The Government must adopt a motto of ‘build on those sites or we punish you’ in relation to the housing crisis
Tánaiste can’t shift blame for homelessness on to the State
IN SEPTEMBER 2007, in the midst of Bertie Ahern’s travails with the Mahon Tribunal over the sources of his finances, the then Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny accused Ahern of having adopted the motto of Louis the Sun King: ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ (I am the State). It was a particularly damning criticism as Ahern had always maintained that he had no interest in personal enrichment and never had in his 30 years of public life.
Eleven years on, the thorny question of the personification of the State came into sharp focus again this week when, in an excruciatingly painful interview on Friday’s Morning Ireland, Tánaiste Simon Coveney was asked by Bryan Dobson whether, as the Minister who had introduced the Government’s housing initiative Rebuilding Ireland in 2016, he accepted that he had failed the thousands currently homeless.
The question came after a harrowing interview with ‘Amanda’, a fifth-year secondary school student who spoke of the heartbreak of being a teenager living in a hotel room, not being able to tell her friends the truth of where she lived and of the stresses of simply trying to cope with the dirt and mould, of corridors full of people eating their meals while she was preparing for school.
Taking a deep breath Mr Coveney responded by saying he accepted that ‘the State is currently failing “Amanda”.’
Put on the spot by Mr Dobson that not only had his pledge – that no families would be living in emergency accommodation by this summer – not been reached but that the numbers had increased and his entire plan had failed, Mr Coveney bizarrely stated that the difficulty was that new families are coming into homelessness all the time.
His theory seemed to be that if only the homeless numbers had stayed as they were when he made his grand announcement in 2016 all would be fine, as the Government was doing its best. He trotted out an array of seemingly impressive statistics on house building: 14,000 houses last year and over 20,000 this year.
Mr Coveney’s final message to ‘Amanda’ was that housing was the Government’s number one priority and it would do whatever was necessary to get the social housing programme accelerated.
So the failure is not that of the Government or its constituent members, or even Fianna Fáil, which has been demanding large increases in the capital spend on social and affordable housing in Tuesday’s budget.
COVENEY’S deliberate use of the word State in describing the failure to conquer homelessness was, I suspect, designed to produce a we’re-all-init-together effect. The reality, however is that the Government, and particularly the Fine Gael part of it cannot escape the fact that the housing and homelessness crisis has come under its watch. There are only so many times it can blame Fianna Fáil for the effects of the economic crisis.
One of Leo Varadkar’s first acts as Taoiseach was to ask his campaign manager for the Fine Gael leadership and new Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy to review his Government’s flagship Rebuilding Ireland policy document which was Mr Coveney’s brainchild. That document wasn’t even a year old and was approved by a Government of which Mr Varadkar was a senior minister and, as it turned out, Taoiseach in waiting.
As the homeless crisis has got worse, Fine Gael has continued to flounder. Its latest solution to the crisis was its announcement last month of the Land Development Agency, which would co-ordinate appropriate State lands for regeneration and development, opening up key sites which are currently not being used effectively for housing delivery. Mr Varadkar, rather grandiosely, said its establishment would come to be seen to be as significant as the decision to establish the ESB, Aer Lingus or the IDA.
If that’s the case, why didn’t the Government announce it this time last year when the housing problem was equally as bad? Moreover, wasn’t the idea of the Land Development Agency part of Nama’s brief when it was established, as the agency already funds the acquisition of social housing on sites it funds via the National Asset Residential Property Services?
Allied to this the Government also looks set to cede power to local authorities by allowing them to build more council houses without having to go through lengthy approval processes.
This seems a reasonable approach, but it comes only weeks after Mr Varadkar and Mr Murphy criticised local authorities for not doing enough to solve the crisis and threatened to take housebuilding powers from them. It all adds up to the idea of a Government not having any carefully thought out plan.
THE reality is that housing policy in this state has been appallingly haphazard over the past half century. We had the failed social experiment of high rise flats in Ballymun in the 1960s. We had the ghost estates, which symbolised the death cough of the Celtic Tiger.
The Irish State has built before. It built in the 1930s under Fianna Fáil as a response to dire poverty and appalling public health. Seán Lemass was particularly exercised by the appalling conditions he witnessed growing up in the tenements in Capel Street. It built in the 1950s under both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led governments.
Both programmes were driven by a simple ideology to tackle poverty, and a desire to build a better country. The State which Mr Coveney blames for the housing crisis can build again and along the same ideological lines. What is needed is political will and our Government needs to empower councils to build again. Councils have the land which they can free up and councils need to commit to social housing and make it worthwhile for builders to build such housing.
The Government can, in tandem punish landowners who hoard.
It’s called interfering in the market and while it might not be in Fine Gael’s DNA it can be done. The motto for Mr Varadkar and Mr Murphy should be build or we punish you.
The alternative is that their Government will be punished at the ballot box unless stories like those told by ‘Amanda’ disappear.