“4 Dublin local authorties, which are deliberately making the problem” – it’s interesting that in the latest competitiveness index, where Ireland slipped once again, to 24 place – the bottom of the Europe (only Italy and Greece are worse – France is 22), bureaucracy was identified as one of the three biggest obstacles – others were taxation (to pay the top income tax, you to earn 4.5 times more in the UK) and infrastructure (reminder: after decades of EU subsidies, Dublin has 2 tram lines that don’t connect – Warsaw built over 40 (forty) without any EU subsidies.

How do the poor Australians survive with just one housing authority for the whole country? Surely their homelessness problem must be much worse than ours, considering that we have a housing authority almost near every pub! (+NAMA, +local councils housing levies up to 40,000 – yes, there is one council who takes that much not that far where Mr McWilliams lives (I think that it’s in Dun Laoghaire were they value bless the locals with such levy).

But but but

On the other hand, many foreign tourists passing through Poland think that Poland must be a country richer than Ireland if people live in such houses in the countryside. Well, of course, it is not – so how come these people have such house?
Guess what – they design them and build them THEMSELVES. Not architects, but every effing person in the village – all family helps in building the house (this goes for villages only) AFTER work or DURING HOLIDAYS – including kids that are 12 years old.

And I’ll tell you more – there was a chap in Ireland who did the same and it cost him only 25,000 euro to build a house for his family.

http://www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/property-mortgages/meet-the-architect-who-built-a-threebedroom-house-for-his-family-for-25000-36180700.html

“That academic also described how when the Swedes moved into new housing estates from the forests in the 50s there would be instructions on the toilets explaining how to use them. Not that I am laughing. When my father’s mother and father were preparing for the visit a relative, a nun, they built an outside toilet, the first that had ever been there (hitherto you did your business in the open ‘faoin gcpóig’). ”

I can believe that – when the Swedes invaded Poland in the 17th century, they came from a country so poor that they were told to steal not only livestock, works of art and precious metals (needless to say that like Germans and Russians, they never returned any of that – except for a frieze depicting the entry of Constance Habsburg to Kraków), but every metal object they would see, including buckets (not sure though why they took relics of St Stanislaus).
The best example of how incredibly backward Sweden was at that time compared to Poland is to say that they have also torn out all the door-frames and took maids dresses.
In Lubomirskis Castle in Wisnicz they had stolen 150 carts of goods.

Even today, most of the Polish pre-17th-century buildings have a description “damaged in the 17th-century during the Swedish deluge”.

Many of these soldiers refused to come back to Sweden and settled in Poland, and the town where I was born is an example of such place.

It is fair to say that their invasion (in Poland called “Potop” – “Deluge”) for the Poles, they must have come across like those Eritreans, Bangladeshis, and Somalians coming to Munich in September 2015 came across to rational Bavarians.

In 2002, the Swedes organised an exhibition called “The Eagle and Three Crowns. Polish-Swedish neighbourhood at the Baltic in modern era” – it consisted entirely of objects robbed in Poland.

Percentage-wise, during the Deluge they killed FAR more people (4.4 million) in Poland than the Germans killed Jews in the Holocaust (3 million).

There it goes “the Scandinavian solution” myth…

nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Do not agree on raising personal taxes via land, property or anything else.
Just makes us an even less appealing place to be/invest in.
Would be open to reducing the switch off the alarm clock and roll over in the bed incentives though (heretical, I know!)

Think about it. To speak of taxing “land”, in the absence of context, is daft. Where is that land? Who owns it? Who inherits it? How many inheritors are there?
If it’s in South Dublin then maybe, but I repeat Ireland is not Dublin or South Dublin, except in ROCK’s world!

What about the top 13 cos in Ireland spending less than 1% on tax? Is that really the best we can do?

In any event, rather than dividing the pie even further, a fundamental principle we seem unable to grasp is: we need to grow the pie.
Yes. Grow!

We need our people to come home and/or invest.
Dream up incentives to grow our economy eg incentivise people looking to move to Europe to invest outside the Greater Dublin area e.g. Spain’s golden residence visa. That’s just one idea and I’m sure the posters on this blog cd come up with hundreds…

Ireland needs critical mass and preferably new people who will contribute to the Economy – ito needed skills or investments.

We also need three clear and distinct strategies – one for Greater Dublin, one for the Republic o/side Dublin (focusing on fast tracked growth for Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford) and a NI Future one.

There are no short cuts.
Ireland needs to think and act strategically for a change.

Grow our pie! Use every strength we have got.

Focus on changing the face of Dublin into a High Rise City with world class transport.
Focus on fast tracking exponential growth in our other cities via clever, sustainable incentives.
Focus on the Future island and how we can make it a place our descendants are proud to make a life and a good living in.

To actually DO all the above, we need moolah.
We all know rule number one of making moolah: investing moolah.
And that requires as Deco says Bonocks!

If we continue to snooze. We will continue to lose (or if not lose, then just tread water).

zzzzzz