Voters want solutions after 20 years of bad housing policy. Enter Sinn Féin

Irreverent. Irrepressible. In the corridors of power

BORIS JOHNSON was stranded on a zipline above a London park in 2012. The infamous images showed Boris, wearing a blue helmet and clutching a little Union Jack. With the London Eye in the background he dangled helplessly. While waiting rescue he pluckily gave a political speech, saying that the ‘zipline is a very good idea’.

The reaction of then prime minister David Cameron the day after encapsulates the political phenomenon of Boris Johnson.

‘If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zipwire it would be a disaster,’ said Cameron. ‘For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.’

Johnson is a clownish figure. There have been incessant revelations about his shambolic private life, allegations about his journalistic integrity and he has been publicly exposed as a liar. Most recently there was a stream of revelations about murky payments for renovations for his Downing Street flat. Still he triumphs.

He led Brexit, the most seismic political upheaval since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He swept to leadership of the Conservative Party, won a resounding general election majority. Again, last week he led the Conservatives to a series of local election and by-election victories. All the accepted precepts of politics have been obliterated by this man. Why?

WELL, people like him. In a changed social structure his modern family arrangements are no longer something to frown upon, but something to relate to. He wheezes on morning runs and pursues fad diets but can’t lose weight, like so many regular folk.

But pivotal to this politician’s success is that he is the anti-politician. The Eton-educated, establishment man is, somehow, an outsider, a disrupter.

Since the betrayal of the financial crash, the British electorate has been asking questions and finally they have found an answer.

Here, too, we see our leaders through a wholly different prism than before 2008.

Since the crash we have been seeking answers too. First in 2011 we turned away from Fianna Fáil and gave Fine Gael and Labour the greatest majority in our history. Then in 2016, Labour was wiped out. Fine Gael performed the confidence and supply trick and a coalition with independents was the next experiment.

Now, after the 2020 rout of the centre, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are in coalition.

This column and others predicted that when the pandemic receded, our shattered housing system would again be exposed.

The Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael coalition are set to fail as abysmally as the other administrations of the last two decades when it comes to moulding a functioning property landscape in Ireland.

Micheál Martin was in Cabinet in 2001, when I first bought a house.

It was clear to me as a young journalist then, that there was already something deeply dysfunctional about the spiralling property market. Mr Martin was in Cabinet still when the property market collapsed and dragged the banks down with it in 2008. His party has supported and colluded in Fine Gael’s property policies since 2016.

Yet last week he urged his Cabinet to take unified action to confront the property crisis. He says it is the greatest challenge facing the Government. Has this only struck the Taoiseach and the establishment this last week?

After last year’s general election an exit poll showed that an extraordinary 26% of voters said that ‘housing and homeless’ was the most important factor in how they voted. It was the second most influential factor in how people voted after health, an eternal worry of the Irish electorate. To emphasise what really matters to the Irish voter, and how wrong a political party can get it, 1% said Brexit most influenced their vote.

FINE Gael strategists should have been hung from a yardarm for making that issue a central plank of their election vessel. As such, a declaration of a state of emergency on housing and homeless was surely an obvious strategy for this Government.

Since Sinn Féin made an extraordinary electoral surge, how could the link between housing and political popularity not be made?

If the establishment repeatedly fails to adjust its performance in a particular area people seek radical solutions.

When the ancien regime fell in France or the Tsarist regime fell in Russia, lore had it that they had become decadent, complacent, too corruptly dominated by narrow interests to reform.

With housing, over 20 years we have seen the establishment parties preside over decadent boom, to wretched crash, to aimless inaction.

Only a fool would say that they deserve the continued right to govern.

Sinn Féin didn’t put enough candidates in the field in the last election – as even they failed to gauge the anger and the despondency the issue has wrought.

Yet the size of their candidates’ votes showed that the Irish electorate has decided to rest their search for answers with Sinn Féin.

Mary Lou MacDonald and Sinn Féin will be our disruptors, so it seems.

Look to the countries that most resemble our political culture.

The British electorate overlooked Johnson’s deep flaws out of desperation.

The US electorate overlooked Donald Trump’s deeper flaws for the same reason.

And soon Irish voters will turn to Sinn Féin because they have been repeatedly betrayed by the establishment.

Regimes have fallen, but in France and Russia the cure was worse than the illness. Far worse.

The electorate will overlook Sinn Féin’s dark past, because an association with a terrorist war has no resonance with younger voters.

And older voters clearly don’t care. They want a house for their old age, and to see their children in an affordable home.

And they will overlook all deficiencies to get a Government that will show them the promised land – even if it’s a gamble that might lead them to a new Gomorrah.