Ireland’s Retrofitting Debacle: Are Green Politics Just a Mask for Corporate Takeover?

Though I’ll tell my great grandchildren that it was the luck of the Irish that saved my hide from the Great Covid Pandemic, the more numerate amongst them would point out that, by the Irish regime’s own estimates, 5,019,908 of Ireland’s 5,026,199 survived and, as there are many tens of thousands more streaming into Ireland to fill the ranks of the fallen 6,291, the luck of the Irish and the Government of the Irish both had little to do with it.

Not only will these New Irish replace the fallen but, as they will, in the main, be much younger, many of them can help the regime in its next narcissistic goal of retrofitting tens of thousands of houses, mine included, with Green Party friendly insulation walls, heat pumps and solar panels. 

The Green Party and their governmental partners in crime are going to splurge about €6 billion from their magic money tree to keep me and other old fogeys warm by giving us €25,000 to splurge on their pet projects, as long as we top that up by equivalent sums from our own pockets or, in the case of politicians and their civil service flunkeys, from our taxes. And, to drive home the point that this is an offer we cannot refuse, the Greens’ taxes, starting from May 2022, will make oil, gas, turf, wood and electricity progressively far too expensive for frugal fogeys like me. The Greens will freeze us into subservience.

Having studied the retrofitting malarkey and consulted relevant engineers, plumbers, refrigeration technicians as well as wiser and older neighbours and friends, I have decided to insulate some, though not all, walls but not to install solar panels or especially heat pumps, at least for now.

This is so even though I want to spend cash as an inflationary hedge. One defends against inflation by buying tangible assets that will last, not by buying redundant or largely untested gimmicks like solar panels and especially heat pumps which are not appropriate for my needs.

Though some friends and neighbours are prepared to spend like a drunken sailor (or a Green Party TD, if you prefer) in the mistaken belief such tweaks will add value to their houses, they are missing the main reasons for this post-Covid party. Tinker as we may in our hit or miss fashions with our retrofitting, we are not the Greens’ target audience. We are, at best, small potatoes.

To see the main targets, take the DART from Connolly station to Howth, ignore the scenery (except for the vast expanse of Clontarf Golf Club that must, they say, be transformed into social housing to keep the cement mixers going). Keep your eyes on the apartments and, more especially the vast housing estates of Killester, Harmonstown, Edenmore, Lough Derg, St Anne’s, Kilbarrack and Bayside as you head into the concrete jungle cess pit that is Howth.

All of those thousands of houses have to be retrofitted to make them fit for their new tenants, those who will rent them from the vulture funds who are currently buying them and other housing estates like them. With economies of scale, tax breaks, strategic partnerships and good logistical supply lines into recruitment agencies and builders’ providers, those companies and those they employ and take care of will be the big winners.

Put plainly, it boils down to location, location, location; the council estates bordering the Dart and the main bus routes out of Dublin City are too valuable to leave in the hands of those for whom they were intended. Retrofitting, property taxes and death taxes will whinny the indigenous aboriginals down to tourist window levels and give our Green overlords the societal infrastructure and atomised social mix they desire. Good times if you have a poodle grooming business, bad times if you have one of Hazel Chu’s chip vans.

Fianna Fáil’s Seán Fleming was on the money. Plebs like us should shop around to beat inflation and down-size to make room for traumatised immigrants and their big families. Put differently, people like me can go to hell but not to Connaught as it is too trendy. We need retrofitted housing stock for those the American multinationals employ and the best non-sufficiently diverse aboriginals like me can do is saddle up, get lost and make room for the diverse life-long lodgers the Greens are planting here.

This is not to say that we are totally abandoned. We can still, if Covid allows, buy our slabs of foreign beers at Tesco and thereby help their ongoing sponsorship of our interminable Trans Pride Diversity Parades. The problem, however, is Covid has killed off a lot of indigenous competition and increased costs, together with the rising expectations of our imported skivvies, is accentuating our growing inflationary ailments. Prices right across the boards will continue to rise and, outside of our bloated Public Sector, wages, themselves an inflationary vector, cannot hope to keep pace. More money from the magic money tree chasing too few goods equals the German Central Bank’s inflationary nightmare.

Our German model is going to kill us off one way or the other. The Germans built our autobahns to sell us their produce as part of the EU’s central planks of the free movement of (German) goods, services, labour and capital, all calibrated to serve German, not Irish, interests. German goods and cut-price labourers flood in, as capital, the perennial coward, flees and services remain over-priced and over-taxed.

Ireland is not Leipzig by the Liffey. Our tax and social welfare services mean we export our youngest and our brightest who do not fit into the World Economic Forum’s Irish Plans, we import whatever professionals Germany does not want as well as a pile of demobbed “freedom fighters” and their extended families that no one in their right minds want, we house the world’s “homeless” in hotels and we pay for all this by taxing those who work for our American corporate overlords, whose imported minions like their retrofitted comforts and Dart commutes.

Much of the material for these retrofits will, together with the workers, be imported with nothing on the other side of our national ledger to even begin to balance the books.

Jesus famously said that the poor will always be with us and that is Good News, at least for Sinn Féin, the Greens, the Social Democrats and whatever other Irish groups pull the forty acres and a mule trick at election time. Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats and the rest of the faux left are predictably going on about the high rents being charged for Dublin apartments and Teflon Taoiseach Martin is giving them his equally predictable kindergarten answers.

Yet none of these over-paid performers will devote even one of their endless sound bites to a Mea Culpa, an apology that their policies on limitless immigration, retro-fitting and encouraging American companies and their Trans Pride camp followers to colonise Dublin is at the heart of the rental and related problems.

During pandemic small business lockdown, their primary concern was that the hooligans of South William Street could get their drink, their drugs and their rent allowances, not that they had turned that and other areas into a rat infested sewer. Now we are back to the business of over-priced pubs, Uber bicycle lanes, inane rent whines and retro-fitting.

The poor have been with us a long time and, though WT Cosgrave has been castigated for wanting them to emigrate, Éamonn de Valera, his immediate successor, praised him for the good shape he left the economy in, given the very considerable constraints Cosgrave had worked under.

No such praise can be given to the current regime or to that which will replace them over the coming years. They are over-paid, under-qualified and not fit for the challenges they have lumbered Ireland with.

To them, pillage is only business. As it is to disgraced Irish politician Mary Robinson, to Swedish rich kid Tintin Thunberg and to the World Economic Forum, whose The Future of the Environment needs us to surrender yet more of our scarce resources to their money making fetishes, just as we surrendered our freedoms to their Covid Gestapo. Who are we to say Nein, danke or thus far shalt thou go und no further?

And so, we move to the next steps on our road to serfdom. Meat, heat, cars and more all have to go. For the environment, you understand. Fat cat Mary Robinson has cried, Tintin has opined, Insulate Britain have played their part and the grants are there for politicians to quibble over on the airwaves for brownie points at the next election.

But their self-serving hot air is all there is. Our government continues to bankrupt  generations to come by running up ever more mountains of debt and ensuring inflation, the spectre that haunts the German psyche, tear us to shreds over the coming years. They have no plan except to scare us with Covid, bribe us with more drinking holidays and give us grants to let unskilled labourers hone their skills by retro wrecking our homes.

Though none other than Satan himself has told us it is better to reign hell than serve in heaven, the patron saint of Irish politicians was not referring to us, the common men, the hollow men who take the Clapham Omnibus. Rather, he was, albeit with some poetic hyperbole, referring to those politicians like him who make sows’ ears of silk purses or transform sovereign countries like Ireland into soulless debt-swamped money-making machines for BlackRock, Vanguard and their swarms of local patsies.