No shortage of ideas, but it’s now a case of ‘seeing is believing’

FOR every idea about how to fix the housing sector, there seems to be any number of reasons for why it won’t work. Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy’s plan to help first-time buyers get cheap credit was met with claims that there are no homes to purchase anyway.

His somewhat ambitious plan to build 10,000 affordable homes has been dismissed as undeliverable without a new agency.

And his efforts, through Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs), to limit rent price increases have been derided as too easy to get around.

Labour’s Jan O’Sullivan argued yesterday the answer lies in the 700 sites owned by the State across the country.

“The State actually owns more than 700 sites, most of them owned by local authorities. The State also has a scheme for putting in infrastructure.

“Now it seems to me that what the State should be doing is using those sites to construct affordable and public housing… it is in the State’s hands to use those sites,” she said.

And Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen said the minister must examine the cost of finance for builders, tackle planning delays, and get bricks and mortar in the ground.

“This is the only effective way to open up home ownership,” he said.

So everybody has ideas but it falls to the minister to actually come up with a workable solution – and quickly.

That’s the problem for Mr Murphy. People have moved past the ‘ideas stage’ because we feel like we’ve heard it all before. We have now entered the ‘we’ll believe it when we see it’ stage.

Does anybody really think that homelessness is going to end in 2018, or that there will be enough social homes to meet demand? Who trusts all the local authorities to really, really get their feet dirty on brownfield sites?

And besides, even if affordable housing becomes a reality, then what about the people who paid the outrageous market rates over the past two years?

It’s a problem that probably keeps politicians in Fine Gael awake at night, and keeps Fianna Fáil up late plotting.

Everybody knows that houses don’t appear overnight but unless the Government starts to make some dent in the crisis soon it may face a general election on this issue.

For all the platitudes about wanting to see solutions, Fianna Fáil is reaching the point where it suits it for Mr Murphy to fail in the short-term.

In the longer term, it’d be happy to see the actions he is putting in place today come to fruition, provided they themselves are in government when it happens.

In the health service, the Oireachtas came together to give us ‘Sláintecare’. It may or may not change the system over time but it gives the Government some political cover.

There is no such unified approach on housing, making it the political hot potato as we head towards election season. Fine Gael’s ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ plan is the only show so Mr Murphy needs results quickly.