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I am not sure Ireland has a housing crisis. The problem is a century old

We have had 100 years of policy retrenchment, deregulation and bad ideas, with nothing breaking the cycle

We have now seen a century of the same issues, criticisms, rebuttals, policy retrenchment, standards deregulation, regulatory capture and bad ideas. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire
We have now seen a century of the same issues, criticisms, rebuttals, policy retrenchment, standards deregulation, regulatory capture and bad ideas. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire
Lorcan Sirr
Mon Nov 04 2024 - 06:00

Councillors regularly complain about the arduous back-and-forth local authorities have to go through with the Department of Housing in its “four stage process” for any social housing proposals of more than €6 million, or about 15 new houses. It delays housing for years, frustrating politicians and council workers alike, they say.

In the Dáil, a Labour TD is on record protesting that: “Those of us who have been members of local authorities and who have been held up over 12 months trying to get sanctions for housing projects know that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, as far as the Custom House is concerned.”

A Fine Gael fellow TD claimed that the minster was holding up house-building. “Every proposal sent to the department was returned with a request to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and that sort of thing would continue for from six to eight months.”

Those quotes are from 1963 and 1965, respectively.

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In 1923, just after the foundation of the State, the Irish Builder magazine was complaining that “the standard of building being enforced is too high”. In 1978 the Construction Industry Federation was arguing that mandatory insulation in new homes was “entirely unrealistic and bureaucratic”. (Countries with the highest winter mortality, including Ireland, were also those with the poorest building standards.)

In 1982 The Irish Times reported that a civil servant told the Stardust tribunal the building industry had lobbied against a system of building inspection. The department accepted the industry’s arguments and introduced self-certification in 1992. Thirty years later, we are paying €5 billion on remediating construction defects, while spending just €15 million a year on ensuring new buildings meet basic regulations.

[ Ireland’s housing crisis is not unique: some of its proposed responses are ]

In the 1930s, Dublin Corporation (now City Council) built high-density flats to house council tenants, but found they were expensive to build, unpopular with tenants and challenging to manage. And now councils in our main cities are doing the same thing in 2024, presumably under the impression that they will be cheaper to build, easier to manage and hugely popular with tenants.

Yet another construction labour shortage arose in the 1960s. Politicians were asking where we were going to find the workers to build houses. Fine Gael’s Thomas O’Donnell suggested that: “This decline [in house-building] is the logical result of deliberate Government policy ... which has diverted the resources of the building industry from the provision of houses for the workers to the erection of luxury hotels, palatial public buildings and so on.” In 2024 we could swap “palatial public buildings” for data centres and office blocks.

When it comes to the hoarding of land, the politicians are on it. One of the biggest challenges “with regard to the provision of housing is the speculation in land that is allowed to continue” with the land speculators being “vindicated by the minster”. That was in 1965. In 2024 there are more than 70,000 unused planning permissions for new houses and apartments, many permissions being opportunistic attempts to speculate in the value of the land, and a Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, who is opposed to a public register of land price transactions.

Is a Ryanair-style model the answer to Ireland’s housing crisis?

Listen | 39:15

This week’s episode looks at the housing crisis from a new angle.Imagine if Michael O’Leary decided to set up a development company to build housing and applied some of the lessons from Ryanair’s experience in disrupting the air travel business.

Again in 1965, Fine Gael’s Anthony Esmonde raised the issue of “salaried people living in lodgings”, as there was no new housing for them, so then they emigrated. We could substitute “lodgings” in 1965 for private rented accommodation in 2024. Last year less than 30 per cent of all new housing became available for sale, the percentage of households renting is the same as the mid-1960s, and nearly 70,000 people left Ireland in the year to April 2024, half of whom were Irish citizens.

The concept of modern methods of construction is currently being promoted to increase housing supply and reduce the costs of building. But the “modern” in MMC is a misnomer: we have been discussing modern methods of construction since the 1960s. MMC was most notably used by in the building of houses and flats at Ballymun and Rahoon. It is a laudable aspiration that finds it difficult to get traction in a building industry that is slow to change.

In the 1970s, luxury living in apartments was promoted for “a whole new class of people” as property developers sought to maximise profits through increased density. In 2015, higher density became the modern planning mantra, and standards for apartment development were diluted to cater for a newly emerging “mobile international workforce”, and property developers.

[ Off-the-grid estates are the new casualty of our housing crisis ]

And again in the 1970s, there were arguments about the government’s counting of new houses. The minister, Fianna Fáil’s Neil Blaney, was counting a house as complete when its grant was paid, long after it had been finished, meaning he was claiming as a success houses that had been commenced under the previous government. In 2018 our current method of counting houses was again found to be inaccurately inflating completion figures, and has only recently been refined.

The consolidation of power within the Custom House is an issue raised by politicians from 1928 to 2024′s Planning and Development Act. This legislation, which has been criticised as “developer-led”, centralises and increases ministerial power significantly. Parts of this legislation have already been deemed non-compliant with international law by the UN committee responsible for overseeing the Aarhus Convention on access to information, public participation and access to justice, including provision for public participation. Cue more judicial challenges and political indignation about delays.

Research by Dr Paul Umfreville has compared responses to housing crises of the last century and this one, finding that politicians of the last century were very attuned to the mood of the public. In recent decades, politicians have been far more attentive to the needs of industry, due mostly to the State’s increased reliance on the private sector to do what it used to do itself.

It may surprise readers who are paying high rent, or struggling to buy a home, or watching their children emigrate that I am not sure Ireland has a housing crisis. We have now seen a century of the same issues, criticisms, rebuttals, policy retrenchment, standards deregulation, regulatory capture, bad ideas copied from other countries cropping up again and again, with nothing breaking the cycle. Rinse, repeat, and do it all over again. If there is a housing crisis, it is of our own making. Given its longevity, it should perhaps be called a permacrisis.

Dr Lorcan Sirr is a senior lecturer in housing at the Technological University Dublin