Sir, – News of the increase in the number of Irish millionaires due to escalating house prices will be cold comfort to the rising number of working people falling into homelessness due to unaffordable rents in Dublin (“Number of Irish millionaires hits 90,000 as property prices surge”, Business, October 21st).
In the moral vacuum of our neoliberal, free market economy, more and more people are inevitably becoming consigned to what critic Henry Giroux calls “zones of abandonment and social death, where they become unknowables, with no human rights and no-one accountable for their condition”.
The logic of a profit-driven system dictates that the cost of socio-economic protections is unjustifiable, but it also means that we have failed in our collective civic responsibility to our fellow citizens. – Yours, etc,
MAEVE HALPIN,
Dublin 6.