Who decides the common good? The privileged do

Below is Justine McCarthy ’s column in The Irish Times yesterday.

 While admitting it is the privileged who decide what the common good she has the decency to tell the reader that she lives in ‘pricey' Dún Laoghaire.

The philosophers and theologians have a lot to say about the common good, and the natural law too.

J McC’s column

Eileen Flynn posed a bombshell of a question in Leinster House last summer. The Independent Senator and Travellers’ rights activist was questioning representatives of business lobby group Ibec at a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on Infrastructure and the National Development Plan about their report, entitled Our Infrastructure Ambition for a Competitive, Productive and Resilient Economy.

Zooming in on the proposition that the planning system should favour the common good over individual rights, she wondered: “Who decided what the common good is?” The common good tends to augment the uncommonly privileged, nobody replied.

Outside Leinster House’s sash windows, a parade of politicians’ parked cars flashed sunbeams across the lawn at their €335,000 bike shelter, installed courtesy of the public. Beyond the gates, tourists staying at nearby five-star hotels strolled in the shade of Merrion Square’s sycamores. Visiting Martians would have been impressed by the opulent tapestry. Visiting Dubliners might have thought they had landed on Mars.

For most people, reality is a constant battle with polluting traffic jams, undependable bus timetables, footpaths cluttered with unnecessary obstacles and queues for GP and mental health appointments. Our masters of the universe are seldom spotted trudging to work in the rain, waiting for a bed in a hospital or a domestic violence refuge, residing beside derelict buildings or on streets festooned with menacing anti-immigration flags.

Back in the committee room, the business delegates were arguing that adequate public infrastructure is essential for a competitive and resilient economy. Echoes of the primacy of wealth creation over the general populace’s quality of life bounced off the lovely walls.

Public administration is becoming an ever more entrenched class issue in Ireland. Budget 2026 provided a sharp reminder of this hierarchy in the contest of priorities. Tax breaks for builders and a VAT reduction for restaurateurs contrasted with zero payments to offset inflated household energy bills and an effective tax increase for many PAYE workers.

Vocal opponents

Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, acknowledged there is a global them-and-us ideology in a New York Times interview in 2006. “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war and we’re winning,” he confirmed, disapprovingly.

For evidence that money speaks, see the Government’s reversal of the 2:1 expenditure ratio of public transport to roads in the revised National Development Plan. At the same time, 21 per cent of rural dwellers say they feel impeded from spending time in nature by the lack of roadside footpaths, according to a Central Statistics Office study.

Some of the most vocal opponents of Dublin’s MetroLink are individuals who seem least likely to rely on the 18.8km rail line from Swords to Charlemont. It is a luxury they do not need because they can afford to live in multimillion-euro houses located in lush inner suburbs already replete with buses, trains and trams. They bask in the double advantage of their homes having become even more unaffordable to most mortals because of their proximity to Dart and Luas lines. An ironic twist in MetroLink’s long-running saga is that some Ranelagh residents complain the new rail system will deliver too many commuters to the sought-after locality which already has a Luas stop. Granted, they do have a point.

While some areas are spoilt for choice, others have zero to none. A recent report by the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland found purchasers need salaries exceeding €108,000 to buy even a basic new apartment. Only the top 20 per cent earn enough to rent one. The upshot is that people – mostly young, and many with burgeoning families – have to move further and further away from their social networks and workplaces to acquire somewhere to live.

Once there, they find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Many prospective homeowners might have felt optimistic when Dublin City Council rezoned land for the building of 5,300 houses near the planned Dart+ South West line that is to connect the city centre to Hazelhatch in Co Kildare. Their hopes were quickly dashed when, 11 days later, the Department of Transport revealed that the beginning of construction of Dart+ South West is to be delayed by four years.

While sprawling new towns are being built without adequate public services, some established, well-heeled ones seem immunised against any dilution of their exclusive cachet. The Office of the Planning Regulator has criticised Wicklow County Council for failing to rezone land around Greystones, a seaside shopping destination, opting instead to rezone land in Kilcoole. Despite property prices spiralling to the sky after the Dart was extended to the town, councillors say its public transport services are insufficient to accommodate newcomers.

The axiom “build them and they’ll come” is not always true. There are great tracts, especially in the capital city and its hinterland, where GPs are as rare as electric gates and golf clubs. It is no coincidence that among the worst-affected areas are the ones boasting the fewest millionaires. In Dublin’s north inner-city, there is one GP to every 3,525 residents, according to HSE data supplied in response to parliamentary questions by local Labour TD Marie Sherlock. A mile away in coastal Clontarf there is one GP to every 1,500 residents.

The north inner city is home to one of Ireland’s biggest prisons. Mountjoy is bursting at the seams with too many inmates, and few white-collar criminals among them. The area also contains a network of traffic rat-runs where fuel-guzzling cars whizz to important meetings or frequent-flyers’ departures at the airport.

When the Sunday Independent asked Tadhg Crowley, chair of the Irish Medical Organisation’s GP committee, about the dearth of local doctors in certain districts, he candidly identified one of the factors as doctors’ reluctance to live in areas of deprivation.

And who would blame them? (Not I, who lives on the high moral ground in pricey Dún Laoghaire).

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission has called for the constitutional enshrinement of economic, social and cultural rights as a key to cohesion and inclusion. While we wait for that referendum, we can throw all the money in the national coffers at fixing our deficient infrastructure, but it will not be right. It is doomed not to serve the common good, that’s why.