THE

State – that’s all of us – owns a huge land bank suitable for housing. But instead of building those houses and making them available as either social or affordable homes, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar wants the new Land Development Agency to share the benefits with private developers.

All of which proves that Leo Varadkar, Eoghan Murphy and Fine Gael generally hate the notion of the State supplying houses to people who can’t afford to buy them at exorbitant, ‘open-market’ prices.

They just don’t ‘get’ it. Social housing is a concept that sticks in their craw. It’ll never happen, not properly, under their watch and the suffering and alienation will continue.

And this is the crowd that Micheál Martin and Fianna Fáil – the party that can rightly claim credit for housing the nation in even more challenging times – are keeping in power.