P…P…P…Privatisation

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P…P…P…Privatisation*

 

Despite the attempts of some to paint the years of the Celtic Tiger as a belle epoch in which we were all ‘blinging’, many will remember Ireland’s boom years as signalling a frontal assault on our public services. Despite the efforts of Ireland’s politicians to establish the idea that privatisation is a good thing, it remains a dirty word for many. This is because people realise that privatisation means policies which place wealth creation for the few above the needs of the community. Quite simply, this is done by selling off publicly owned assets to millionaire businessmen. Successive Fianna Fáil-led governments have been instrumental in foisting privatisation on the Irish people, dressing up many such policies as PPP’s.

 

PPP’s – Public Private Partnerships – are, according to the relevant government website, ‘basically just a different method of…combining the best of the public and private sectors with an emphasis on value for money and delivering quality public services’. Surely nothing insidious there, then. After all, the ‘emphasis’ is still on quality public services. But what happens when tensions develop in the marriage between public and private interests?   

Croke Villas, off the Ballybough Road in the north inner city, are the sort of flats hastily thrown up in the 1960s, and badly in need of renovation. The flats were to have been redeveloped as a complex of retail, private apartments and 36 social housing units under a PPP between Bennett Developments Ltd and the council. Recently the proposed development was terminated. Why? Because, as with many other PPP social housing regeneration schemes earmarked for 2008, worsening market conditions meant it was no longer viable for the developer to provide social houses in exchange for land to build private housing.

So the market, the manna which was supposed to nourish the emaciated public sector, has instead dictated that the scheme won’t go ahead. And the residents of Croke Villas who still need a decent place to live? Well, tough! It reminded me of the scenario facing people in England whose local councils owned up to the fact that they had invested millions of pounds of public money in the recently collapsed Icelandic market in order to ‘spread the risk’. The risk may have been spread, but this meant little to residents who, when the market turned bad, were still left with the potholes in the road which needed filling.   

Whatever the spin, the market can not be allowed to take priority over social needs. PPP’s are just a byword for the encroachment of private interests on the common weal. Croke villas was typical of the privatisation of public spaces within Dublin city, including green spaces and public parks – not just ‘empty spaces’ but areas vital to social cohesion and public health – sold off to greedy developers. In the south of the city, in this ward in fact, Rathgar springs to mind. Here, a public park was sold off by the council so that yet more flats could be built.

 

Although richly diverse local interests must be given consideration whenever a PPP crops up, in most instances where they have been instituted they conform to a pattern: space for profit, in itself antithetical to the public interest, is created. And when such projects go belly up, the rug is drawn from under them because they are no longer profitable. 

Rathmines Swimming Pool on Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6 closed on the 21st December 2007 for redevelopment as a PPP. Works started in January 2008 and won’t be completed until 2009/2010. The public swimming pool is to be demolished, replaced with ‘a new civic plaza, a new swimming pool, gymnasium, changing village, multi-purpose sports hall, aerobics studios and 46 residential apartments’.

Of course, there is a need to redevelop public services like the pool for the welfare of the local community. But will the welfare of the community be at the heart of the new project? Or will the interests of profit predominate? Is the new development going to remain accessible and affordable to local people, or will trendy gentrification and profit maximisation take priority? Unfortunately, experience points towards the latter. 

 

* My apologies for the title of this post but, sadly, like the makers of the old Penguin bar adverts I just couldn’t resist a pun based on alliteration of the letter ‘p’.

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Tags: government, privatisation, Rathmines pool