You spend hours in gridlock to return to a county other that the one you work in, one you began commuting from home 14 hours ago. Your next in line to get off the slip road and onto the regional pothole network that will take you home, its 7.45PM and you haven’t seen your kids or partner for more than 20 minutes for days.
After a hard weeks commuting its the weekend. As social services are severely underfunded the local environment has little going on.
Bertie Ahern wants you to volunteer your time to run things within your community. This is an honest gesture if you fell asleep in 1986 and suddenly woke up. I did the whole volunteer thing from 15-27 before politics took my time, There are wonderful people in every community in Ireland that volunteer, the same 2% in every community, for health care, GAA, all sports, youth clubs, meals on wheels, bingo, cake sales, ladies clubs, bridge etc.
I think the Govt. has a fecking nerve to ask the commuter belt in post Celtic Tiger Ireland to screw itself by making itself feel guilty if they do not rise to the challenge in their community of volunteering. Its a fine and noble cause but not after a 15 hour day in gridlock. On May 25th it took me 25 minutes to travel 1 mile through the town of Balbriggan at 7.45PM. localised late evening gridlock is a new feature of the satellite towns, heaping misery on the people who experience the major all day gridlock on our roads.
This is Dublin City Volunteer Week (June 1 – 7) and while I would suggest to anyone that volunteering is great and you WILL get more out than what you put in, I really have to say, this greedy capitalist system has little to offer the volunteers in terms of support, “Quality of Life”, tax breaks, funds, help, legal protection, premises, rent or insurance relief or proper training. If you do have the time, start a pressure group, lobby for the services of the state to fund what it should always have been involved with. WIN things for your community that are sustainable that wont get wiped out by extra hours in gridlock next year for the volunteer base, Either we go back to 1986 or things change, they do not remain the same. Wake up.