Rory Hearne: Troy controversy exposed the gap between Generation Rent and those who govern them
Picture: Minister Junior Leo Behal Martin Robert Julien Supported Varadkar Tánaiste Micheál Troy Despite Taoiseach By Resigned Being And
The Robert Troy controversy starkly shows the gulf of housing inequality between a tiny, but influential group in society who own multiple properties and Generation Locked Out who work, and save, and sacrifice, and still cannot get a home.
It also points to a gulf that has opened up between the beliefs and values toward housing held by Generation Rent who just want a home, and those in Government and older generations who consider it just fine to invest in the ‘property game’, with little consideration for how this impacts on those who have to pay for it.
Anger boiled over as people saw a Government supposed to be solving the housing crisis, implementing policies they materially benefit from, while Generation Rent is hammered by higher rents and homelessness.
This is not just about the actions of one landlord TD flouting rules — in the Oireachtas, close to a fifth of TDs and senators are landlords, yet in the wider population just 3% are landlords. Two former housing ministers, Alan Kelly, and Simon Coveney, were both multiple property owners. The current housing minister invested in a real estate fund in 2008.
We need to realise that Robert Troy’s attitude to housing, not as a home, but as property investment, is not an outlier, it is Government policy.
Added was the Celtic Tiger attitude that the housing system is there to be profited from, if you have the money, the right contacts and a bit of luck. They put in place policies that turned housing into an investment asset.
To make sure landlords, developers, and more recently investor funds, can ‘make an income’, Government provided tax breaks, refused to freeze rents, failed to provide real tenant security, and most importantly, stopped building social housing and turned private rental property (through Ras, Hap, and leasing) into a lucrative investment.
Now we have a fiasco where €1bn a year, a quarter of the entire housing budget, goes to private landlords, including those same TDs.
It is this toxic mix of ideology, political belief combined with an actual personal benefit of policies (TDs directly and those in their social and societal circles, the lobbyists and funders) that is clearly influencing policy and legislative decision making in a disastrous way in housing. This is what sickens the public — policy being made for insiders and the privileged.
The public reaction points to a fundamental change in Irish society.
A cultural revolution has taken place in our attitudes to property, and the Government is completely out of step with the public.
After the Celtic Tiger crash, austerity, and policies resulting in Generation Rent, the Irish public now want housing to be treated as home and a human right. But the Government still doesn’t get it.
In defending Troy, the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, showed their ongoing failure to grasp the scale of social devastation of the housing crisis. Similarly in his resignation letter, instead of acknowledging the generational devastation of the housing crisis, homelessness, and rental poverty, Troy instead criticised the ‘vilification’ of landlords. Such responses are totally out of touch with the humanitarian catastrophe of the housing crisis.
The treatment of housing as property investment, as a financial asset, is why we are in this crisis — fuelling house prices and resulting in an unprecedented generational inequality.
That some people with money can buy up multiple properties — results in others — Generation Rent — being locked out of being able to buy their own home and stuck renting insecurely from private landlords.
That the State fails to build social and affordable housing on a major scale leaves us in a chronic state of housing shortage.
The impact of this controversy on the proposed introduction of tax breaks for landlords in the budget will be interesting to see. Small landlords are exiting, and unfortunately being replaced with corporate landlords — the real estate investor funds (REITs) — backed by Government tax breaks. But rather than propping up a failing private rental sector, policy should replace it with public affordable housing provision.
Fundamentally, we need an unprecedented increase in the building of new social housing, affordable cost rental, and affordable homes for purchase.
Affordable cost rental housing run by local authorities and not for profit housing associations (like Respond and Clúid) can provide rental housing to take the place of falling numbers of private landlords.
In Austria and Denmark, half of all social housing is owned by not-for-profit housing associations — available for all income levels.
Cost-rental on a major scale can provide an affordable secure rental sector for low and middle earners. This is the way forward, not Reits. Also, as landlords sell up, tenants could be kept in their home, by councils buying the property for cost rental housing.
Ultimately, the scandal once more underlines the need for a radical shift in how we treat housing. The Housing Commission is actually looking for submissions from the public on what a referendum on housing should be.
If you are looking for real change in housing, why not make a submission asking for a referendum to insert the right to housing in the Constitution? Ensuring governments have to deliver housing as a human right would make a real difference.
- Rory Hearne is assistant professor/lecturer in social policy at the Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University, and a co-presenter of the Tortoise Shack podcast.