[Matt Barrett]

Originally Posted by BattleCorp

Given the shennanigans around the costs for the children's hospital (escalating expedentially), I doubt that the city council have the expertise to effectively manage such projects.

That's irrelevant. This project we are discussing is in the ****ter and it's PPP, so we stop PPP and say 'sure look at O'Devany Gardens'? I wish.
TBF, as regards the National Children' Hospital it's not a DCC project and the Ministers of Finance and Health not only took their hands off the wheel, they were in the back seat playing Punch Buggy.

[Matt Barrett]

Originally Posted by hatrickpatrick

Because Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in the central government won't allow this. Since the early 1990s, the idea of directly built social housing has been ideologically rejected by the two main parties and unfortunately because people keep voting for them, we're stuck with that paradigm until something changes electorally.

What you're describing is precisely what was voted for by Dublin City Council a few years ago, but the government point blank stated that they would refuse to fund anything which didn't involve sell-offs to private developers. And in this particular case, they're stating point blank that they will not even fund a deal which involves buying units back from a private developer. They simply do not believe in publicly owned housing because it doesn't suit their neoliberal, devoid-of-empathy "everything is about market economics and not about people" ideology.

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