This article by Eoin Ó Murchú first appeared in Unity, the weekly publication of the Irish Communist Party.
The bald admission by the Department of Finance in Dublin last week that there is no prospect that the government will resolve the housing crisis for at least fifteen years – yes, fifteen years – exposes not just the failure of current policy, but also the callous indifference of those in charge.
In a report entitled Future Forty: A Fiscal and Economic Outlook to 2065, the government argues that demographic growth, construction bottlenecks and pent up demand (in other words the failure to build sufficient housing units to date) mean that housing demand over supply will not be eliminated until 2040 at the earliest.
Even so, the department’s figures are wildly optimistic! It assumes that supply will reach 60,000 a year by 2030, and sustain that level from that time, a huge increase on the 30,300 actually delivered last year.
Nowhere does the department refer to the inability of the private sector to provide the housing needed. This, of course, is not just an act of will, but a fact that the private sector takes decisions for the sake of profit.
It is therefore interested in keeping prices high and providing sufficient for the top end of that market, while only providing the minimum necessary by way of social housing to fend off political challenge.
So, the department estimates that only 25% of the housing units to be built will be social housing.
This report blandly accepts that, so long as current policies are maintain, the mass of young people will be squeezed by high rents, the inability to get mortgages, and a constrained standard of living.
This generation will certainly be worse off than the one before it, and many will have to look forward to an old age of insecurity and extreme poverty when on retirement they will be forced to pay market rates for accommodation.
The government response? The minister James Browne just asserted that he would get the job done, without explaining how or refuting any of the projections issued by the department.
“I am going to end the housing crisis in my term and I believe that can be done,” he told reporters.
North and South the same rules apply; private profit must come before social need. Theoretically in the North the parties of the Executive could come together to demand adequate financing from Westminster, but in practice have not done so.
Sadly, there is little pressure on them to do so, with political challenges confined to the battle lines of sectarian divisions.
The South, however, has no such constraints. The government has taken a deliberate decision not to build housing directly by the state to meet social need. And it has been buttressed in that by the EU rules which insist that the governments of member states must pursue a market economy – in housing as well as in everything else.
Workers must confront the fact that housing supply cannot be resolved within the market economy: facts on the ground prove that. Housing is not a market, but a social need, and one in which both administrations are failing.
In the South there is the possibility of a unity of the Left being able to provide a completely different government to that which currently rules, but a Left Unity government will itself not be able to solve the housing problem unless it rejects market control, no matter what rules the EU asserts.
In the North, we need the Executive to set aside sectarian differences and combine to fight for a new comprehensive housing policy.
Workers need to get involved to demand this change.
Let our voice be heard.