Script:

Thank you all so much for coming. It’s great to be in the original land of the green!

I'm Roger Dam, I'm a London-based Development & Sustainability Strategist and I work both with MGE Partners and with Castlebrooke Investments. 

My plan today was to tell you all about Castlebrooke’s new Tribeca luxury development, and all the sustainable features we'd be building into it. 

This would have been tremendously profitable for our investors, and would have brought a truly dynamic, fresh young look to the center of Belfast.

But as you may have heard, just this morning the Belfast City Council, impelled by public pressure, voted to cancel Tribeca and to instead build... Sunflower EcoVillage, which is 100% sustainable, 100% social housing development on the empty Mackies site in West Belfast, to accommodate some of the Northern Ireland homeless, who include 15,000 homeless children.

We've begun launching a marketing campaign all over Belfast. It's an easy sell for the public, who after all pressured the City Council for this to happen.

Now I myself care about homeless people and so on, but our investors are understandably disappointed at the lost revenue. So we've prepared a special message for them, our investors, and I can share a rough first version of this broadcast now.

How much money is the face of a happily housed child worth? 
It's actually priceless - because a society that abounds in avoidable misery is not one that anyone can be happy in. 
In Northern Ireland, there are over 15,000 homeless children.
We have the keys to change this. And we must.
Less profitable than Tribeca? Sure. But we all need happiness more than we need a little more money.
So thank you, Belfast, for forcing Castlebrooke to do the right thing.
Castlebrooke. In Belfast we're doing it right.

City Council will be hosting a groundbreaking ceremony at the Mackies site in West Belfast where Sunflower EcoVillage will be, and I'd like to invite each of of you to join us there this Saturday at 1pm. 

We have brochures for everyone with all this information and more, and an official statement from Belfast City Council.

You can also read more about this at our website, www.castlebrookein.co.uk/

And now I'd like to open it up to any questions.