wearing pyjamas in public

langdang wrote: »

Link to article please, or copy and post text!
I'm amazed people with access to the internet and the ability to spell are defending the wearing of skanger pj's!

WHILE the pain is acute in Dublin, at least the city has the small comfort of having enjoyed the full benefit of the boom.

Such is not the case in the city of Limerick. Traditionally one of Ireland’s more depressed cities, Limerick was a latecomer to the property party. While there were some good times, the downturn has had a more wrenching effect there, with unemployment over 14 percent — among the highest rates in Ireland.

The layoffs have picked up speed around Limerick in the last month, as construction companies have stopped work, seemingly on a dime, sending such a procession of jobless to seek assistance that the local unemployment office became the second busiest in the country.

The waiting room in the office is dank and gloomy, and Dale McNamara, 20, wonders how a professional life once so charmed came to be so hopeless. Since graduating from high school as an electrician, flourishing building work in the area kept him more than busy and flush enough to buy a new car, start a family and consider buying a house.

Then, without warning on Dec. 5, he was told that it would be his last day of work, just six months before he would have received his certificate as an independent electrician.

Since then, he has been frantically knocking on doors, but to no avail. Now, as rent, heating bills and car payments pile up, he is beginning to feel desperate, unable to afford a night out or a Christmas present for his 20-month-old baby.

“If I don’t get a job in the next two weeks, I am worried about losing my house,” he says. “We have no money.”

He looks at his number in the unemployment lines and grimaces — he has been waiting four hours now and his name has still not been called.

“My grandfather says this reminds him of the 1930s when everyone left for America and Australia,” he adds. “There is just no work here.”

More dire, however, is the condition of the permanently unemployed in Limerick’s festering ghettoes, where experts say the unemployment rate touches 70 percent. During the early years of the economic revival, the government did its best to spread money to such areas, which are a feature of urban life all over Ireland.

IN fact, it was through social housing projects like these that Mr. Dunne got his start as a developer. But as the investment returns in the private sector became quite obviously more lucrative, the attention paid to so-called social estates like Moyross, on the northern outskirts of Limerick, wavered.

Crime, gangland disputes and a sense of anomie flourished as Moyross and other similar projects evolved as cocoons of poverty and hopelessness amid the riches and celebration of the Irish miracle.

“This place missed out entirely on the moment,” says Stephen Kinsella, an economist at the University of Limerick. “There has been no accumulation of wealth here.”

Walking through the garbage-strewn, empty roads on a cold, misty afternoon, Mr. Kinsella points to the shuttered houses and the mothers still dressed in pajamas taking their children home from school. Social workers in Moyross refer to the “pajama index”: the more men and women one sees who do not take the time and care to dress for the day, the worse the economic situation tends to be.

The Irish government has recently begun a regeneration project in Moyross that would result in large new investments in housing and infrastructure, but the going so far has been slow.

Limerick_Lass wrote: »

What if these were my pjs??