The country can’t afford your ignorance

They are regarded as the best and the brightest but our leaders’ failures lead to careless and cruel policies, writes Gene Kerrigan

SIMON Coveney and Eoghan Murphy are widely regarded as two of the best and the brightest ministers from a generation of young, selfconfident politicians. They work under the direction of an ambitious, articulate Taoiseach, whose personal financial affairs haven’t attracted even the slightest whiff of controversy.

This is refreshing to those of us who lived under the ageing time-servers of the Kenny government. Or who remember the sleaze-ridden era of Shifty Haughey.

There are, though, some rather large drawbacks.

In my opinion, these best and brightest are, in truth, not very good at their jobs. There are some figures relating in particular to Coveney and Murphy that are quite startling. We’ll consider those in a moment.

Another drawback is an astonishing ignorance about the history and culture of the country they govern.

So deep is this ignorance, so basic, that their failures are inevitable.

Probably the failures distress them. After all, they set themselves up, from a young age, as dynamic alternatives to the politicians who ran the country into the ground in the first years of this century.

But, far from being dynamic, they continue to devastate the lives of people who deserve better than incompetent hypemerchants. Let’s look at a central function of government — housing — as managed by these people.

There is a homeless problem, but that’s merely the sharp end of a bigger problem — that of organising the housing of the people, in particular in the largest area, Dublin.

The private market is broken, dominated by the capricious rich and the ruthless vultures. And the State has abdicated responsibility for directly housing people. The most it will do is implore the private sector, which operates on the profit motive, to be socially responsible.

For every one person in emergency accommodation, there are countless numbers living with their parents, couples who can’t get a mortgage, workers who struggle to afford extortionate rents.

The fact that Varadkar, Coveney and Murphy have made a pig’s mickey of housing is not in question — let us suggest why they are so bad at their jobs.

Why don’t they, as Tony Fahey, UCD professor of social policy, suggested recently, just build the houses we need? “Just do it.” Such state-led building was the norm in the 1930s and in later decades. And it worked.

We need 30,000 homes a year, we’re not near that — why not just build?

Ignorance and class prejudice, that’s why.

When I was a teenager I worked alongside a nice man who was a bit snobby. He was careful to let you know that he came from the “private end” of his area, not from “the scheme”. Because “the scheme” was local authority housing and he wanted you to know he was a step above that.

The belief that you are defined by where you live, and in what kind of house, runs deep. The minor prejudices of an old gent from a previous generation are one thing — but when that kind of simple-minded class prejudice dominates the thinking of those in government, we get careless, cruel policies.

In recent debates on housing, the Varadkar set have been frank about their prejudice. They denounce the “failed policies that did not work before, such as building giant social housing estates”.

They are resolutely against housing estates — what my old workmate called “schemes” — and they insist on what they call a “social mix”.

Municipal housing, local authority housing — anything akin to a “scheme” — is now labelled “social and affordable housing”. It’s for poor people.

It’s considered as almost a charity. But, like Victorian charities, it must be morally improving. In the current thinking, housing must have a “social mix” to ensure the values of the middle classes rub off on lesser breeds, or else we’ll have estates full of “problems”.

From this thinking comes the nonsense about “the people who get up early”, and the “people who pay for everything”, versus “the people who don’t want to pay for anything”, the “benefit cheats” and the rest of the bullshit.

The less paternalistic of this crowd, idiots who believe local authority houses are a form of charity, use the taunt “free houses”.

In fact, the giant estates were all rented, managed by local authorities. One of the milestones of my childhood was becoming old enough to be trusted to bring the weekly rent to the local rent office. The giant estates — Ballyfermot, Finglas, Cabra West, Crumlin, Drimnagh and the rest — housed and reared generations of electricians and plumbers, administrators and labourers, teachers, factory workers and shop workers and drivers and hairdressers, office workers and scientists, without which this country would not have prospered.

The estates were the backbone of the capital city. The houses were solidly built, with an infrastructure of schools, shops and dispensaries.

Later estates, built by shysters, were sometimes slapdash, without facilities and with government policies of gathering in one place large numbers of people with social problems.

It is these latter estates, and the truths and the myths they spawned, that frighten the Varadkar set.

They insist on outsourcing the job, donating state lands, in the hope their plans will fit into the investment needs of the private sector. They believe that if the State properly “incentivises” the developers, they’ll allow the minister to smuggle in a “social and affordable” element along with the “private” houses.

My old workmate is long dead, but his ideas live on in the Taoiseach’s office.

In the Dail last week, Eoghan Murphy lamented that “not everything has worked out like we hoped it would, such as the Repair and Lease scheme”. And what’s that? Well, it’s one of the many gimmicks they’ve invented to “incentivise” the private sector. Simon Coveney created it in 2017. Repair and Lease would produce thousands of homes, he said. No fewer than 800 in the first year.

Simon moved on and Eoghan took over. It became obvious that Repair and Lease wasn’t as successful as Simon hoped, so Eoghan tweaked it.

Two of the finest conservative minds in the country worked on this plan. And at the end of the year, how many of those 800 homes did the best and brightest manage to entice the private sector to provide? Fifteen. One-five. That is a success rate of less than 2pc. A success rate of 1.875pc, to be precise.

And last week, the Dail voted total confidence in Eoghan’s ability to handle the housing crisis. He will remain the Minister for Scratching His Arse While the Homeless Figures Rise.

In what other endeavour would such incompetence thrive?

But this isn’t a matter of personal failings in either Murphy or Coveney. Some online Fine Gael elements cannot disguise their class hatred. But Murphy, Coveney, Varadkar and the rest don’t exhibit that. They’re prejudiced and paternalistic, they’re ideologically obstinate, but their prejudice seems to derive from ignorance, not ill-will.

Meanwhile, with a Government desperate for images of success, hardly a person is allowed into a “social and affordable house” without Eoghan, in safety helmet and hi-viz jacket, being photographed handing them the keys.

Like 1950s’ Stalinists insisting that the Five-Year Plan will succeed if we just give it another 15 years or so, the FG/FF cartel are sticking to their principles.

Usually an admirable trait — but not when other people have to pay the price.

‘The giant estates housed and reared generations — they were the backbone of the capital city’