Halfway through TG4′s 100 Years of Housing: Crisis Without End – 100 Bliain de Thithíocht: Géarchéim Gan Deireadh – (Wednesday, TG4, 9.30pm), I wonder if I’m watching a documentary about housing policy in Ireland or have joined a People Before Profit march by accident.
The film is billed as a “decade-by-decade look at how Irish housing issues have been tackled since the birth of the Irish State”. But it skews unapologetically to the left with key interviewees, including campaigner Rory Hearne and housing activist Peter McVerry, whose trust of the same name is currently seeking a bailout from the State.
Their views are well-articulated and passionately held. However, the documentary cries out for alternative perspectives – though, of course, that would risk undermining its central thesis – that only the State can solve the housing crisis. That is an entirely legitimate viewpoint – but there is by no means a consensus on the subject. Why not let other voices in the room?
The documentary is an unabashed love letter to the State as a provider of housing. It begins in the early years following independence, when the new government embarked on an ambitious programme of construction – or, as ambitious as the ruinous public finances would allow at the time. We are invited to bask in examples of progressive projects, such as at Marino in Dublin and Turner’s Cross in Cork. Here, locals talk about the strong sense of community.
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It’s great that these are wonderful places to live. Yet, the documentary doesn’t seem open to the possibility that other forms of housing might also have a sense of community. The film addresses the 1970s bungalow boom, though with a weird sniffiness. In Donegal, architect Tarla MacGabhann decries the popular Bungalow Bliss design as inappropriate to Ireland (they commit the sin of being “prairie-style” houses). He talks about alternatives that speak to the “vernacular” native style. So bungalows are bad unless they are “vernacular” hipster bungalows?
You also have to wonder about the title. Have the past 100 years of housing in Ireland really been a “crisis without end”? This feeds into the narrative that Ireland is a failed State. It suggests the country has always been a basket cast, with the ominous implication that it is better to rip things up and start over.
The documentary’s biases are laid bare when Rory Hearne arrives and blames the slowdown in public housing construction in the 1980s partly on “neoliberalism”. He goes on to suggest the election of Margaret Thatcher in London impacted on housing policy in Ireland.
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“The idea of neoliberalism,” he says, “was an economic perspective that had really come on board in the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan... Housing was a key area Thatcher attacked. Ireland was heavily influenced by that... We see this narrative of council estates being referred to as ghettos, no-go areas.”
This is all presented as fact. But might it actually simply be Hearne’s opinion? We don’t know – no contrasting perspective is offered.
100 Years of Housing is an important documentary. And it arrives at a timely moment, with house prices in Dublin finally starting to dip and a general election on the horizon. But in arguing that public housing and only public housing can solve the accommodation crisis, it moves beyond documentary-making into advocacy – and should have been flagged as such by TG4.
