The Tribeca Debacle: Sinn Féin-DUP in Bed with Big Business.
The Sinn Féin-DUP coalition forces £500million Tribeca development through Belfast City Council in the face of much opposition. The Council vote saw the main parties reject a motion against the development last week brought forward by smaller opposition groups.
Speaking regarding the vote, Lasair Dhearg spokesperson Ciarán O’Brien said that, “It seems that the Stormont Sinn Féin-DUP coalition firmly places their hopes on big business to drag our communities out of poverty, with the expectation that some of that £500 million capital investment will translate into jobs and taxes. This is a business model dreamt up by neo-liberal thatcherites and which has, over many generations, failed to lift the tens thousands of homeless families and poverty stricken Irish children out of destitution.”
“These so-called ‘economic experts’ either fail to realise, or do not care, that if such an amount of money was properly invested in working class communities it would lead to genuine economic prosperity. Building homes creates jobs, it lowers the cost of living, allowing consumers to spend more in our economy instead of bumper profits being driven off shore by those with other interests.”
Ciarán said, “This Tribeca investment represents the unity of government and business; it symbolises the complete failure of those elected to represent us to do just that. Whatever the 1% invests in Ireland, they only do so in order to extract even more from the pockets of those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder; normal working people.”
“Tribeca is the next step in the long race to the bottom. The battle lines are being drawn in a society where rents are ever increasing and the cost of living is going in the opposite direction of wages. It is now quite clear on which side of that war Sinn Féin and the DUP sit; and it is not with working class communities.”
“We need to build homes,” Ciarán said, “not business empires.”
