State's vast resources are spread on too many

As I write the news headlines remind me that in Dáil Éireann this Tuesday morning, the Cabinet has its standard weekly meeting with, on its main agenda, housing. Or should that be - housing, housing and housing. Because if there’s anything that’s obvious to even the most obtuse political commentator or the least focused observer of the political scene, it is that unless the Government gets a firm handle on the housing crisis the decision of the people at the next election will be a boot to you-know-where.

The omens to date are not promising. So far into the present dispensation, everything associated with housing seems to be falling asunder: houses are still getting more expensive by the day and even sometimes by the hour; the planning process remains the great impediment to contractors and apparently no one can sort it out; the failure to get blocks built on land that’s technically available for houses; and the furore about appointing a housing tsar, a concept floated back in 2017 by the then housing minister, Eoghan Murphy, whose star suddenly fell to earth. And, more recently, the embarrassing debacle about a social housing initiative that had all the hallmarks of success imprinted on it but that had to be cancelled at the last minute when it emerged that each unit would cost €1,000,000.

Today’s news carries the not very exciting revelation that the present Minister for Housing James Browne will be leading the discussion. Good luck to you, James Browne, and the dogs in the street know you’re going to need it. Easier to solve the Rubik Cube than to outline any convincing solution to the housing crisis.

So what’s the problem? Public officials pressed on this question have a useful, impressively sounding word for it – ‘multifactorial’. It means that the solution is dependent on a number of factors. Or, in common usage, if you muddy the waters by parroting often enough the equivalent of ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’, people will believe that you know what you’re talking about. They don’t and they won’t.

That ship has now sailed as an obvious political truth is now written in the stars. This Government will be judged on whether it sorts out this particular political conundrum before the next general election writes their imminent epitaph – and before Mary Lou on a white horse leads a baying Pearse Doherty and a band of political all-sorts in triumph into Leinster House. 

Political commentators will then surpass each other in explaining how a simple enough challenge (put one block over another and then another and leave space for a door) failed the last FF–FG government even though they had everything it takes to build houses (land, time, opportunity, proposals to sort out planning, etc and, of course, plenty of money). And yet they made a bags of it.

One theory to explain the grand failure of the present FF–FG government is that they were too willing too easily to rush to the rescue of whatever group of people knocked on their door, cap in hand. They knew and we all knew that Paschal Donohoe had squirrelled away for future use ‘a rainy-day fund’ to meet exactly the kind of requirement that every supplicant group decided would spectacularly fit their particular need.

Paschal’s national piggy bank served the people of Ireland well when Covid came. It was a once-off challenge and the need was obvious. But it started a ruse that presented itself as a defensible policy - if in doubt ask Paschal for money. Or better still ask someone with less of a proprietorial approach to the political Lotto to ask Paschal - because the evidence was that Paschal was not entirely happy that his carefully worked out conditions for an effective form of national insurance deserved being treated as another version of the Lotto.

My own take on this relatively new Irish phenomenon of pervasive dependency on the state is that the recent and present success of the Irish economy - that has settled us effortlessly in any listing of the top ten most prosperous countries in the world - indicates that we have failed to sort out the outstanding problems facing the few by trying to spread our extra resources on the many.

It's why social housing has been more or less discontinued in recent years in Ireland. It’s why education has received huge investment particularly at second and third level but, to our shame in this wealthy country, children with autism are sometimes left without a school to go to. It’s why poverty, in its many and varied forms, is still endemic. Because we spread our resources around on the many, the few who need special attention are neglected. It’s an Irish version of what Pope Francis called "the developed world’s addiction to consumption while disproportionally affecting the world’s poor".

Have you noticed how shopping has become the new religion? As the old religion contracts, the new religion is expanding by the day. People are buying, buying and buying. Much of it, as we all know, is unnecessary and is often unused. Our garbage bins increase exponentially as household waste multiplies. Our homes and our wardrobes are too small and, as a result, charity shops abound.

Frugality is now a bad word. “Making-ends-meet’ is an historical term from somewhere beyond Famine times. The word ‘temperance’ - describing a lifestyle erased from memory by ever-increasing levels of disposable income - is no longer in current usage.

It’s Christmas every day as homes bulge with unwanted and unused toys.

Despite the constant refrain of ‘the cost of living’ to explain every possible price-hike with full employment and the almost universal presumption that the good times are here to stay, people are spending, spending, spending.

No one, or at most a few, save anymore. No more looking forward to things. We want everything now. Including a house for everyone, rich or poor. It can’t be done, of course James Browne knows that. I think Micheál Martin does too. I suspect Mary Lou does as well, but she’s not letting on.