Leo & Co have failed on housing and health – but do the voters really care?
LEO Varadkar acted coy about his first anniversary in office this week – and it turned out that he had good grounds. “Twelve months of Leo” fell on Thursday, a day which also told us that even those abysmal house-building figures were actually exaggerated, and thus things even worse again. And we also learned the numbers awaiting health care were at an all-time record.
That “happy birthday, Taoiseach” news takes much of the gloss off Fine Gael, and also dents Leo Varadkar’s “lucky general aura” which he has sported since June 14, 2017.
Mr Varadkar and his Government have had various successes in year one – bar much progress on tackling the two big challenges which confront them: housing and health. All of this brings us neatly to a question which will confront voters at the polls in the coming months.
What impact will health and housing have in the next election? Suppose you’re lucky enough to be healthy, and those close to you are healthy.
Assume you also have the good fortune to have a house, nominally increasing in value, and those close to you have somehow scrambled on to the property ladder.
Very many voters will be that happy situation in a once-more buoyant economy. For all them, will these issues be the ones to decide who gets their vote?
Many people will tell you they will be led and said by these problems. But what people say publicly and do in the privacy of the polling booth can be different things.
One thing is already certain: voters will be in no doubt about the shortcomings in both these elemental services. The Government’s habit of blaming the previous Fianna Fáil-led governments for wrecking the economy, in leaving no money for homebuilding, and knocking the building sector back to zero is now completely timed-out.
Fine Gael has led the Government since March 2011. In 2014, with a fragile economic recovery under way, exemplified by rising house prices, the Government published a six-year plan – Social Housing Strategy 2020.
This committed it to providing 35,000 new social housing units at a cost of €3.8bn. Progress here was extremely slow.
So another launch was called for.
In 2016 another new housing minister, Simon Coveney, announced more ambitious plans. “Rebuilding Ireland – Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness” pledged 200 rapid-build homes to be completed by the end of 2016 and another 800 by the end of 2017, while 130,000 new social housing units are promised by 2020.
Twelve months ago the housing mantle passed again, this time to Leo Varadkar’s successful election agent, one Eoghan Murphy.
The would-be bright boy of this administration, he has floundered over the past year, despite an abundance of cash. News on Thursday that the nation had 30,000 “phantom homes”, claimed as part of painfully slow progress, was a hammer blow to him.
These 30,000 new homes were in fact halting sites, mobile homes, retirement homes, holiday villages, and farm outbuildings. The news from the Central Statistics Office has left Mr Murphy digging himself deeper into that hole.
The health story, recently presided over by Leo Varadkar himself, has more recently been left to Simon Harris, who was not a Varadkar supporter.
Mr Harris has been shown to be a battler supreme – but he has still had few victories.
Ironically, the Health Minister may have been helped a little by the shock news on housing that “new homes” numbers had been over-estimated by almost 5,000 per year.
Mr Harris had to take some time out from trying to pick up the ever disintegrating pieces of the cervical cancer test debacle to do a bigger-picture version of defending the indefensible.
We learned the numbers of people on the waiting lists, either hanging on for treatment, or waiting on to see a doctor, now stands at 707,000. It’s an astonishing figure – an all-time high in the nation’s history.
Anyone on glancing terms with the news agenda will know these facts. A person who takes them on board, and possesses a modicum of humanity, must surely decide we need change.
We could experience a rush of blood to the head on the basis of that reflection, and also note that last time, in February 2016, people favoured better services over tax cuts.
That was a major finding of rather detailed exit polls on polling day itself.
It gave us a surprise in that people did not go for big tax cuts as promised by Fine Gael. It suggested Fianna Fáil, who campaigned on better public services, read the public mood better and that this was buoyed up by a stronger left-wing vote.
All of this is true – but let’s not get too carried away here.
Reality is that Fine Gael had blown things with a wrong assumption that more voters felt they were sharing economic recovery.
It does not mean people do not want tax cuts.
Political defeatism has surrounded health for a long time, a sentiment which may soon also pervade home provision.
All the Opposition are now puzzling how they might usefully harness these two topics to win votes.