Leo’s shaggy dog story
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar takes a break from the Fine Gael Parliamentary Party meeting in the Minella Hotel, Clonmel, Co Tipperary, as Bobo the dog looks on.
IN the Taoiseach’s own words, you can tell a lot about a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. Leo Varadkar listed 10 ways that Fine Gael has made life better, or, as he described them, “examples of the Republic of Opportunity in action”.
He pointed to increases in the minimum wage, new bursaries to increase access to education and childcare subsidies. “So when people mention style, I think of all that substance,” he said.
He is laying the groundwork for the next election, rebranding Fine Gael as a caring, sharing party. He realises there is more to winning public approval than maths. And that’s why TDs and senators who made the ‘trip to Tipp’ spent much of their day discussing the housing crisis.
It is now the one major obstacle holding the Government back. The budgetary figures are good but for most people they are just ‘millions and billions’.
Does anybody who gets up early in the morning without a degree in economics really know the difference between GDP and GNP?
It’s another set of statistics that people understand: more than 8,000 people, including 2,970 children, are without a home.
Various groups now measure the homelessness statistics in the same way the INMO has monitored trolley numbers for years.
As a society, we have somehow become immune to the hospital crisis. For many, it’s a case of unless they are directly affected there’s an understanding or an expectation that the system is broken. Mr Varadkar has said there is “no perfect health service in the world, but we can certainly have a vastly improved one”.
But on housing we are not yet so desensitised. Pictures of children doing their homework in cramped hotel rooms and people sleeping in doorways hit hard. Unlike the health crisis, the housing one hits millennials. It affects parents who want their darlings to fly the nest. It upsets older people who want to downsize. An unquantifiable proportion of the population is directly affected.
“In 2012, some people said we would never get on top of the jobs crisis, as unemployment hit 15pc, but we did.
“We will bring the same determination and focus to solving the housing crisis,” Mr Varadkar said.
Four years ago, Fine Gael backed the banning of bedsits. Now it is looking at reversing that. The latest idea is to change the remit of Nama so that it can help fund developments – a proposal long supported by Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party.
Perhaps Leo Varadkar is listening to the Opposition or maybe it’s simply a case of try everything and hope something works?
Concluding his address, the Taoiseach said Fine Gael was “the party of aspiration”.
It will need to aspire to make major inroads into fixing the housing crisis by the time an election rolls around. Otherwise, the attempt to be the ‘Republicans of Opportunity’ will seem as hollow as the party’s plan to “Keep The Recovery Going”.