If Varadkar can’t get homeless children out of hotels, PR spin won’t save Fine Gael
OVER my years of canvassing around my home town of Dundalk, I was always struck by how many fine local-authority housing estates had been built decades ago. In times when there was much less money to go around, the local authorities seemed to have been able to build many houses for those on the waiting lists.
For instance, between 1922 and 1941, a total of 21 new housing schemes were undertaken in the inner-town area of Dundalk to meet demand.
I have no doubt that these types of figures for house-building by the State were replicated right across the country during those decades.
Indeed, when the conflagration in Northern Ireland commenced in the late 1960s, significant numbers of displaced people came across the border and were given refuge in towns such as Dundalk.
At that time, the local urban council responded with rapid house-building to deal with this influx. Hundreds of houses were built, albeit not of particularly great quality.
Over the decades, housing at local-authority level was always particularly difficult to acquire.
Nevertheless, we didn’t seem to experience the type of crisis that has now confronted our country for the past few years.
It seems now – in much better times – that we as a society are unable to respond in similar fashion to the continuing crisis surrounding housing all of our people.
The ever-increasing homeless figures, the exponential rise in rental prices and the extreme difficulty for young couples in getting on the housing ladder are a continuing stain on our society.
THE economic crisis has exacerbated the situation, in that the State has virtually ceased building homes. The present Government is grappling with the housing and homelessness crisis, which is of an unprecedented scale.
While the numbers of new builds have been growing steadily, the increase isn’t enough to meet the demand, nor has it made any appreciable dent in the continuing rise in house prices and rents.
Waiting for the private sector to deal with the crisis will not suffice because developers nowadays are far more hesitant in building the numbers to meet the demand, mainly because of their reluctance to be overexposed financially.
Private developers will want to push the risk of rapid building onto the taxpayer, while the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform will not want to see the public purse exposed.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs), whereby private-sector companies design, build and manage infrastructural projects, have been successful in a number of areas, not least our roads and schools.
But for some reason, the same type of success has not found its way into the PPP model for the housing sector.
The Government has promised that 2018 will see a huge increase in the State’s investment in homebuilding. This is an issue which will make or break Fine Gael’s chances of getting re-elected – or, putting it another way, of preventing Fianna Fáil from replacing it as the lead party in a new confidence-and-supply arrangement after the next election.
Fine Gael has had a major resurgence since Leo Varadkar became Taoiseach. Despite a few hiccups, he has shown, especially in some of his more recent media performances, that he is a different kettle of fish to Enda Kenny.
Fianna Fáil used to be able to rely on Kenny’s below-par media performances to allow Micheál Martin to shine.
This will definitely not happen in any election head-to-head between Varadkar and Martin. Indeed, if anything, Martin could be trailing Varadkar in any such scenario.
In the last election campaign, Martin and Fianna Fáil very skilfully identified ‘fairness’ as a key requirement across every facet of Irish society.
They were able to portray Kenny and Fine Gael as uncaring and only interested in the economy.
The Fine Gael election slogan – ‘Let’s keep the recovery going’ – was a disastrous one. Added to Martin’s constant repetition of the word ‘fairness’, it ensured that Fine Gael’s last election campaign went downhill from the very first day.
Varadkar, by his many utterances over his political career, has shown that he is perhaps even more right-wing, economically, than Kenny and other previous Fine Gael leaders.
His smooth media performances belie a deep-set philosophy that may not suit everyone.
Helping those who ‘get up early in the morning’ may strike a chord with a sizeable proportion of the population, but behind it all, Irish people tend to worry about those left behind. And there is nothing more liable to influence middle Ireland, from a voting point of view, than the spectre of homeless children living in totally unsuitable accommodation – and little, seemingly, being done about it.
The housing crisis is one issue that, as Gerry Adams would put it, ‘hasn’t gone away, you know’.
If anything knocks Varadkar’s rise off course and jeopardises Fine Gael’s chances in the next election, it is how well they grapple with the housing crisis.
All Varadkar’s PR spinning will be for nought if he can’t show that Fine Gael has come up with a proper and credible response to the thousands of families without a proper home. A housing crisis of this magnitude normally takes years to fix – and this Government doesn’t have time on its side in this regard. The Opposition, especially Fianna Fáil, know this.
Expect this issue to be the main political battleground in 2018.