Outgoing Labour Party chairman honoured for his long-service

At the 73rd Labour Party conference held in Dublin last weekend, the retiring Chairman of the Sligo-Leitrim Constituency Party, Mr Hugh MacConville, was awarded a long-service award by Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik.

Duncan Smith TD, Labour's spokesperson on Disability, Transport and Communications, addressed the conference ahead of the award. He spoke about how Hugh had been active in left-wing politics since the 1960s, particularly around the issues of housing, homelessness and evictions.

Hugh commented, "It is disturbing to think that the issues that brought me into politics six decades ago continue to plague this country and hold it back from achieving its potential. In the 60s, 70s and 80s Ireland was a poor country, and we were experiencing a war in the North.

"With membership of the European Common Market, and eventual peace and increased co-operation between North and South and the two Islands, we have experienced fabulous prosperity.

"According to Keynesian economic theory, the period following the Financial Crash should have been used to ramp up house building and to train unemployed people to work in the trades.

"Government should have borrowed to spend. Instead, house building virtually ceased, training and work opportunities ground to a halt and we lost many of our most talented tradespeople.

"The two main parties who have dominated each Government since the foundation of the State, continue to direct economic policy and blindly follow a neo-liberal economic model which resulted in rapid order, a collapse in house prices, a loss of a skilled workforce, followed by housing shortages, record homelessness and an explosion in house prices.

"I was honoured to receive this long-service award from a political party which recognises the seriousness of this issue and the centrality that housing policy plays in any civilised social democracy."