brian@socialistparty.net

yesterday local councillors Cllr Healy Maher & Cosgrave supported the material contravention that gave way to development on the Edros site.

photo taken in march 2003 at a previous rezoning attempt at the site.

in November in the Irish Times cllr Healy having objected to the planning application said the following

Watch this Space

Opposition to apartments on amenity-zoned site in Howth

A proposal to grant planning permission for apartments on Howth’s largest amenity-zoned site would be a massive blow to the community, says Green Party Cllr David Healy.

Pierse Contracting is looking to build 64 apartments and a café in five blocks on the Edros site beside the Martello Tower in Howth, which was a community sports amenity until eight years ago.

Healy says the development would have a major visual impact on historical and amenity routes and locations in Howth, including views from Abbey Street, St Mary’s Abbey, Tower Hill, Balscadden Road, Ted Hayden’s field and East Pier, and would be out of keeping with the historic character of this important heritage area. Fingal County Council is proposing to use a material contravention procedure to allow a breach of the development plan which would require a three-quarters majority of the councillors to support it.

“There have been suggestions that the developer give money towards the development of amenities elsewhere in Howth. However, in the absence of concrete plans for such facilities, such as planning permission and capital funding arrangements, money itself carries no guarantee of results,” says Healy.

has planning permission and capital funding arrangements been granted? NO.

Howth needs a community centre. The new proposed site is 0.8 miles from the village, welcome as it is to the community it has not got the access that the open space site at edros had. I wish the groups that are working hard to site a new community centre in Howth every success in the future. It is a great pity the best amenity site in Howth will not be part of their plans. Edros site was gifted to the people of Howth but yesterday it was gifted to the developer to make tens of millions more now that the dev plan has been materially contravened and the site (he owns) is no longer to be used for open space / amenity.

€3.50 per child water tax

bin the bill

Tens of thousands of litres of water leak from the mains water to the ground water every day. Children sit in drafty prefab rooms in need of repair, FF/GP/PD govt give nowhere near the cap grant they promised in May ‘07 and class sizes promised to INTO in April have not happened.  What does the government do in kind, tells schools they have to pay local authority water bills. I am sick of funding a broken service from outside the system (fees! Cake Sales etc). Not content to sit on the side lines and moan I joined my childrens (x3 one school)  school board of management and started a 4 year term in December ‘07. I aim not to be quite about it. These bills have to go and the government may follow them into the bin.

Indo says

The Government faces a major new storm after it imposed a €3.50 water levy on thousands of primary pupils.

And in quietly slipping out the latest ’stealth tax’ announcement last night, it immediately triggered widespread anger among parents and teachers.

BreakingNews.ie reports today

Schools simply do not have the money to pay the planned water bills, according to primary school principals.

The Irish Primary Principals Network has protested that the new flat-rate water-charges being introduced by the Government are unfair.

Under the plan schools will have to pay €3.50 per pupil for water services this year and €4 in 2009.

A metered system will then be introduced and schools will have to pay the full cost for water use.

The Government claims it is a necessary part of the EU legislation and Minister Mary Hanafin says our schools have to meet EU water conservation levels.

dónal writes over on workers play time

Why do banks still chain down the pens to the table, the banks make billions of euros by taking in our wages and charging us to take the money back out of a hole in the wall. Could they not just give us free pens like in Argos or the Bookies,

not for the first time dónal is a few weeks ahead of me on a blog topic. I saw such chains in the EBS and thought the same. Never got round to posting it. Sometimes I think I read his blog as I sleep surf. But he writes so infrequent this is not possible.

Miss-Quotation-Marx

“The Banks have nothing to lose but their chains” and our money at the casino stock exchange

I heard David McWilliams steal Joe Higgins clothes and lines on Morning Ireland this morning MP3 [time code 37:45 - 39-04] “a financial coup .. (by) a cabal of property owners in cahoots with the government. ” I was there the night Joe Higgins debated McWilliams but I didn’t think we had such an effect on the guy. BTW  750+ downloads of the debate on MP3. my god who needs RSS, when an audio blog will do. 750 wow thats more than twice the 350 that stuffed into the packed Teachers Club in Oct 2006.

A field full of bricks? who knows, the council never checked, when i was growing up in the area it was a marsh, a swamp and an illegal dump. For all we know the dumping could be asbestos dumping like what happened down the road on the N32.

Now it remains zoned amenity land thanks to the efforts of the local community, residents associations & community sports groups and the socialist party locally who saved it from rezoning in the county development plan 2005 - 2011. Plans are underway to rezone it again by means of a variation to the dev plan.

please forgive the photo quality but all i had was a 1.2mp camera and the surveyors with staff were on site a few weeks back. I have recorded a piece for radio about this site. Its due to broadcast December 3rd but you can hear it now below.

While not fully explored here there are other issues regarding the glut of housing stock in the County, the amount of already rezoned land that will take this development and the amount of mixed type infill that has already happened in the Baldoyle area.

audio recorded for future use on enviro on Near 90 FM

 brickfields [3:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“You only pay for what you throw away”

Swords based Socialist Party Councillor Clare Daly Chairperson of the Fingal Anti-Bin Tax Campaign has slammed the proposed introduction of a new flat charge for environmental services, linked to the extension of the green and brown bin service.

* FINGAL ANTI-BIN TAX CAMPAIGN WILL VIGOROUSLY OPPOSE THIS DOUBLE TAX

Councillor Daly said, “After six years of propaganda from Fingal County Council to establish the tag system for the collection of the grey bin, they have now dropped the sham environmental cover and moved to charging directly for recycling facilities also.

All of the statements from Council management and the pro-bin tax councillors when the charge was originally brought in, that it wouldn’t rise, that it had nothing to do with generating extra taxation but was about encouraging people to recycle, have now been exposed for what they were – TOTAL AND UTTER BLATANT FALSEHOODS.”

She continued, “The Fingal Anti-Bin Tax Campaign has been absolutely vindicated in the stand that we took opposing that charge. Not only has the charge increased massively every year, but now the Council’s own catch-phrase has been shown up as a con. Residents will remember the Council’s slogan “You only pay for what you throw away”, and all the nonsense that if people recycled the charge would be negligible. The new proposals would mean an average household based on leaving out the grey bin fortnightly, as having paying a bin tax of €300 per annum. This is an absolute disgrace.”

Councillor Daly said, “The bin tax has always been about generating extra revenue for the Council against the backdrop of falling percentages of government support. Tens of thousands of new taxpayers have moved into Fingal County Council over the past 5-10 years, yet the amount of funding from central government equates to only 13%.

The introduction of a bin tax has made waste big business the private operators are earning millions from the present situation while PAYE taxpayers and pensioners are levied on the double. Meanwhile, while recycling has increased, the actual amount of waste per person has also increased during the lifetime of the charge.”

She concluded, “This debacle will only be halted through the elimination of a direct charge and the reinstatement of waste collection as a public service. We will vigorously oppose the introduction of this new tax by every means possible, starting at the Council Estimates meeting next Tuesday.

caught live on community radio Near FM, john haughton is on air as Fingal County Council subbies fell the trees of Stapolin, he takes me live on air before the sig tune fades and the sound of shredding begins. Hear the MP3 below. Thanks to Near FM for the recording.

 Near FM Enviro 09/10/07 [14:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

uploaded via Fling, which seems to lowercase the file and ext. odd.

taken with poxy 1.3MP XDA PDA

funny old day. out Friday night on a gig, 40th in Cellbridge, home late up late. soon as I woke the AM noise issue hit me again.. I got dressed yanked the sw radio out of the mains and went mobile again , a good 50 meters from the front of the house in the back garden the signal was as bad as ever. S9 sprogging the radio like mad. Big peak on 612Khz with harmonics on 512 712 then 1224 2448 doubling all the way up to 9.6Mhz

I knew it was airbourne and not mains but I fired a quick email the the ESB over BLP.. I rang the brother and he said kill the mains in the house and see.. good idea must try that later i said.

Headed up to the Radio museum in Howth for the first time! wonderful little gem hidden away there (btw it beats the radio museum in Sundays Well Cork, the Howth museum is a living museum!). Met Joe & Eamon up there, old Hams I know via my community work over the years, they introduced me to the curator and all the other hams there for the day, they were operating a special station for International Museums Weekend, the station call sign is EI0MAR, I was never a Ham, more the spam of radio in my pirate SW days but we all got/get along!

I raised my issue on 612Khz with the 6 hams up there in Howth, they gave various theories but also suggested that I kill the mains and see that it goes away then bring up parts of the house one by one, i bit like code breaking or debugging bad scripts. [i will blog some more about the EI0MAR Museum.. after I visit it without my girl group entourage that were more interested in the playground than the radio wires]

So i got home and decided ok I have proved the new UPS is not to blame so I will pull the mains and see the UPS work and see if the noise goes. If it doesn’t go this is going to be worse, as it is far more difficult to rectify (literally) a neighbours problem equipment than it is my own. So I take the sw radio to the garage and climb up and pull the big 35A trip on the house.

SwooshhhhhwooootizzzzZz zap nothing. the bad jammer signal is gone! woot! so what the foxtrot is it! trial and error begins… soon after i find that it is the age old doopy now an ubuntu desktop for the dr. who fan among us. Its PSU even when not drawing power but simply plugged in, is whacking out a major 90 meter radius sprog of bad RF all over the band. I found it!!, and I know what to do next.

The hams in Howth were dismissive of my BPL theory but the dread and fear of it was evident. I believe my SWL issues would be as bad if not worse if BPL reaches our shores. BTW another question I was asked was if the signal had polarisation and it did at SE-NW the signal could almost be silenced..

Thanks to all who gave advise; the Hams of the IRTS in North Dublin and Irelands youngest person to pass the B licence exam but not take up the licence thats the brother who I was mistaken for today among the old hams. I spend my life being mistaken as him, but the only comfort in that is that he spends his life been mistaken as me, and I have a larger public profile! Twins!

from the Museum website it says

The Martello watchtower was completed in 1805 when a Napoleonic invasion of Ireland seemed imminent.
The first working submarine telegraph from Great Britain came ashore on the beach just below the tower
in 1854. The tower then became a cable station.

In 1903, the famous American wireless pioneer Lee de Forrest used the tower to demonstrate his wireless
telegraphy system to engineers of the British Post Office. Two years later the Marconi Company
conducted ship to shore wireless experiments with the HMS Monarch as she sailed to various locations in
the Irish Sea.

In a museum pamphlet it goes on to say that Lee de Forrest was doomed as British MPs had shares in the Marconi Company. Some things never change. A British PM and a Italian Broadcast Media Mogul up to their necks in it.