You don?t have to be a Corbynista to know that the Establishment does not encourage radical politics of the genuinely socialist kind and that it will do whatever it can to belittle any group garnering mass support for daring to challenge the status quo. In the domain of cultural practice, mutatis mutandis, hugely important figures like Ken Loach and James Kelman are marginalized by the intelligentsia for the same underlying reason.

The political order wants safe middle-of-the-road parties and it matters not a great deal which of the established parties steers the ship of state; the cultural order appears to be liberatory in its warm acceptance of the whole aesthetic gamut but it shies away from Ken Loach?s films and James Kelman?s novels, leaving it to non-British critics and commentators to praise their cinematic and literary achievements. Kelman know the score:

?areas of human experience [I write about] should not appear in public; we don't want to know. We know that people are in the street, that they have no money and are maybe begging, but we don't want to see them in literature. They should be swept under the carpet.?  

Lifting up the carpet and sweeping out what is underneath has been a trademark of Kelman?s writing ? tastefully dismissed as ?pugilism? by bourgeois supremo critic James Wood ? but Dirt Road cannot be so easily pigeon-holed. It is a story about grief, a terrible family loss that a father and his son have to cope with, but without the emotionalism that characterises humanist fiction on painful topic. It?s a road-trip novel but without the romance or consolation or violence you expect to find in books about journeys across the Deep South.

What makes it special is the language, the way we don?t express our feelings in neat sentences with carefully chosen adjectives and adverbs to nuance our refined sensibilities, the inarticulateness that is part of the expression of anguish and of hope. No living writer does this better than Kelman and Dirt Road quietly explores what it is like to struggle with the awful sense of loss that inhabits the body and mind when someone who was close dies.

In July, the government announced a new housing plan. Called Rebuilding Ireland, it is designed to tackle the current shortage in housing supply. It is an ambitious plan with praise for itself as radical and innovative. In truth, it is neither of these things. This plan was put together after the previous Housing Strategy document of 2014 but states that this is ?having a positive impact, but not at the pace necessary to meet current pressures and pent-up demands.? It is not at all clear how Rebuilding Ireland will address this question of pace. The central problem with Rebuilding Ireland, however, is that it relies on the notion of ?access to a home?. At best this is a poorly worded substitute for the right to a place to live. At worst, Rebuilding Ireland?s underlying vision relies on a flawed model of provision. We have to give the plan some time to produce something tangible but the way the plan is written does not inspire any confidence that the shortage in housing here will be addressed.

The plan is structured under five ?pillars?. These are billed as ?high level actions [which] will support a range of actions across the five key pillars of the Action Plan?. The plan seeks to address homelessness, accelerate social housing, build more homes, improve the rental sector and utilise existing housing. In time worn tradition, these have targets and deadlines for delivery across government departments and local authorities. A few days after its launch, a senior public servant spoke on the radio and bumbled his way through some of these targets testily insisting that there would be 47,000 social houses available by 2021. Considering that local authorities acquired about 1,000 units in 2015 and constructed just 75 in the same year, there are a number of problems with these targets. Chief among these is a reliance on the private rented market and Approved Housing Bodies. Relying on the private and voluntary sector to provide that many units in five years would require an immediate four fold increase in both building programmes and municipal acquisitions.  The plan makes it clear that this figure would be supported by ?5.3 billion worth of investment, including accelerated Housing Assistance Payment delivery. As recent high profile cases have shown us, the HAP scheme moves people seeking housing off the local authority housing lists in return for subsidy payments to private landlords. These landlords can evict the tenant if they sell this property later, throwing people back on to some housing safety net which does not yet exist.

Rebuilding Ireland is neither innovative nor radical. One of its guiding principles is a reliance on private providers of housing. This means more money given to landlords, both individual and institutional / financial ones. Why fall back on a model of housing provision which currently does not support people in vulnerable housing situations and which, on other scales, has shown that it can sell property from under people?s feet? One of the reasons identified for an oversupply in the years to 2008 was a reliance on private developer-led speculative building. Developers relied on the continuation of credit to provide home loans to people needing a place to live. More worrying still, the plan promises that it will ?work closely with the ESRI and the Housing Agency to improve understanding of conditions in housing markets around the country?. Such understandings are already available: from the ESRI, the Housing Agency as well as the National Economic and Social Council and a number of other bodies concerned with housing rights. Measuring supply and demand is easily done, right now.

The bin charges debacle is spiralling into chaos.  We have areas where two or three or four bin companies operate and other areas where companies are threatening to leave; escalating charges becoming an intolerable burden on many low-income households; considerable price variations between counties; off-shored private companies pursuing wage suppression to increase profits; considerable illegal dumping; charges for recycling which dis-incentivises a social good; and on and on.  This is not a waste management policy; it is a circus.

The Minister is set to introduce a freeze on bin charges which would at least give us some breathing space.   The following sets out an alternative outline to waste management.  This is not a hard proposal; others will come up with better ideas.  However, it is clear that the current situation is not sustainable ? from an environmental, economic, and social perspective.

1.    A Public Service

Waste collection should be a public service.  In the late 19^th century great strides in public health came from water, sewerage and waste collection services; all provided as a public good.  We should return to this principle.  This does not necessarily mean that waste collection would be provided directly by the local authority or some other public agency (but it could ? see below).  However, rather than relying on market-forces to provide the service or set the charges, local authorities should re-assert active management and control of waste collection.

In 2006 I concluded my review of Reem Kelani's debut album Sprinting Gazelle with the phrase ?I believe it's a masterpiece.? That belief has subsequently matured into a certainty, and the disc has become one of my favourite albums in any genre. A full decade later Kelani's follow-up album Live at the Tabernacle, on Leon Rosselson's Fuse label, could easily have proved an anti-climax. Instead, it complements its predecessor admirably while also being a masterpiece on its own terms.

Kelani refers in the album booklet to ?live concerts? as ?the essence of what my musical journey is all about?. This journey has hitherto also entailed composing, teaching, musicology, and performing in works by classical western composers with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, so it is hardly surprising ? if frustrating for her growing legion of fans ? that she regards recording as something of a sideshow.

The performance recorded here took place at the 2012 Nour Festival of Arts in London (the Tabernacle, Notting Hill), and the double-album eventually materialised thanks to a Kickstarter campaign of which Kelani says: ?In an age in which music is structured according to the laws of the market place, and political narratives are suppressed, nothing is more comforting and assuring than grassroots support which can be neither bought nor sold.?

Concerning Sprinting Gazelle, I wrote that Kelani ?shuns political rhetoric, preferring to allow the music to speak for itself?. This is as true of the Palestinian material on the new album as it is of Kelani's comments both on stage and in the excellent booklet accompanying the recording (I really recommend buying the hard copy, as the whole thing is so beautifully produced). Of course Kelani is hardly apolitical. She is a member of the Anti Capitalist Roadshow, a "collective of singers and songwriters... opposed to the ideologically driven austerity programme imposed by this [UK] millionaire government". Some of the material on the second Tabernacle disc relates overtly to the 1919 Egyptian revolution and the 2011 Tunisian revolution. However, she seems content to allow Palestine's interminable trauma the status of an implicit if unmistakeable backdrop.

So has a political narrative been suppressed here after all? An informative and sympathetic Guardian interview from 2008 clarified that Kelani ?initially struggled to get a record contract here [the UK] because of her [Palestinian] subject matter.? She admits that on the cover of Sprinting Gazelle ?I was very careful...I did not say 'from Palestine'. I said 'from the motherland'. I'm walking on eggshells all the time.? Nonetheless, she asserted that ?[t]here is a message that Palestinians don't exist, so my narrative is... my existence, both personally and collectively ? As a human being, as a woman, as a Palestinian."

By now Reem Kelani's existence and hence her narrative is so firmly established that she could probably afford to kick aside the eggshells, although admittedly the defamatory energies of the Israel lobby are inexhaustible. In the CD booklet Alan Kirwan, curator of the Nour Festival in 2012, writes that ?[a]t the heart of her work is the recurring image of Palestine?, and the album's epigraph ? cited in English and Arabic ? is a defiant quatrain from the jubilant traditional Palestinian song Il-Hamdillah:

                                                Praise God, that evil is no more

                                                We planted peppers in the heat

                                                Our foes said they wouldn't turn red

                                                Praise God, our peppers grew and turned red.

This song, which euphorically closes both this album and Sprinting Gazelle, contains lyrics ?collected... from field recordings of Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon and Jordan?. The  opening track on Disc I, Let us in! (Hawwilouna!), was ?recorded from a group of Palestinian refugee women, originally from the village of Sha'ab near Acre? (in present-day Israel).

We are potentially heading down a dangerous stretch of road ahead ?leading us into the Ultra-Low spend zone.  In this zone, investment declines and, so competitiveness and productivity; health and education services suffer; income supports falter adding fuel to the inequality engine.  A low-service, low-waged, low-productivity future awaits.

Of course, spending a lot of money doesn?t guarantee you optimal results.  But spending too little certainly won?t get you optimal results.  So how far behind are we falling?  Let?s compare public spending (excluding interest ? this is called ?primary? expenditure) in the EU-15 countries.

I?ll use the method devised by Seamus Coffey who hangs out at Economic-Incentives.  He excluded elderly-related expenditure and then compared Ireland with the rest of Europe.  He did this because Ireland has an advantage here ? we don?t have to spend as much on pensions and related expenditure because we have a smaller proportion of elderly.  In the EU-15, the over 65 cohort makes up 19 percent of the population; in Ireland, this cohort makes up 13 percent. 

2014 is the latest year we have data for old-age expenditure.  In the following, old-age expenditure is subtracted from total primary spending.  For instance, Ireland spent 37.2 percent of its adjusted GDP (adjusted per the Irish Fiscal Council?s hybrid-GDP estimate that factors in the accounting practices of multi-nationals).  It spent 4 percent on the elderly, leaving an expenditure level of 33.2 percent excluding elderly-related spending.  Figures for European categories are mean averages. 

Ireland ranks below all the European averages.  What difference would it have made in 2014 in actual Euros and cents?

• To reach the average of other EU-15 countries, we would have had to increase public spending by ?6.5 billion

• The next comparison is with other Northern and Central European economies (other NCEE). This is the EU-15 excluding the poorer Mediterranean countries like Greece and Portugal.   To reach this average, we would have had to spend an additional ?9.6 billion.

• The final comparison is with Other Small Open Economies, a category used by the IMF. These are economies with a small domestic market and a high reliance on exports.  Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Sweden are in this category.  This is arguably our peer group.  To reach this average we would have had to spend an additional ?15.5 billion.

[Note:  some will say that defence spending should also be factored in as other European countries spend more than us.  This is true.  In the EU-15, defence spending makes up approximately 1.3 percent of GDP; it?s 0.4 percent in Ireland.  In any event, defence spending is a policy choice and, in my opinion, shouldn?t be excluded from comparisons.  But if you insist, knock off about ?1.5 billion off the numbers above.]

In 2014, it could be argued that we are already a low-spend economy but as I wrote here, the situation could actually be worse.  I have reservations about Seamus?s method.  Excluding old age expenditure not only removes the demographic driven part of overall spending, it removes policy choices.  Most other EU-15 countries spend more on elderly per capita than we do.  Second, if we are to adjust for the elderly population, then we should also adjust for youth demographics.  In Ireland, under-20s make up 28 percent of the population, compared to 21 percent in the EU-15.