The new Irish housing plan has received across-the-board opprobrium from opposition politicians, housing experts and charities, with Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit saying it:

…failed to deliver the radical reset needed to actually solve the housing crisis.

The strategy, entitled Delivering Homes, Building Communities: An Action Plan on Housing Supply and Targeting Homelessness, 2025-2030, promises over 300,000 homes by 2030, which will be supposedly:

Backed by unprecedented investment in water, energy and transport infrastructure, as well as regulatory reform, zoning and tax measures.

Irish housing plan — scrapping yearly targets is a means of hiding failure

There is also a pledge to provide 90,000 starter homes aimed at first-time buyers and 72,000 social homes. There has been the abandonment of yearly targets for construction of new properties, likely in part a result of the failure last year to meet the target of social homes. This spares the government the repeated embarrassment of announcing a shortfall every year, and kicks into the long grass of the distant future any announcement of a potential failure in reaching its target. Conor D. McGuinness TD, who is Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Rural Affairs and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, hammered the approach taken by Minister for Housing James Browne, saying:

A plan with no annual targets is not a plan. It is a political document dressed up as a strategy. Without targets there is no accountability, no way to measure progress and certainly no guarantee of delivery. Rural communities are effectively being told to stop expecting results.

There is no new investment, no new powers, no new thinking and no impetus. Rural housing requires serviced sites, infrastructure, wastewater solutions and planning capacity, but the government has not provided a single additional resource to make any of this possible.

Boyd Barrett also lambasted the sense of déjà vu, saying:

The new plan, the 4th in 15 years, once again is relying primarily on the private sector to deliver much needed housing. The plan has a target of 300,000 homes over 6 years, 50,000 per year, while the central bank last year recommended 68,000 per year. This target is inadequate but, considering the last plan only delivered 38,000 over the last 4 years, it is also unlikely to be met.

He bemoaned the continuing reliance on the private sector to step in and build, despite the repeated failure of this model that depends on non-state investment for half of new houses:

Affordable homes do not have a precise target in the plan and once again by relying on the private sector to deliver many of these homes, they will not be actually affordable for those in need. The plan for social housing is 72,000 over the life of the plan while there are currently 120,000 on housing waiting lists, never mind the fact that there will be tens of thousands of new housing applicants going on these lists during the lifetime of the plan.

Disabled are among those losing out

Others, such as Orla Hegarty, architect and assistant professor at UCD’s School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, continued the theme, decrying the lack of innovative thinking. She at least thought the state was coming to terms with the reality of the issue, comparing the government to the recently bereaved:

[The government are moving] further along the stages of grief from denial and bargaining to depression and perhaps even some acceptance, which is a good thing.

Amazingly, the plans also lacked basic provisions for accessibility. Rosaleen Lally of the Irish Wheelchair Association pointed out that the plan gives more detail to accommodating pets than to supporting people with mobility issues:

It is astonishing that in the 21st century, the basic human right to accessible housing is still an afterthought, while pet provisions are being written into policy.

She continued:

Every new housing development should have a mandatory percentage of fully accessible units, not just an ‘optional extra’.

While the British government announced the long awaited banning of No Fault evictions, there is no such provision in the Delivering Homes, Building Communities blueprint. No Fault evictions are when a landlord can kick a tenant out of their property on a whim, despite no wrongdoing from the tenant. This places large numbers of people at risk of homelessness, at a time when this issue in Ireland has been driven to record levels. The absence of protection on this was criticised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, along with the failure to bolster the Tenant in Situ programme:

There are no proposals to protect tenants from No Fault evictions, no radical expansion of the Tenant in Situ scheme, which was one of the better innovations of the last government.

The Tenant in Situ scheme enables the state to buy homes from a landlord if a planned sale of the property would put the tenant at risk of homelessness.

Far-right likely to continue using housing as a stick to bash migrants

The new Irish housing plan has already been used as a rallying point for a far-right that places pressures on housing as a means to attack immigrants. The Facebook group Tallaght & Citywest Says No More IPAS (IPAS stands for International Protection Accommodation Service) found time to criticise the government’s approach. They describe their mission thus:

With currently up to 4000 asylum seekers in Dublin 24, mostly male, mostly undocumented/criminally Unvetted [sic] and plans for 1000s more. As of now we have asylum seekers living in tents in our park and under bridges. Ireland does not have the capacity to facilitate the 1000s arriving weekly. It’s time we stand together to let the government know how we feel about this…Its now or never.

Ironically, research indicates that migrants could in fact be the key to solving the crisis, by bolstering the understaffed construction sector.

As indicated by a recent announcement by the Garda commissioner and Taoiseach, far-right violence is on the rise. Commissioner Kelly pledged to protect asylum seekers and refugees, saying:

We’ll be particularly relentless around people who target people in positions of authority, people in IPAS (International Protection Accommodation Services) centres, any of that type of activity.

It would be more effective for the government to take preventative measures to stop fuelling the reactionary flames rising across the country, and that starts with effective housing policy. The scrapping of yearly targets effectively amounts to going to sleep for five years with a blaze raging at your door, and hoping that when you wake up everything will miraculously have taken care of itself. As others have pointed out, the plan’s shortcomings suggest that is unlikely to be the case.

Thus, Irish people will continue to be cruelly denied the basic human right of shelter, while migrants will suffer that indignity too, compounded by a likely growing threat from a racist scourge fed by corporate avarice and political incompetence.

Featured image via Breno Assis on Unsplash

By Robert Freeman

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