Get a move on Leo!

Only vision and courage can solve our housing crisis. Does Leo have the drive to build a just, modern Ireland?

THE rat race for university points now exists alongside an equally vicious rat race for accommodation. In Ireland location has always been a prime driver for student choice when it comes to applying for university. But as access to third level education has widened, the pressure for accommodation has become acute.

In over 20 years working at Dublin City University I have never received as many queries about accommodation as I have this year. I’m not equipped to answer them but I hear the despair in the voices of those worried about not being able to accept precious places because they have nowhere to live.

For every student housing place on university campuses there are around five applicants. We are now hearing of students deferring places or making outrageously long commutes to get to campus.

There is a housing crisis in Ireland and the relentless demand for student accommodation is an increasingly significant part of it, one which will bring yet more pressures in the years to come.

So what exactly are Fine Gael, and indeed the government as a whole, up to when it comes to housing? One of Leo Varadkar’s first acts as Taoiseach was to ask his leadership campaign manager Eoghan Murphy, the new Housing Minister, to review the Government’s flagship Rebuilding Ireland policy document – the brainchild of Varadkar’s leadership rival Simon Coveney. That document wasn’t even a year old and was approved by a Government of which Varadkar was a senior minister and, as it turned out, Taoiseach in waiting.

We’re now told that the Government is considering the establishment of a new semistate company to ensure an adequate supply of house building across the country in an effort to solve the housing crisis. One might well ask wasn’t that part of Nama’s brief when it was established? As Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen pointed out this week, Nama already funds the acquisition of social housing on Nama-funded sites via the National Asset Residential Property Services.

Although Fianna Fáil are no paragons of virtue when it comes to planning and housing having let developers and bankers ride roughshod over what little regulation there was during the boom. We are still living with that deleterious aspect of the Celtic Tiger.

HOUSING policy in this state has been appallingly haphazard over the past half century. We had the failed social experiment of the high rise flats in Ballymun in the 1960s. We had the ghost estates which symbolised the death knell of the Celtic Tiger and the misery it left behind for thousands.

We now have the new towns of Adamstown, Cherrywood and Clonburris with their grandiose plans and glossy brochures.

Adamstown, to the west of the capital is basically a town without a centre. Building began in 2003 when then-taoiseach Bertie Ahern, at the height of his popularity after his 2002 general election victory, was on hand to oversee work start on the site. He returned in early 2005 to officially open Ireland’s first new town since Shannon in 1982.

By 2014 just 1,600 of the 9,000 planned homes designated by the Adamstown strategic development zone had been built and few of the promised amenities had come to fruition.

Adamstown has good schools and its residents are rightly house proud but a car is a necessity to shop or go for a drink. It now has a relatively small shopping centre but there is still no church, cinema, community centre, swimming pool, sports hall or public house. All were promised when the development was announced. Another recently announced development promises a community centre and an all-weather sports pitch. Sounds familiar.

In 2014 plans for some 7,000 houses in a strategic development zone in Cherrywood near Dún Laoighaire, south Dublin were announced. Now as winter 2017 looms not a single house has been built there.

Given the evidence and problems of Ballymun, Adamstown and Cherrywood, how could anyone have faith that Clonburris, west Dublin’s new poster boy town – and right next to Adamstown – will be part of the solution to the capital’s housing crisis.

Adamstown is only 15% complete yet we are told that Clonburris – a new Wexford-sized town bolted on to Lucan and Clondalkin, as it was described by South Dublin County Council’s Director of Planning – will be able to tackle the capital’s housing crisis by providing 8,000 homes to house over 25,000 people using socalled ‘fast-track’ planning.

Already there are mutterings from some county councillors about the difficulties of the dire traffic in the area being such that it would be a hard sell to approve a whole new town with the associated increase in traffic. Moreover, as the tales of Ballymun and Adamstown remind us, new towns need facilities, not the never-ending promises of amenities that never materialise.

THE council owns 35% of the Clonburris land, the rest is in the hands of private developers who say they are ready to build immediately. This is no bad thing. The main problem with our lack of housing is that local authorities can’t seem to deliver public housing on sites they own.

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 terrible conditions he witnessed growing up in the Capel Street tenements. It built in the 1950s under both Fianna Fáil and inter-party governments.

Both programmes were driven by an ideology to tackle poverty, a means of wealth distribution and fundamentally a desire to build a better country.

We can build again and along the same ideological lines. What is needed is political will and empowering councils to build again. Councils have land which they can free up but they need to commit to social housing and make it worthwhile for builders to build such housing.

Nobody really likes private developers but like that other despised class in contemporary Ireland, bankers, they are essential to solving the housing crisis. Much as it may gall those of us who don’t live the profligate lifestyles of these modernday buccaneers, they do have the wherewithal, skills and know-how to build houses.

Government can in tandem punish landowners who hoard. It’s called interfering in the market and though it might not be in Fine Gael’s DNA, it can be done. The motto for Varadkar and Murphy should be build or we punish you.

The aim should be to get a system of attracting tenants to purchase their houses again. This would be a powerful re-engagement with the social contract that seems to have been abandoned since the Celtic Tiger.

This Government’s greatest challenge, notwithstanding health, is the housing crisis. It straddles all social strata, from those unfortunates trapped in homelessness to the children of financially comfortable Fine Gael voters who struggle to find accommodation and afford rent. Solving the crisis will require vision and courage.

So what will Varadkar’s legacy be? Our first gay Taoiseach who symbolised a modern but broken Ireland, or the Taoiseach who actually built a just, modern Ireland?