lack of facilities and public transport in the area for years.

This has angered a large number of people who have lived happily in Ballymun for years, leading them to clarification on the matter.

“So what you’re saying is that you could have housed us in Dalkey and we would have wrecked the place too, yeah?” asked one man who has lived in Ballymun his entire life.

“I think what they meant to say was, ‘we’ve pretty much been screwing the poor over for years, and we don’t want to look like we haven’t learned anything from it’, or perhaps ‘if we move these people into the one place and they wreck it, we’ll never get a vote out of that area again’?”

“We all know that’s what they mean, really, but it’d be nice if they’d come out and say it for once, instead of using our community as the byword for a shithole when in actual fact it’s the byword for what happens when a government completely fails citizens on so many basic levels”.