Re: Re: Dartmouth Square Disgrace

@FIN wrote:

ha,ha…
not to be the devil’s advocate or anything as feelings on this can be very high but the man own’s the land.the lease is up and wasn’t renewed and therefore the owner has the right to do what he pleases with it. i think abp and the high court overstepped their boundaries and he will be vindicated in the supreme court or europe if he wants to take it that far. for abp to include ” or reputed owner ” stinks of personal opunioin instead of objective thinking. he has a case. and then will sue the council to get his money back. he was on today fm yesterday evening. he bought the land for a good price and fair play to him. if any of us had the chance we would jump at it too. it may never be re-zoned but hope value is a lot. fair play to him.

Good letter in Sunday’s Tribune which answers that argument pretty well:

More Captain Boycott than Michael Davitt From David D’Arcy

AN OLD example of chutzpah is a man convicted of murdering his parents pleading for leniency on the grounds of being an orphan.

An updated Irish definition might be an absentee landlord citing the approval of Michael Davitt for his stated intention to destroy a beautiful public park (Dartmouth Square) for his own aggrandisement.

Noel O’Gara made just such a claim in his interview (Review, 17 September).

However, the famous ‘Three Fs’ which summarised the campaign of Davitt’s Land League, were clearly not intended to establish unfettered freedom for wealthy property owners to do with their land as they wished.

On the contrary, the demands for Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Freedom of Sale effectively sought to circumscribe the absolute property rights of landowners to apprise them of their responsibilities to the greater public good and to achieve some balance of fair-ness with other stakeholders.

Far from being a “small farmer with a few bits of property, ” as he describes himself, O’Gara is in fact a wealthy land speculator who has more in common with the landlord class of the 19th century which he claims to despise, than with the common man of the 21st, on whose side your article laughingly purports to place him.

He is completely heedless of the effects of his actions on those who live near his property and has had no qualms about disparaging them frequently and unfairly in media inter-views, not least in your paper.

Similarly, he is not above insulting other disinterested groups, notably the Travelling community (who to their credit told him to sling his hook) and, in your paper last week, the people of Clondalkin.

All for the purpose of portraying Dublin 6 residents as selfish villains who expect to avail, at the expense of the public, of a private park from which they will exclude people not to their liking.

This is a travesty of the truth as the park was open to all until O’Gara padlocked it and barricaded it prior to announc-ing his intention to build upon it.

I am at a loss to understand how a man who so blatantly seeks to enrich himself to the detriment of the general public, and who has been so quick to misrepresent history, should meet with such approval from your staff.

The opening paragraph describes him as acting for the public benefit (without providing a scrap of supporting evidence), your pull quote allows him to repeat the lie that the park at Dartmouth Square was only available to the residents of the square, and the author urges us in the concluding sentence to “wish [O’Gara] well in his endeavours.”

I suspect Michael Davitt would have urged a complete boycott of this grasping opportunist. And that he would have been horrified by the Sunday Tribune’s hero worship of him.

David D’Arcy, Percy Lane, Dublin 4.