IT’S FINALLY HERE. The Pride-Taylor-Twainitude-Quarter Finals weekend, everyone’s favourite annual holiday. The Saw Doctors are also in the mix somewhere. 

For once, Dublin might actually be somewhere near full. Not in the far-right headbanger kind of way, just in a scheduling conflict kind of way. 600,000 people will descend on the city, and only 25% of them will be Swifties (that figure could be higher, there could be some Swifties who are prioritising The Saw Doctors).

One only hopes that everyone makes sure to get on the right buses or else we’re going to end up with some 16-year-old Doja Cat fans vaping in the Hogan Stand and your uncle who has waited his whole life to see Shania Twain thinking that her songs sound a little different and that she looks a little younger. 

In the interest of public service journalism, here are the details about the extra bus services that Dublin Bus will be running to facilitate the seamless and smooth movement of people through the city on this auspicious weekend: haha, just kidding, there aren’t any! It’s this kind of well-oiled infrastructure that saw Dublin named the 39th most liveable city in a survey of 173 possible cities this week. How do you like that, Birmingham?

The thing about this column is that sometimes the weirdest news story of the week will be the fact that the EU is banning Smoky Bacon-flavoured Tayto. Other weeks, it is really quite challenging to find anything stranger than a €475,000 three-bedroom house in Coolock being touted as affordable by a government who have presided over a housing crisis so long that it now seems a permanent fixture of Irish society. 

Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien this week confirmed that some of the homes in Oscar Traynor Woods affordable housing scheme – approved by Dublin City Council in 2021 – will cost between €399,000 to €475,000, depending on the buyer income. 

A poll conducted by The Journal and Ireland Thinks in 2021 found that the public at large overwhelmingly rejects this definition of affordable. A staggering 83% of respondents defined ‘affordable’ as €299,000 or less. It took me a while to get my maths right, but I believe that’s a whole €100,000 less than the lower bound of the three-bedroom homes in question at the Oscar Traynor Woods site. According to Morgan McKinley, that 100 grand gap amounts to more than twice the median annual income in Ireland.

Speaking this week, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe defended the prices by saying: “I accept it is still expensive for many at the moment, but the key point is in the absence of that scheme, the price of that property would even be higher.” That may well be true, but it doesn’t make the use of the word affordable any more accurate or any less ludicrous. 

Let’s call a spade a spade. To categorise houses that cost a little less than half a million euro as ‘affordable’ is nothing other than an insult to our collective intelligence. The government gave itself plenty of leeway with a word as nebulous as ‘affordable’ to begin with, and they still couldn’t help themselves but stray from the realm of any reasonable definition. After all, if €475,000 is affordable, why stop there? Why not put an affordable home on the market for €750,000? Now that’s innovation. Ireland: the birthplace of the world’s first €1,000,000 affordable home.

And none of this is a slight against Coolock, by the way. There’s not a single normal-person suburb anywhere on earth where a €475,000 three bedroom new build would constitute affordability. Whether Foxrock or Coolock, €475,000 is only ‘affordable’ in so far as, yes, somebody out there can technically afford it. The same would also be true of a spaceship, the Mona Lisa, and Taylor Swift’s €750 It’s Been A Long Time Coming VIP Eras Tour package. Or, as the Irish government calls it, the ‘affordable’ package.  

We can all pat ourselves on the back for using phrases that don’t mean anything. For example, the Taoiseach could say that Ireland has been pursuing a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to domestic, sexual and gender-based violence. Oh, he did, did he? Right.

“Zero tolerance is not a political slogan,” Simon Harris said this week, as if he was convincing somebody. 

Another fully suspended sentence was handed down this Thursday to a man who left an ex-partner traumatised, cut and burned after a “horrific” attack. In her victim impact statement, the woman told the court that she had to get gardaí to make him delete a phone app he used to watch her through cameras installed in her home. The perpetrator, William Galvin, was given a suspended sentence of 21 months and ordered to pay €7,500 to the victim. 

The traumatising assault endured by Natasha O’Brien by Cathal Crotty is still fresh in the mind of the public. In that case, Crotty received a fully suspended sentence despite beating O’Brien unconscious and bragging about it on Snapchat. On Thursday the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre reported its highest number of contacts from the public in its 45-year history, which last week Last week Women’s Aid reported their worst ever year for domestic abuse calls.

So maybe Simon Harris is right. Zero tolerance isn’t a political slogan. It’s just a sick joke.