From The Newswire: After a recent Spotlight programme highlighting some of the anti-social behaviour practised by some students in the Holylands was broadcast - students organised a protest in the Holylands to tell their Mummies and Daddies that 'No we're not really misbehaving going wild and spending your money on e's and booze'. Where then would students like permanent Holyland residents to move to?

I am a Protestant woman from North Belfast, whose partner is a Catholic from the Short Strand. The Holylands is one of the only neutral working class housing executive areas available to mixed religion working class families. My neighbour was also a Protestant woman whose partner was a Catholic from the Lower Ormeau. My other neighbour was a Catholic from the Whiterock whose ex-partner is a Protestant from East Belfast. One of the other families' mother was from the Lower Falls and her ex-partner was a Protestant from Portadown. Some of the other permanent resident families are ex-students from the countryside who've setttled in the Holylands with their kids for many years.

"Building a motorway which would be designed for handling 50,000+ cars a day is a complete waste of time. We will be destroying our heritage for nothing. It is worth noting that the scheduled completion date for the new motorway by the NRA is around 2010. From the graph and of course the latest date for peak oil (2005) from ASPO, we will already be on our way down in our usage of oil and cars and the steep decline in place continues after that time."

The tolled Motorway through the Tara and Skryne Valley should not be built for two main reasons. 1) It will destroy our heritage and 2) it will soon become a White Elephant. Instead, Dunshaughlin, Navan and Kells should be bypassed and the existing N3 road should be widened. This would be more than sufficient to deal with the traffic.

The National Roads Authority (NRA) forecasts for the traffic levels and the total number of cars in Ireland are flawed because they do not take into account the looming issue of Peak Oil. The growth for the number of cars is based on the rising population, GNP and a rising car per capita rate. This was a reasonable assumption up to now, but Peak Oil changes everything and this continued growth is very unlikely to come to pass.

Continue at the link below for the rest of the feature and an explanation of the graph

Last week Dublin City Council held their "Conference on Future Directions for Future Housing Policy" in Croke Park. The issue that was of most interest & concern at the conference was the Council's future change in policy to allow tenants of social housing flats to buy their own property.

Dublin City Council owns over 16,000 flats in Dublin (and approximately 10,000 houses on top of that). The Council allows people who live in their houses to buy them out, and the price depends on how long the tenant has lived there, how much rent they have paid over time, the condition & location of the property, etc.

The sale of Council flats inevitably means that many complexes will become privatised. The Council's proposals have not been finalised yet, but some of their plans involve turning over some estates to housing associations, in the same way the flats at Killarney St/Buckingham St were given over to Clúid. Other blocks, in prime inner-city locations, could be turned over to private management companies. The Council could benefit to the tune of €3.3 billion, which is a conservative estimate of the flats' value at current market prices. John FitzGerald & Brendan Kenny (city managers) have previously favoured PPPs (Public-Private Partnerships) in the redevelopment of inner-city complexes.

From the Newswire: Ten students were evicted from their house last night, with four hours notice, following a request for their washing machine to be fixed.

The landlord is well known to DIT Students’ Union, and other local Students’ Unions, who were involved in a claim against her just four weeks ago. The students had repeatedly asked for the repairs to be carried out and following a written request, the landlord gave the students less than a day to pack up and leave.

DIT Students’ Union Vice President Sharon Hughes was contacted by 2 of the DIT students and called to the address, where she assisted the students. Students were attempting to pack their belongings while the landlord accused various parties of trespassing and threatened not to return the students' deposits.

All lights in the house were turned off while students were trying to remove their belongings from the premises, with one girl tripping in the blackness. Sharon Hughes called two Gardaí from Whitehall station to the scene. The Gardaí had no comment to make on the legality of any of the landlords actions.

From the newswire: Why the silence/inattention on the mainstream media on the plight of Margaret Hassan and Annette Flanagan? Is Bertie hiding something? The anti-war movement in Ireland should be doing more to link the plight of the women hostages with the Shannon issue.

With the death of Yasser Arafat and the destruction of the city of Fallujah in the name of ‘freedom’, the plight of the Irish-born hostages Margaret Hassan and Annette Flanagan has fallen to a kind of ‘afterthought’ item, both in the Irish mainstream media and internationally. Some may claim that ‘negotiations are ongoing’, which is not ‘sexy’ news, unlike the pictures of America’s poor driving around Fallujah in heavily armed and armoured vehicles exterminating their Iraqi counterparts for the benefit of capitalists everywhere. However, I think that we here in Ireland are letting a most important story pass us by without even the most cursory of investigations, and those of us who’ve been involved with the anti-war movement over the last two years or so haven’t made the most elementary connection between the hostages and the continued use of Shannon by the US military.

When the kidnappers of Mrs. Hassan and Ms. Flanagan made their demands, the Shannon issue was notable for its absence. It was not until last Sunday that I asked the simple question – why?