General election 2020 (6 Viewers)

[flashback]

A lot of new estates got built on the former flood plains of towns. There was major flood in a new build in Sallins near me about 10 years ago. People were shocked to discover that their 400k homes in a place literally named Waterways might be vulnerable to flooding.

I mean... that's another head exploding element of Ireland. This fucking desire to sprawl tiny, shit gaffs ever outwards. Zero consideration for infrastructure, zero long term plans, it's FUCK IT, FIRE UP THE MIXERS BOYS, WE'RE DOING IT LIVE.

Then we're surprised when various disastrous things happen.

Do planning. Build apartments. Spend some money ahead of time, when it's cheaper, than desperately retrofit some bullshit hacked solution.

 

[Lili Marlene]

bad planning, plus the boom where people were moving to areas that they had no knowledge of.
where the locals would be tutting and shaking their heads that someone was foolish enough to build an estate on mitchell's lower field, but people who were buying there because it's where they could afford, had no such knowledge.

Would there be no one local in the council denying planning permission on the basis that it would.... oh wait... cost in the long run... oh yeah... haha the long run. And we're back to climate change.

 

[flashback]

This thread has become the most hectic thing here for a long time alright

WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING LOOKING AT YOU CUNT??

 

[Unicron]

When did all this happen btw? Was it what became ghost estates or mad decisions in the 80s or something else? and do they know why? Straight up corruption or just bad planning or what?

Genuine questions, I've just always wondered.

I'd say it's a decades long thing, the flooding in Sallins, I just googled, occurred in 2009 and Kildare CC only announced in the past summer an €11m investment in flood prevention for the village.

Closer to home, in Clane which is the nearest village to where I grew up there's an estate called Lough Bollard, my folks had a house there in the 70's before they moved a few miles outside and again, prior to be being built that area was low ground where the village drained in to.

 

[magicbastarder]

Would there be no one local in the council denying planning permission on the basis that it would.... oh wait... cost in the long run... oh yeah... haha the long run. And we're back to climate change.

and where the estate agents and construction firms were deliberately hiring planning officials by offering much better money, because they knew how to rig the system.
or so i think i read in a frank mcdonald piece once. but it makes sense.

 

[egg_]

Would there be no one local in the council denying planning permission on the basis that it would.... oh wait... cost in the long run... oh yeah... haha the long run. And we're back to climate change.

I've a friend who worked as a planner in Louth for years - coming from a environmental/heritage background the whole experience was thoroughly fucking demoralising for her. People just want houses, and they want them cheap, and everything else is secondary.

 

[flashback]

and where the estate agents and construction firms were deliberately hiring planning officials by offering much better money, because they knew how to rig the system.
or so i think i read in a frank mcdonald piece once. but it makes sense.

Oh yeah? Like buying all the players, benching them, then your side wins?

Huh. Interesting.

 

[pete]

I'd say it's a decades long thing, the flooding in Sallins, I just googled, occurred in 2009 and Kildare CC only announced in the past summer an €11m investment in flood prevention for the village.

Closer to home, in Clane which is the nearest village to where I grew up there's an estate called Lough Bollard, my folks had a house there in the 70's before they moved a few miles outside and again, prior to be being built that area was low ground where the village drained in to.

Home - Floodinfo.ie for all your underwater field needs

 

[flashback]

I've a friend who worked as a planner in Louth for years - coming from a environmental/heritage background the whole experience was thoroughly fucking demoralising for her. People just want houses, and they want them cheap, and everything else is secondary.

There has to be some tipping point, when people get a general inking that they fucked up. Or no?

Galway seems to be under a foot of water for substantial parts of year. When I was over there last there were fields in Kildare that were shallow lakes.

I suppose the fact that Ireland hasn't realized that building fleets of gaffs over there isn't always the solution doesn't bode well for people figuring out that annihilating all the land might have consequences.

 

[egg_]

Closer to home, in Clane which is the nearest village to where I grew up there's an estate called Lough Bollard, my folks had a house there in the 70's before they moved a few miles outside and again, prior to be being built that area was low ground where the village drained in to.

IMO this is a consequence of increased mobility more than anything else. Every time the roads/public transport improve enough to move village X inside the commuter belt, it's a golden opportunity for the local cowboy to buy up the cheap rushy fields and put houses on them and sell them to blow-ins who don't know any better

 

[Unicron]

I mean... that's another head exploding element of Ireland. This fucking desire to sprawl tiny, shit gaffs ever outwards. Zero consideration for infrastructure, zero long term plans, it's FUCK IT, FIRE UP THE MIXERS BOYS, WE'RE DOING IT LIVE.

Then we're surprised when various disastrous things happen.

Do planning. Build apartments. Spend some money ahead of time, when it's cheaper, than desperately retrofit some bullshit hacked solution.

Sallins is a particularly egregious case, even growing up near my small shit village with very little for people I always thought of Sallins as an especially small, shit, village but over the course of the tiger years the population went from 856 to almost 7 times that many people living there with very few improvements (they have a lidl there now, and some permavacent commercial space). It had very little to offer other than being countryside adjacent and having a train station with an arrow line in to Heuston.

 

[flashback]

I suppose the question is, is Ireland going to realize it's a big boy country now, and not a third world shit hole like it was in the 80s.

Like, are we going to send some people to Denmark, or Oslo, and explain that this is what the grown-ups do. Or is that beyond us.

 

[Anthony]

It had very little to offer other than being countryside adjacent and having a train station with an arrow line in to Heuston.

That's MORE than enough for a 1000 houses.

 

[Cormcolash]

WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING LOOKING AT YOU CUNT??

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[ann post]

I'm not sure I believe that the fairly small amount of land that's covered with houses etc really contributes hugely. I'd say it's the much larger tracts of land that have been deforested and farmed into oblivion, resulting in the soil getting destroyed.

I'm not saying one outweighs the other or that houses in rural ireland are ruining the planet - but habitat fragmentation has a mutliplier.

roughly:

When you build over land, roughly half the species in an equal amount of sorrounding land die off - its because the codependencies all die off. roads are awful for this, houses, especially the irish style of leaving a site between sites is more or less a doubling/tripling effect on the biodiversity loss.

carry on.

 

[flashback]

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I deeply deeply love this film. I recommended it to a couple of Americans, and they weren't into it at all. I think it's AMAZING. It would be without doubt on my list of best films ever made. Not messing. It's amazing.


It's so amazing I don't even want to say it's amazing, because then people won't get the chance to watch it and be taken by surprise by how amazing it is.

 

[Squiggle]

So this is interesting. Your father didn't get any subsidies for farming? At all? If he sold dairy for example, that price was subsidized, right?

There's subsidies in various areas, during the process and at the point of sale, and then afterwards.

@Lili Marlene : as I understand it, we don't live under capitalism when it comes to farming (AFAIK). At all. Farming doesn't work on normal supply and demand type economics. Supply is outstripped by demand, so there are artificial price fixes put in place. Farming as an industry would collapse the moment these subsidies are removed.

So there's direct costs, actual money given to farmers to aid in keeping of livestock Then there's secondary costs which are consequences of destroying the land when flooding occurs and people's houses and businesses are wrecked. Then there's further indirect costs like destruction of rivers, destruction of pollinator stock, emission of methane, etc.

My point is that there's vast amounts of money pumped in on almost every level, up front and elsewhere, all because we insist on having masses of cows. And then we don't even want the milk.

We're paying masses of money to destroy the place, for a product we don't want.

NO subsidies for my Dad. The price of dairy isn't subsidised, the diaries paid what they paid and fined you if you were over your quota (a whole other problem). Subsidies were ouside that, something you applied for like a grant, and had to meet certain criteria (inspected) to get.

 

[Squiggle]

In addition to the issue of building on land affecting the ability of water to drain loss of worms is a contributing factor. Compacted, depleted soil doesn't absorb water well.

FDR said "The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself." Subsidised, intensive, specialised farming destroys the soil.

 

[flashback]

NO subsidies for my Dad. The price of dairy isn't subsidised, the diaries paid what they paid and fined you if you were over your quota (a whole other problem). Subsidies were ouside that, something you applied for like a grant, and had to meet certain criteria (inspected) to get.

OK. As I understood it the price of milk is fixed by the state, and this number has nothing to do with supply or demand. If milk the price of milk was to be set by a normal supply / demand the price would tank, and the entire dairy industry would instantly be not viable. That milk is being bought by the state to maintain an artificial preset price.

If that's the case that counts as the industry being subsidized in my mind. But @Lili Marlene pointed out that effectively ALL industry is state subsidized, which I suppose is true.

My point is more like: if the government decided to subsidize people driving nails into their own hands, then people might point out that this is a bit self destructive, seeing as people don't really need to have nails driven into their hands to do day to day life. So why the fuck are we wrecking the place to produce more milk and beef etc.
Like, we can just decide to not subsidize hand nailing, subsidize more native forestry, and we have the special bonus of not having all these people wondering around with sore hands.

 

[Lili Marlene]

I pretty much agree @flashback

I think i've said elsewhere that my utopia is pretty much this article at a wide scale:

Putting pigs in the shade: the radical farming system banking on trees | John Vidal

A farm in Portugal is showing how the ancient art of silvopasture – combining livestock with productive trees – may offer some real answers to the climate crisis

www.theguardian.com

It'd require a lot more manual work by humans, but that's no bad thing. With the arrival of automation in a lot of systems, we'd probably be all better off mentally, physically and psychologically if most of us worked with each other for, I dunno, 15-20 hours a week, on a system like this and less time on bitty, pointless jobs.

It'd be better for the planet to a huge degree, it'd reduce a lot of mental issues - isolation, anxieties, hopelessness etc. - but we'd still have access to the technological advancements we've made. It's not a medieval cult or nothing (sorry @ann post)

Maybe we can't hop on a cheap ryanair flight for a holiday but we probably would feel less of need for it as well.