On housing, this Coalition is out of touch, out of ideas, and will be out of office

IN MY airy, high-ceilinged Leinster House office I am mercifully alone. So I listen to Spotify, on a speaker. If you don’t know Spotify, the music app, let me tell you that it selects ‘daily mixes’ based on your listening patterns. I recently looked at my supposedly hippest playlists. They include Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dog and Notorious BIG. In a shocking moment of clarity, I realised that most of these songs are 20, if not 30 years old.

When it comes to music I’ve always been out of touch with the now. I went to a Frank Sinatra concert alone when I was 17 – as none of my friends would come.

However, when a Government falls behind, even slightly, in assessing tastes, desires and needs it can be grievously injurious for the population they rule.

As I sat down to write this piece, a song came up, randomly, called Rock And Roll (I Gave You All The Best Years of My Life). A reflective number by an old troubadour who is always out of touch, Kevin Johnson sings:

‘But you were changing your direction and I never even knew / That I was always just one step behind you.’

It was another moment of clarity (proving the benefit of a solo office).

As you look for complex reasons for why a seemingly glaringly obvious solution to a crisis can’t be grasped by a Government the most simple answer is the best.

This Government cannot solve the housing crisis because it is hopelessly and irredeemably out of touch with voters.

The electorate’s hopes, needs and dreams are alien to this Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil/Green Coalition.

The established parties are bloated, complacent, morally anchorless monoliths now.

And that is not a comment on individuals. Because morally bankrupt human institutions move past redemption precisely because they are so ideologically bankrupt that they can’t save themselves.

SO CHANGING planning regulations, or increasing stamp duty on bulk housing purchases and or any other tinkering around the margins will do nothing to reverse the housing catastrophe in Ireland. This is not a policy issue, it’s a national emergency.

The Government and the public will have to stand by and watch this continue a slow, inexorable decline until there is either civil unrest or a Sinn Féin Government.

Over a year ago a health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, struck. Two successive administrations decided to confront it as an emergency. Peacetime civil liberties were curtailed on an unprecedented level.

The public were treated as kindly as the banks were a decade before and bailed out to the tune of billions. So there is proof, in the last year, that if the State sets it course on destination it can be reached.

That this has not been done with housing can lead you to two conclusions: this Government doesn’t think it is a real crisis or it doesn’t care.

This means it is out of touch with the public. And this will lead to political oblivion.

Fine Gael is still riding relatively high in the polls, vying with Sinn Féin for first place. Yet one feels there is a reckoning ahead for Fine Gael, as there is always contagion in a coalition.

Fianna Fáil’s decline has been more obvious and inexorable. The party revived itself somewhat from its 2011 collapse, thanks principally to a return of its traditional supporters.

But it did not ever, nor will it ever, shed itself of responsibility for the property and financial crashes that led us to this housing scandal.

Fianna Fáil will argue that an international economic recession made our financial crash inevitable. It is not a view I share.

Nevertheless, having recovered from Brian Cowen’s leadership, Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil meandered complacently into a series of political mistakes. It allowed what should have been a temporary parliamentary accommodation, confidence and supply, go on for far longer than it should.

CONSEQUENTLY, Fianna Fáil then shared responsibility for Fine Gael’s housing failures. By supporting Fine Gael in the Dáil, and then voting confidence in beleaguered housing minister Eoghan Murphy they inextricably connected Fine Gael’s disgraceful performance on housing with Fianna Fáil.

Martin suffered for this in the 2020 general election. Fianna Fáil, again complacent and misguided, expected gains. It lost seats.

Martin, weakened and isolated, entered coalition with Fine Gael.

Then he appointed a Fianna Fáil Cabinet complement in which the ministers had one shared characteristic – they posed no political threat to him at all.

Talent, proactivity, skill or polish played no role. Fianna Fáil’s Darragh O’Brien took housing, where he has proved himself deeply ineffective.

The battleplan for this Government was consumed with Covid-19, which is reaching its natural end as a crisis. Where was the big idea on housing that the gravity of the problem demanded?

It is almost as if the Government intentionally created a collection of ineffective but showy housing projects so they could spend their time arguing with the opposition and the media about the irrelevant minutiae.

The path of obvious solution, ‘build the houses’, seemed too simplistic.

It can still be done. The world is borrowing to build capital projects.

European Central Bank interest rates have remained at rock bottom since the last financial crash.

Until recently the Government cited European rules for not borrowing to build houses.

But the EU suspended the ‘3% of budget deficit’ rule last year in response to the pandemic, permitting member states to take advantage of current extremely low interest rates.

These rules are expected to remain suspended in 2022. The ECB has added a special pandemic programme to support Governments in the borrowing markets.

The International Monetary Fund expects the cost of servicing Government debt will stay well below the growth rate it expects Ireland to achieve.

The organisation Housing Europe describes this as a ‘unique opportunity’ for EU member states to borrow to build social housing.

Conservative bodies like IBEC and the ESRI back State borrowing for capital projects.

This needs the co-operation of the Taoiseach, the Minister for Housing and the Minister for Finance, and the political will of the Government as a whole.

Many of the backbench TDs understand the problem intimately, as housing is going to cost them their seats.

But the leaderships of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are, like Kevin Johnson, one step behind.