Yes, Minister! You used to think your words were spin
Darragh O’Brien likes to plead for more time to f ix housing crisis – very similar pleas to the ones he decried in 2018
THE Housing Minister has come under attack this week for an apparent U-turn on Government rhetoric about the housing crisis.
Minister Darragh O’Brien said this week there was ‘no silver bullet’ to tackle the housing crisis. But just four years ago, when he was the opposition spokesman on housing, Mr O’Brien sharply criticised the then-Taoiseach for using the same argument.
Then housing spokesman Mr O’Brien told the Irish Mail on Sunday in September 2018,
‘It shows the obsession with PR and media’
that then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was using ‘weasel words’ when he said there was ‘no quick fix’ to the housing problem.
North Dublin TD Mr O’Brien, who has ambitions to lead his party, accused the government in 2018 of being deliberately misleading in its housing policies at the time.
‘It is weasel words because what it effectively is, is representing the same argument for five years and trying to hoodwink people and not being honest and open with the situation,’ he said, after an RTÉ radio interview in which Mr Varadkar said there was ‘no quick fix’ to the housing crisis.
Mr O’Brien went on to criticise the government’s Rebuilding Ireland initiative, which was referred to as ‘not a quick fix’ by thenHousing Minister Damien English in a 2018 statement.
Mr O’Brien told the MoS at the tiem: ‘The problem is, they keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. All they’re doing is repackaging and representing and it shows the absolute obsession with PR and media.’
Despite having criticised previous governments for using such rhetoric, this week Minister O’Brien’s office remained tightlipped about the apparent aboutturn on the line of defence. His office did not reply to a request for comment.
The minister made his ‘no silver bullet’ remark during the launch of the second quarterly progress report on the Housing For All strategy on Wednesday.
He said the Government is on course to meet housing supply targets: ‘In the 18 months since taking office, if you’ll excuse the pun, we have laid the foundations for a sustainable housing system.’
Speaking about how senior politicians keep parroting the same phrase, Social Democrats housing spokesman Cian O’Callaghan told the MoS: ‘Housing minister after housing minister keeps saying there’s no quick fix and that houses can’t be built overnight. They keep on repeating this and we’ve been hearing it for the guts of a decade now.
‘Everybody understands that houses cannot be built overnight, but they do need to be built. It’s two years now since the general election and it’s really not acceptable that the Government just keeps saying “There’s no silver bullets; we can’t do this overnight; we’re promising that there will be housing delivered in the future”. The time for excuses like that is up. People need to see delivery and not see any more of these excuses.’
Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin criticised Wednesday’s briefing saying he did not see ‘anything in today’s very, very long and wordy report that indicates any progress’.
And Labour’s housing spokeswoman Senator Rebecca Moynihan said it reflected an obsession with PR and media. ‘If we go through some of the things… marked as complete, what they’ve done is they’ve made a start on it but they haven’t completed the full implementation of what the goal in Housing For All is. And that for me screams this is spin over substance.
‘Nobody expects the housing crisis to be solved overnight. But what we do expect is a little bit of honesty from ministers when they’re doing progress reports. When you actually drill down into the details of some of the things that they have said are complete, they’re actually not, or certainly haven’t been completed for people on the ground.
‘The review of eligibility for social housing, for example. They say the housing agency conducted the review and the Department of Housing is considering it, but they haven’t actually completed that. The review hasn’t been adopted. There’s loads of reports sitting on ministers’ desks that haven’t been implemented and adopted. So it’s a bit of a cheek for him to turn around and say this has been completed.’
The ‘no quick fix’ line about housing has been used by successive governments since at least 2014.
In December of that year, following the death of homeless manJonathan Corrie just metres from the Dáil, Defence Minister Simon Coveney – later Housing Minister – said there were ‘no simple, quickfix solutions’.
And ahead of the 2016 general election, in an interview with Hot Press magazine, Eoghan Murphy, who would soon became Minister for Housing, said the problem couldn’t be solved ‘overnight’.
In September 2017, then-Taoiseach Varadkar said there was ‘no quick fix’ to the housing crisis, repeating the phrase a year later.
And last September at the launch of the Housing for All plan, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said: ‘There is no easy or immediate fix.’
‘We’ve been hearing it for the guts of a decade’