Alison O'Connor: Time is running out for this Government on housing crisis

Time is running out, or rather has run out, for Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party on this issue.

Far too many citizens are without a place to call their own. Virtually no one believes the Coalition parties are capable of solving this huge problem.

The latest move — a temporary eviction ban — moves the deck chairs around a little more. Isn’t it all too reminiscent of those emergency health initiatives, a dime a dozen each winter?

Is there anything to be said for another winter task force, you might ask? How long before we send our homeless abroad to be housed, along with those getting medical treatment?

Why stop at the opening of a hospital in Spain to treat those waiting years here for procedures? Just swoop in and buy a brace of villas down south. Sounds absolutely mad, I know, but hey.

Everyone knows this eviction ban, which will help vulnerable people over the next few months, will, in the longer term be about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike, if real changes are not made in the interim.

What we are left with — along with the despair of people trying to afford enormous rents and those who have almost zero chance of ever owning their own homes — is hollow squabbling over who is to blame.

It’s not just like two bald men squabbling over a comb, but a whole host of them tussling, as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil start in on each other over who is responsible for the housing mess.

All the motions were gone through when the “new vision” Housing for All policy was launched in September 2021. But even then, it did not really feel worth the paper on which it was written.

Radical action is required here. But nothing close to that has been offered by the establishment parties. We’re mired in levies on concrete blocks, foreign funds buying entire apartment blocks, planning issues, and state and semi state bodies refusing point blank to identify and transfer sites to the Land Development Agency for use.

So even government departments themselves failed significantly, when asked, to identify and place on the market land or property suitable for residential development. That is so damning in terms of a lack of drive behind solving this crisis.

Now the two bigger government parties are turning on each other —a sure sign their policies are failing badly. Not only that, but the Tánaiste even attempted to drag in the Labour Party to take a share of the blame this week. A party that has not been in power since 2016. Even then, it was as the significantly smaller party in the coalition with Fine Gael. There is such a stench of desperation about it all.

We’re told Fine Gael is getting ready to overhaul the approach to housing when Leo Varadkar gets back into the Taoiseach’s chair in December.

I could bore you with the details of what they intend to do, but as a kindness will desist.

It’s nothing you haven’t heard versions of previously.

You could head to the bookies right now to see what the odds are on all of this being just as impotent as what went before.

Fianna Fáil is sore listening to this talk. Party backbenchers feel they had to pick up the pieces from the FG approach of ‘the market will fix it’ when their own Darragh O’Brien went into the Housing department in June 2020.

In response to this notion of a “new” FG approach, FF Kildare North TD James Lawless tweeted a sarcastic response. “If only there was some kind of table where they could sit around and pitch in ideas? Or if they were in charge of the housing brief for say, 10 of the last 12 years?! Housing for All is working, but it’s hard to go 0-100 since 2020.”

Some valid points in the former part of the tweet, but more latterly it lacks credible evidence. At any rate, which bit of public squabbling between the two parties makes for a good idea in trying to convince anyone that the plan is working? It clearly indicates government parties are panicking and looking to shift the blame.

As things stand, there is a grand delusion going on in Government Buildings or, looked at another way, they are attempting to perpetuate one.

We are long past hoping for improvements as a result of a particular agency here, a tax break there, intentions to give local authorities a kick up the arse to get them moving, or yet more statements of intent.

The dismal performances of the two parties in opinion polls show the repeated insistence that it’s actually all going to be dandy and isn’t worth a bucket of cow poo to a very large number of voters. The notion it will all actually add up to something they will be able to hail as a success at the next general election now borders on the deranged.

Fairness dictates that Covid and the war in Ukraine are mentioned. Not one, but two extraordinary things with which the Government has had to cope.

Both have sucked so many of our resources unexpectedly. Indeed, on both, the Government is to be lauded. Although it does remain to be seen how it performs through the cost of living and energy crisis this winter.

But as the reaction to the recent €11bn bonanza budget showed it is housing and its related failures that trump all. It does feel it is too late for the Government to turn things around now; that the sense of failure is set in some sort of political stone.

It’s the notion they held their fire on what really needed to be done, for their own party-political reasons, for too long. All the while Sinn Féin has been gaining in stature on the back of this issue. It has delivered to that party the full riding-high-in-the-polls experience.

For all its mettle though, it must too be unnerving to think if Sinn Féin ends up in government soon there is an expectation the housing crisis will be solved almost immediately. Achieving a United Ireland might seem the less tough task.

Last month, at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis Micheál Martin said, unusually, ahead of the Cabinet reshuffle in December, that Darragh O’Brien would definitely be remaining in the Housing brief.

The speculation so far has surrounded which department Mr Martin would choose — Foreign Affairs or Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

Yet we have a housing emergency, a real, live, worsening one, something that virtually eclipses everything else. Why wouldn’t he signal he really means business by opting to become housing minister himself?

Wouldn’t that be risky? You bet it would. But grand and brave gestures are all that is left to them now for any hope of shifting the dial. Otherwise, they just hang on in there until the inevitable end.