For years, Mohamed Mustafa inhaled the soft dust that used to come out of the machines in the cement factory south of Cairo where he worked, but he never thought those small particles would end his career.
A few years ago, the 55-year-old former cement worker developed a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever and night sweats, and he began losing weight. When a doctor told him he had tuberculosis (TB), he said he collapsed in shock with the realization that he would lose his job, just as many of his former colleagues had when they had been found to have TB.
“Cement dust used to fall on my head in showers every minute,” Mustafa said. “I never expected it to bring about my end,” he told IRIN.
The Egyptian government says 21 in every 1,000 Egyptians are infected with TB every year. But only about one in 10 of these latent cases become active. It estimates the number of patients nationwide to be 17,000, but independent organizations say the number is far higher.
“TB has come to pose a real danger to the people of this country,” said Essam al-Moghazy, chief of the National Tuberculosis Control Programme, a state-run agency seeking to assist TB patients. “The problem is that poor Egyptians living in the country’s slums are more prone to it.”
"Tuberculosis patients shouldn’t be given that treatment. Employers shouldn’t take the fruit and throw out the peel like this."
Having TB, an infectious and sometimes deadly disease that is passed from person to person through the air, is cause for automatic dismissal in many companies in Egypt.
Mohamed al-Asmaie, head of Friends of the Environment, a local NGO campaigning on behalf of TB patients, said when many Egyptian workers become sick with TB, instead of receiving treatment in hospitals, they are laid off and have to fend for themselves.
“Tuberculosis patients shouldn’t be given that treatment,” said al-Asmaie. “Employers shouldn’t take the fruit and throw out the peel like this.”
Mustafa, who lives in the industrial city of Helwan, about 30km south of Cairo’s centre, blames the years of cement dust inhalation for weakening his immune system enough to get infected by TB.
Though there is no hard scientific evidence linking cement dust to TB, studies have shown that persons with silicosis - an occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of crystalline silica dust - are up to 30 times more likely to develop TB.
TB is the third most life-threatening disease in Egypt, after bilharzia and hepatitis C, according to the Health Ministry.
Despite this, in its 2009 Global Report, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Egypt had succeeded in achieving the global target in TB case detection and treatment success in 2007.
The case detection rate of positive cases in Egypt was 72 percent (global target is 70 percent) and the treatment success rate was 87 percent (global target is 85 percent), WHO said in its report.
But such statistics mean nothing to TB patients like Mustafa. The father of six, who lives on a pension of LE 76 (US$14) a month, has already developed lung cancer and psoriasis, like many of his colleagues from the factory who were infected with TB.
“Most of the drugs my doctors give me are ineffective,” Mustafa said. “Everybody keeps avoiding me and my wife for fear of catching TB.”
The conversion of excess rice straw into fertilizer, rather than simply burning it off could be the solution to a problem that has plagued Cairo residents for the last 10 years: the “black cloud” that decends on the city every October and November.
… and the vultures, in somewhat different form but identical nature, have returned … as have the evictions … and rack-rents
As a comparative thing, it’s interesting that wrecking properties is still a feature of many evictions in the US, but not so much in Ireland any more.
Until last year I thought that the three Queen’s Colleges began around the same time as the famine, but now I understand that it was only the Government Act that was in 1845, and there were no students until 1850. And doesn’t that then mean that those beautiful cut-stone buildings, quadrangles, etc. were constructed during the famine?
While the poor (mostly native & catholic) suffered the middle classes were having nice university colleges built for them?
Also TCD was a major landowner (owning 1 or maybe 2% of the island of Ireland). I read McDowell and Webb’s great history a few years ago, “Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952”, and one serious gap is that there is no mention of the famine. Maybe it didn’t collide with their social backgrounds but it is strange given than McDowell was a great professional historian and Webb was a great professional botanist.
TCD apparently didn’t actively manage the land tenancies itself but had many agents (& I think there was a mention of the college getting a poor return).
Dubliner Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, wrote when prime minister in 1830 on the regularity of famines in Ireland:
Now when this misfortune occurs, there is no relief or mitigation, excepting a recourse to public money. The proprietors of the country, those who ought to think for the people, to foresee this misfortune, and to provide beforehand a remedy for it, are amusing themselves in the Clubs in London, in Cheltenham, or Bath, or on the Continent, and the Government are made responsible for the evil, and they must find the remedy for it where they can — anywhere excepting in the pockets of Irish Gentlemen.
The Land Commission dates from 1881 and the Irish State to the present day still keeps the records secret from the start — Sweden passed its Freedom of the Press Act in 1766 and it has been operational continuously since 1809. A culture of transparency promotes good governance and the Web Foundation launched by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the pioneer of the World Wide Web, judged in 2015 that Ireland, Greece and Hungary had the least transparent governments of 33 in Europe. Putin’s Russia was ahead of Ireland!
This is an Irish Times editorial in May 2013 defending the Government’s Pontius Pilate stance on facilitating tax avoidance including the argument that Ireland wasn’t engaged in tax haven activities because the OECD said so (neither were its members, Netherlands, Switzerland or Luxembourg).
In the early decades of independence, the Land Commission became a political patronage agency similar to the service provided by New York’s Tammany Hall to the Irish there.
It was typically farmers with land who got land in Meath, Kildare and Dublin and de Valera thought that establishing Gaeltacht ‘colonies” in Co. Meath would help revive the Irish language.
Prof Terence Dooley of Maynooth has extensively research the land issue and in the early years of the State he says land programmes were estimated to cost £30m, funded by a loan from the British government, but an estimate of the outturn was £58m — this was about 10 times the cost of the 1920s Shannon hydroelectric scheme.
It is astonishing to see just how much of the early State’s revenue — 5.4% in the early 1930s — was used to placate land hunger in rural areas to the relative neglect of pressing urban problems. This rural focus extended to providing subsidised housing for farm migrants from the West to the more fertile midlands and the rural labourer. Rural areas got more than ten times the social housing investment of urban areas. Local authority housing tenants moreover, were given the right to buy their house from the outset – a right only offered to urban flat tenants this year of 2004.
A reader may be tempted to dismiss the foregoing as history but during austerity and the recession, the Irish State was making ‘goodwill’ payments to farmers for not interfering with road-building and after 2001 the farmers got 23% of the national road-building budget — about double land acquisition costs elsewhere in Europe.
Land prices are the main drivers of rising housing costs in developed countries and today while well-meaning folk call for a minister to have sole charge of housing policy, the Irish land racket is ignored.
How crazy is it that Irish agricultural land prices are four times the level in France? Prof Alan Matthews last year said beef farmers should grow trees because absent subsidies they are in a loss-making business and wonder why farm numbers in the European Union plunged 27% in the period 2003-2013 according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, and Ireland was the only EU28 member country that showed a rise in holdings — a country with a huge number of uneconomic holdings increased the number of farms!
The CSO gave up tracking agricultural land prices about a decade ago while there have never been official statistics on development land — US vulture funds gobbled up about 88% of NAMA sales, while London, Sydney and Vancouver, show how foreign investors can exclude the locals.
With vulture funds buying up distressed mortgages in Ireland with the blessing of the Politburo it will be back to the future. According to Forbes (www.forbes.ie/bilionaires) , Ireland has 6 billionaires and John Grayken of Lone Star is one of them. He buys up distressed assets with a view to flipping them on ASAP to get the best RoE
Ireland is the most anti-tenant country in the world. Irish democracy is rule of the landlords, by the landlords for the landlords.
Property services can be consumed in two ways,by owning a property or by renting a property. In all euro zone countries lease lengths for residential properties and commercial properties are “say” three to ten years,with renewal rights and rents are reviewed each year with reference to increases in the CPI/inflation. At the end of the lease term,the rent reverts to market rent.
France and the Benelux countries have 3/6/9 leases where the tenant signs a nine year lease,rents are reviewed annually by the CPI for the nine years and the tenant can break the lease at the end of year3,6 and 9. At year nine the rent reverts to market rent. The tenant has renewal rights.
If residential property prices in these countries become too high you have an option to rent,with renewal rights and some certainty about your future rent. Residential property lease law in all these countries is the same as commercial property lease law.
Ireland has the most anti-tenant property lease law in the world. We have very different commercial and residential property lease law–commercial property leases are very long say 25/35 years with ratchet rent reviews every five years and no break clauses and residential property leases are very short say one year with no rent controls and no renewal rights.
In Ireland the residential tenants and the commercial tenants are serfs to be exploited. The state actively colludes with these landlords.
can you tell me if this will this get posted? is the delay because of the weekend, or another reason?
Hello again. I have posted a good few times in the past without a problem. Do you know why it is blocked now?
The labourer and family, outside the turf hut in Gweedore is a very poignant photo, as are the other photos. Thankfully, there appears a hint of defiance in the eyes of both mother and child. One wonders how temporary the hut was. Note the window on the gable of the turf hut.
The modern generation would do well to recall the evils of our history of property rights and landlordism, as exemplified in these photos.
I have gone walking walking with the dog around Ardfry near Oranmore recently and there is a fabulous abandoned mansion there that is a reminder of the fragility of economic systems.
It was funded by tenant farmer rent in an ultra laissez faire system of which evictions were a key part but elites always forget that economic power is subject to the consent of the people . Once the political weather changed the big house model was doomed.
Woodbrook by David Thomson is an interesting economic history covering the move from landlords to FF voters.
Almost equally striking photographs can be found on the web of the Highland Clearances. They are from another time.
“The introduction of the expenditure benchmark means that there is effectively a fixed amount of funding to be allocated between the various requirements of the State. The growth of this “fixed pot” is subject to a strict formula, and additional expenditure requirements must be funded by discretionary revenue increases (primarily tax increases) or expenditure cuts elsewhere. To operationalize compliance with the expenditure benchmark in our domestic budgetary process, the Ministers and Secretaries (Amendment) Act 2013 put the Government Expenditure Ceiling and the previously administrative Ministerial Expenditure Ceilings on a statutory basis. The Government Expenditure Ceiling covers Voted expenditure authorized by the Dáil each year plus appropriationsin-aid and expenditure funded by the Social Insurance Fund and the National Training Fund. All of these elements are set out in the Expenditure Report and the Revised Estimates Volume each year. Annex 2 shows the transition from the level of general government expenditure that is permitted under the expenditure benchmark to the Government Expenditure Ceiling. Annex 5 contains the circular issued by the Department of Public Expenditure to govern the operation of the Ministerial Expenditure Ceilings.”
The existence of this “fixed pot” must be the best-kept secret in Ireland. The real political sea-change will have occurred when (i) its existence is recognised and (ii) there is a consensus that it would be in the country’s best interests if the formula was, in fact, improved at a national level i.e. acceptance that there should also be built in a fixed budgetary ceiling safety margin for unforeseen circumstances.
The curious matrix of political ineptitude being witnessed daily guarantees that such circumstances will arise.
This piece by Martin Sandbu on the issue of “fiscal space”, in which the outgoing MOF got hopelessly lost, is also of interest.
The IMF, seemingly, is the main culprit in opening up this gap through which politicians have attempted to charge en masse, evidently fully supported by willing electorates, it being impossible, however, to establish who is kidding whom.
Indeed yes, the photos are poignant and over a century later bear witness to individual suffering and despair in Irish rural society of the times that were in it. In a wider context, they are part of the portrait of a changing society, which determined the shape of modern Ireland for over a century.
The Land War of the late 1870s and 1880s was a critical juncture in Ireland’s modernisation. Its scenes of eviction, agrarian violence and mass emigration – which averaged more than 16% per annum throughout the decade, levels not seen again until the 1950s – took place against the backdrop of a general economic recession related to events such as the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, a slowdown in availability of what were rapidly becoming traditional emigration outlets, as well as the ongoing transformations in patterns of Irish agriculture
The Land War was a political success. It instigated land reform that would ultimately provide for the mass transfer of land ownership from landlord to tenant in Ireland within a few decades. It immediately provoked the Land Act of 1881, which granted the ‘Three Fs’ tenants’ demands for ‘fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale’, latterly extended to include a review mechanism for judicial rents after three years in 1887. By this point, Irish tenants enjoyed greater security in their holdings than their counterparts in the rest of the UK. The balance of power in the landlord/tenant relationship had been irrevocably altered to the tenants’ advantage.
Hence, as well documented by our historians, the stage was set for a final settlement of Irish land reform. Arguably, settlement of this big issue, along with other institutional infrastructural reforms in education and local government, contributed to the smooth transition to Irish independence after 1921. That the pattern of land ownership thus established would contribute to subsequent economic stagnation and social rigidity of the newly independent State is also apparent. A further downside, when you think about it, is that there has never been any real debate in Ireland about whether settlement of the land reform issue in such terms was in the best interests of Irish society, or the Irish economy, over the long term. It was unquestionably accepted as a ‘good thing’ and wrapped up under the mantle of Irish nationalism, along with a lot of other things that might have borne a more critical examination.
Back to this engaging site, I like the story about the bees best of all. First time I’ve ever come across bees, so essential in every other aspect to our survival as a species, being used as a weapon of war. A great ‘buzz’ on a Saturday morning!
Spamming the comments on a piece on 19th century evictions with stuff on the Government Expenditure Ceiling may count towards DOCM’s targets with the ECB, but it won’t make a blind bit of difference otherwise.
P.S. In the re-jig of the site, it would be useful to have an author delete button. This is standard on most blogs.
A very interesting comment. Garret Fitzgerald put it best in my view in 1966 cf. a link courtesy of a member of the present diaspora.
The new state had to stand on its own two feet financially from the start. It is presently barely able to do so. And there is a deep-seated unwillingness to face up to this fact.
Land Reform ended up with FF voters. Small minded conservatives with very little interest in progressive policies. But maybe that was inevitable. You can’t make a silk purse etc
Michael is a bit harsh. Another way of describing the work of the land commission is that it was by and large a very rare global example of the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. (there was low level agrarian violence over who got what land) When you say that most land was redistributed in Meath etc, remember that most of that was to migrants up from the West and it gave them a chance of a decent living. (Many of whom are my neighbours- we live on a land commission road and I grew up in a land commission house).
However Seafoid raises the more pertinent point. Post-independence the Land Commission was effectively controlled by FF who used it for patronage. All those migrants never forgot who gave them the farm. Only in the last election did their grandchildren abandon FF for SF.
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If like us you’re huge fans of the Irish Lottery and the Euromillions then do we have a treat for you, and it comes in the form of the Daily Million! The Daily Million is a lottery you can play everyday, and fortunately there are still huge prizes to be won as the Daily Million has a 1 million euro guarantee! So as those math whizzes out there will tell us that now means we have an additional 7 lottery games a week to enjoy on top of the games we already have.
The rules for the Daily Millions is very similar to the main Irish Lottery game in that it is a matching numbers game, only this time there will 39 balls to choose from instead of the usual 47 and the entry fee per ticket is only 1 euro which shouldn’t hurt the bankroll too much! Furthermore with only 37 numbers to choose from and still 6 numbers to be picked the chances of you walking away with a prize are higher than ever before!
To play the Daily Millions you can purchase a ticket at your local store or purchase tickets online.There are many advantages to purchasing tickets online which include the speed and accessibility of putting the ticket on as well as being able to set and purchase the same numbers(or different) days or weeks in advance so you never miss a draw. You must pick 6 numbers between 1 and 37 as well as a bonus ball for the Daily Millions and the draw is on every night at 9pm for those wanting to watch the draw happen live. Unlike the Irish Lottery the Daily Millions has a set prize that you win equal to the number of balls that you match which start by matching at least 3 balls. Matching 3 balls with the Irish Lottery will be good enough to see you walk away with 3 euro while if you can also get the bonus ball in there it will be increased to 10 euro. 4 balls will see a player win 25 euros while getting the bonus ball on top of that will earn the player 100 euros! With 5 balls a player will win 500 euros and that only increases to a staggering 10,000 euros if you can also match the bonus ball with that. Finally matching all 6 numbers will see the player take down the jackpot and win their share or all of the 1 million euros!
So if like us you can’t get enough of the Irish Lottery then treat yourself to a few extra games of the Daily Million each week to get your fix. With less numbers to choose from the chances of you getting a jackpot prize is much higher and with a million euros as the prize we’d say it’s well worth the effort!