Paul KeenanDear Editor, It is with a sense of outrage that I pick up my pen to write in response to the homelessness crisis highlighted by Br Kevin Crowley in your paper (IC 29/5/14).
Have we learned nothing? Are we incapable of learning? As we continue in the cold embrace of the banking culture which is gleefully gearing up once again to offer lifelong mortgages to another generation, it takes a notable Capuchin with a life’s experience of the “tragic human casualties” in our country to cry ‘stop’ to the behaviour we accurately – and yet euphemistically – refer to now as ‘the madness’.
As a country we need to lend our voices to that of Br Kevin, and to that other voice for the homeless, Fr Peter McVerry (who has warned of a “tsunami” of homelessness as Irish banks inevitably scale up the rate of house seizures from the so-called cubs of the Celtic Tiger). Beyond the confines of our allotted time during national and European elections, we need also to cry ‘stop’, and to do so repeatedly before we realise that all we have built for ourselves against poverty and homelessness are trapdoors under our own feet.
Of course, if the current Government still baulks at the thought of a man of religious standing having a point on a given topic, it could perhaps more comfortable heed the words of Thomas Jefferson, a politician who believed passionately in the separation of Church and State, but who also wrote: “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake
up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
Yours etc.,
Robert Leahy,
Dundalk,
Co. Louth.