The lack of ambition shown towards finally solving Ireland’s housing problem is heart-breaking, but then again, with 90% of Ireland’s wealth tied up in property, the status quo must be working for too many voters for it to change. That’s the only explanation I can think of.
Based on the evidence to date, Darragh O’Brien clearly doesn’t want to do any more than simply tinker around the edges, but the fact is that we need a top-to-bottom rethink of housing in this country, and move away from the market-centric view of what housing should achieve, to a more socially-minded perspective. The primacy of the attitude of housing-as-wealth-creator is failing too many people.
Apart from putting a stop to cuckoo-funds hoovering up swathes of what little available housing stock there is, the Government that fixes this problem will have to adopt a much more interventionist stance by entering the landlord business and building good-quality, municipal housing for rent on a scale unprecedented for Ireland. Renting from private landlords should be a choice, not the only option.
For tenants who do opt to rent privately, this hypothetical Government will also need to implement proper regulation, deposit management and dispute resolution mechanisms to stop scummy landlords and delinquent tenants ruining it for the rest of us as they currently do. The rental market as it is is far too ad-hoc and open to abuse by tenants and landlords alike.
Societal attitudes towards tenants and property ownership in general will have change too. Renting is seen by a lot of Irish people as almost vulgar or delinquent behaviour on the part of people who lack personal responsibility and could buy a house if only they got their act together and saved harder, as illustrated by that ridiculous “avocado toast” article in the Irish Independent a few years ago. The message from the media, Government and home-owning older generations has been that If you can’t get a home, it’s your fault and yours alone. This is despite the fact that the renting generation have lived through 2 recessions and a pandemic in their adult lives, and a huge proportion of homebuyers get financial assistance from their parents (“the bank of Mum and Dad" we keep hearing about) or if they’re really lucky, are gifted a property outright.
“Rent is dead money” is a common belief passed down from parents to their children, even though you could say the same about your bus fare or electricity bill. It also conveniently overlooks the hundreds of thousands of Euro you’ll pay in interest over the full term of a mortgage. That seemingly doesn’t qualify as “dead money.”
Yes, the key difference is that you’ll have an asset by the time you’re 65, but that only matters because in Ireland the only way to guarantee you won’t be homeless after you retire is to buy your home 25–30 years prior.
The Irish homeowner compounds the situation by adopting a “drawbridge” mentality of locking the door behind them as soon as they join the club by objecting to any future developments that would dare touch the value of their beloved property. It betrays a real meanness and lack of civic solidarity in Irish society that is much more widespread than we would like to admit.
The societal expectation of home-ownership is a huge burden for younger people, and the system as it is only caters to couples. If you want to buy a reasonably-sized property as a single on the average industrial wage, forget about it.
This pressure is also bad for wider society on a number of fronts, as majority home-ownership destroys the environment through urban sprawl and the resulting pollution and destruction of ecosystems. Nobody ever seems to mention the opportunity cost of tying up your disposable income into bricks-and-mortar for 25–30 years, or the reduced labour mobility and the financial vulnerability that comes with spending all your money on an illiquid asset that is subject to boom-and-bust valuation cycles, especially in Ireland.
I think in the long run, the problem will largely be resolved, but not in the short-term and not by proactive Government policy. There is a generation gap emerging between the home-owning over-forties and the renting thirtysomethings and under, in terms of their attitude to property, their ability or desire to purchase it, and consequently, their voting choices.
FF/FG are effectively handing Sinn Fein the next election with their prevarications, and I don’t think SF’s magic money tree, utopian economics will solve the housing crisis either, as they are cynically leveraging the situation to score points politically while objecting to developments left, right and centre themselves.
As Ireland’s demographics shift, FF/FG’s wealthy constituents age and their electoral importance declines, they can expect to be in power much less frequently. My one hope is that this void will be filled by a more representative body politic that adopts a civic-minded and egalitarian view of housing, rather than the zero-sum, kill-or-be-killed attitudes we have today.
