How can we as a country keep getting things so very wrong?

I WAS hovering around the supermarket shelf as you do, searching for something that was probably right in front of my face and not seeing it so I asked the shop assistant stacking shelves near me. After we found the item, we got into one of these fascinating conversations you can have with strangers that loops and twists and turns and in this case lasting ages. All the while, she kept stacking.

It started, of course, with Ryan Tubridy and how we were all so disappointed that he hadn’t put his hand up at the start, and this led to how strange this country can be about some things.

This woman, who was, say, in her late forties or fifties, confided that she lives with an unremitting knot of anxiety in her stomach that one day her landlord, who sounds, in fairness, a decent enough soul, will phone her to announce that he has decided to sell the house she has rented from him for many years.

Her salary is not large, but her landlord is not a greedy man and she said she was just about able to afford the reasonable rent increase he asked for recently.

In fact, when he rang and mentioned the rent increase, her knees turned to water with relief because she was so utterly terrified that he was going to tell her he had decided to sell. And if he sold, she would lose her accommodation and if that happened, she said, she has absolutely nowhere to go. Nowhere.

I told this woman about my aunt, who lives in another part of this outwardly affluent country. My aunt told me that she woke up one morning to find that the neighbour who had rented the house next door to her for more than a decade, had been put out on the street.

The house had been sold and she had nowhere to go. In desperation and humiliation, she was getting the bus to Dublin to move in with her sister.

How, the shop assistant and I asked each other, can it be that the government seems so rich and is forecasting such a huge budget surplus when our housing is a mess and our public hospitals are stressful, crammed and over-run, with inadequate staffing and resources and all too often with toilets and wards that are unclean.

The community health care in this apparently wealthy country of ours is on its knees. GPs are as rare as hen’s teeth in many parts of the country - and this at a time when the taxpayer is forking out millions training top-of-the-range doctors and nurses who won’t stay because of, guess what, working conditions, salaries and rental costs and the government’s mind-boggling refusal to build in any conditions whatsoever for paying their way through college.

I was sitting in my GP’s surgery recently when a young woman came up to reception. She was a mother of small children and utterly desperate, she said. She had recently moved to the area, and had spent the morning working her way through the town, visiting every GP surgery she could find. Not one of them, including my own doctor’s surgery, was able to add her to their patient list. They are all overwhelmed.

Why are there never any gardaí to be seen on the beat anymore, and by this I mean physically walking up and down the streets?

Why are children, teenagers and adults being allowed to cycle bikes and e-cycles on pavements, often at speed, making it extremely stressful not to say dangerous, for pedestrians to simply walk down a street?

Why do so many picturesque tourist havens turn so nasty at night with vicious fighting, stabbings and anti-social behaviour?

One woman told me how she ed a drunk in a pretty West Cork town urinating on top of an ATM machine at 10pm one Saturday night. 

She nearly got sick, she said. By morning that urine would have dried onto the machine, which unwitting people would be touching. With their hands.

Previously quiet, pleasant, happy towns are rough on Saturday nights. There are men harassing, pulling at and cat-calling at young women. There are drug deals occurring openly in the streets. There is casual drug use in pubs and nightclubs.

Where are the gardaí? Do tell, Commissioner Drew Harris. If you don’t believe me walk for an hour or two after 10pm on a Saturday night through a rural town like Killarney or Clonakilty and witness for yourself the rough, ugly, intimidating anti-social behaviour which has become the norm.

The gardaí are being moved around the county like pawns on a chess board, so that they have no knowledge of or connection with the local communities they are being drafted in to serve. How does that help crime fighting?

And if it’s bad in the towns, phew, dear God almighty, the city centres are worse. They are dirty, grubby, run-down, plagued by dereliction and very ugly anti-social behaviour. Anything goes because nobody is in control.

Gardai are stuck in their stations, not allowed to emerge unless some central security control unit approves it after filling in a questionnaire from a concerned member of the public.

I’m no fan of Dubai. It’s a horrible place. But Dubai does one thing well. It has a well-resourced, efficient, and workable police force that you don’t mess with.

There are plainclothes police out on the streets on a constant basis.

A guy I know who worked there told me that anti-social behaviour is virtually unknown in Dubai - because you never know whether the bystander witnessing you vandalising a town park, pissing into an ATM machine or cycling down the centre of a pavement putting elderly pedestrians at risk is police or civilian. So they don’t dare to try it on.

In wealthy Ireland the Garda Siochana, the army and the navy are losing valuable personnel hand over fist because they are not being paid properly, treated with respect, provided decent working conditions, good equipment, back up or even basic moral .

Our public and social services are under-staffed and under-resourced.

Our public infrastructure is appallingly badly structured and ill-resourced.

The anti-social and intimidating behaviour and drug and alcohol abuse reported on trains and buses is nothing short of hair-raising, yet we still don’t have a proper State-operated system of public transport policing. Policing by actual police, that is. Not leaving it up to a harassed bus driver or some poor girl pushing a tea-trolley down the train aisle to deal with these thugs.

Local housing lists are not working – at least not for the local/Irish people who are being left waiting for years or being ed over for housing time and time again in their own communities by “local authority” bodies which do not meet any definition of local.

How come we are so rich that we pay 46% above the European average for ordinary household goods and services and yet we live in a society riddled with the problems of a third-world State?

Why, when the government is housing thousands of war refugees faster than the speed of light, are so many homeless people, em, Irish?

Why do so many young Irish people have to leave Ireland because living here is unaffordable?

The problem is that everything in this country is highly centralised.

I have read that in most European countries public infrastructure and services are organised, financed and delivered locally – and work.

We need to go back to able, transparent local governance, housing and policing.