Politicians need to think big — and housing is biggest issue of all

A state land agency, no matter how long it might take to come to fruition, would deliver changes that voters would reward, writes Eoin O’Malley

AWEEK is sometimes a long time in politics, but usually it isn’t. Coming to the end of 2016 we see politics much the same as it was at the time of the election. An Irish Times opinion poll last week showed little change to when the Government was formed last May, which means there’s no reason to expect another election in the immediate future. If anything, Fianna Fail will be happy to be ahead of Fine Gael, and relieved that Sinn Fein is well behind. Fine Gael can also be satisfied that its support is holding up. Fine Gael TDs will know that 26pc got them into the Dail, so these polling numbers should see them returned.

The stability in the polls is reflective of the absence of any change in the politics. Big ideas and big policy solutions can shift polls, but this Government seems either too enfeebled or too cautious to offer anything radical that might move its polling numbers. It also might not think it worth the effort. Big policy changes often take years to have an impact, but this Government knows time is not on its side. Why bother?

Still, the electoral landscape is quite different to what it was five years ago. This is because big things happened. Sinn Fein is a much bigger party than it once was, and it is the most obvious manifestation of the anti-establishment mood we see in much of the west. Although government satisfaction is up in the poll, still just a third of voters are happy with the Government’s performance. Much of the explanation for that rise in populism has been about a disaffected working class, which has lost status, security and income. They blame immigrants, but there’s an assumption that governments are failing them. Hence the government dissatisfaction.

But a lot of the reason we see for the rise in populism is not that governments are failing, but that they’ve been so successful.

Most Irish people’s lives are remarkably better than they were 40, 30 or 20 years ago. It’s not uniformly better, some stuff is worse. We’ve inadvertently created an underclass utterly dependent on the State. But, generally, we live longer, are healthier, wealthier, safer, and better educated, more tolerant, and better travelled than we were.

The problem is, however, that because we are so much better off, governments in the west now struggle to deliver the big gains they once could. Unlike after World War II, when the health service and new public housing delivered huge gains to our welfare, and again in the 1980s and 1990s when globalisation, deregulation and increased competition put consumer goods we used dream about within reach, now the State is not seen as delivering big gains.

Despite huge investments, improvements are small and incremental, and, as a result, pretty underwhelming. Politics promises big, but delivers small.

The parties that identify the issues that could make a bigger-than-average improvement in people’s lives will do better. But what are those issues? In Ireland, water charges was just a protest issue, and nothing done there will actually make people much better, or worse, off. That’s why the parties that highlighted them haven’t made big gains. That’s why Fianna Fail should be wary of using it as the bedrock of its electoral strategy.

Housing has to be the issue that makes the big gain. Unlike water, housing consumes between a third-and-a-half of many people’s income. There is a real problem that is making life truly hard for large numbers of people. It’s also making Ireland uncompetitive again. The State can do something about this. Politics solves problems because the State has awesome power.

Though the Government thinks it has done a lot on the issue, and there are certainly a lot of initiatives, most of the Government’s policies are small, tinkering at the edges. The policies either do little, just deal with symptoms, or will make the situation worse. By effectively increasing rents, the Housing Assistance Payment is likely to push people in the private rental market into homelessness and dependent on the State.

Instead, the Government should think big, and look at past suc- cesses. The model in Dublin’s Docklands (though it got greedy and was mismanaged at the end) actually worked really well.

It turned a literal wasteland into the most valuable real estate in the country. The Docklands is a place where people want to live and work. Excluding its later losses on the Glass Bottle site, the DDDA did so without costing the state much money, and without taking any real risk.

If Simon Coveney is serious about the problem, or a politician with any ambition, he should look at the DDDA example. The State owns vast tracts of land. The problem is that the land is held in lots of different hands — often held as a form of financial guarantee by the different state agencies.

It would be reasonably easy to set up a state land agency, a sort of NTMA for our land.

An Irish land agency could then identify and sew together those tracts of land the State has that’s currently lying derelict or being used inefficiently. Why, for instance, park buses in Donnybrook, when we could build apartments?

The land agency could have the legal and financial power to provide development plans for new areas, service those lands, zone them and auction off parcels, essentially designing new neighbourhoods.

The land agency could make decisions on the best way to provide the transport links, public parks, social housing we need, and get the private sector to build it.

The Government wants to wait for the private sector to act, but it can’t because it doesn’t have the power to deliver serviced zoned lands on the scale the country needs.

The left wants the State to become the builder and developer itself, but this will impose bigger risks and costs on the State.

A state land agency could deliver big changes that voters might reward. Unfortunately, such an agency would take time to come to fruition and even longer to deliver benefits.

As ministers soon discover, five years is a short time in politics.

‘Most policies are small, tinkering at the edges’