Darragh Brien

Hey @DubCityCouncil, why don’t you pop down to James’s Street or Bond Street flats, and tell the young lads whose home is falling apart from the damp, and whose mam is a recovering addict, and dad was shot or stabbed over a drug debt or is in Wheatfield, and whose older cousin made them mule drugs across the city since they were 9, that they are innately privileged because they are white. I’m sure the white women who’s entire families were ravaged and wiped out by heroin who’ve been moved, at the ripe age of 65 and arthritic, from DCC flats, to DCC council houses far away from the community they and the generations before them grew up in would love to hear about the privileges they have because of their skin. How about you pay a visit to remind the young single mothers living in emergency accommodation without so much as a kettle or a pot to piss in, how privileged they are that they and their kids, who have been moved between 6 different houses over the past 4 years, because their skin is white? Or, the kids in Crumlin Children’s Hospital (still waiting for the new, improved hospital) who are on the oncology, PICU, or CF units, and have spent more of their little lives hooked up to machines than playing with their friends, while their parents live out of Ronald McDonald House or are forced to travel up and down the country everyday? Maybe their white skin will pay for the remortgaging of the family home? Or the white woman in her 20s whose hair is matted from sleeping rough on Thomas Street, who would regularly ask me if I could get her a sandwich in Tesco because she hadn’t eaten since yesterday? I’ll tell her to use her skin to pay for the sandwich next time. Or the bipolar white woman in Dochas who’s in on nothing drunk and disorderly charges, who can’t receive her correct medication while in custody? Or the mother who has had to make the difficult decision to place her profoundly autistic 11 year old son into residential care because his father abandoned the family when he was 6, and the child has now started threatening her with kitchen knives and overpowering her during meltdowns, and the Tusla support workers could only be there 12 hours a week? Or the man on the Ha’penny who’s developed pneumonia from the wind on his back all day and night? Maybe he’s forgotten his skin colour could pay for a hostel, or even a house. How about the women who’ve had to up and leave their entire lives with their kids in the middle of the night, now living in a DV refugee camp, do their boyfriend doesn’t kill them this time? I’m sure they’d all appreciate it if you reminded them to check their white privilege. Utterly Machiavellian and disgusting material.