“This is very dangerous,” Eoin Ó Broin warned reporters gathered at a briefing about Sinn Féin’s new affordable homes strategy in Dublin on Thursday. But he wasn’t suddenly subscribing to the Government argument that his party is a threat to the national interest. “You’ve given me a PowerPoint presentation, a captive audience and you’ve asked me to talk about housing. I could go on forever.”
The Sinn Féin housing spokesman was under strict orders from party leader Mary Lou McDonald to keep his presentation to 10 minutes. In the end, it was a little over 12, but the importance of housing to the Sinn Féin political project is much more vital than could be captured in a few slides. And it is very finely balanced.
Four years ago, Sinn Féin recorded an outstanding general election result that owed much to its laser-focused critique of Government housing policy. For the first half of the Coalition’s lifespan, it rode this wave. But, while polling suggests voters remain deeply concerned about the housing crisis, the link between these concerns and the party’s popularity has been interrupted – perhaps severed.
Sinn Féin's reset, Fine Gael's exodus
“Just remember, we have never stopped talking about housing,” said McDonald on Thursday. She’s right, too: Sinn Féin has consistently tried to put the focus on housing, especially as the public and media attention has drifted towards immigration – a topic that appears to have split the party’s voter coalition and with which it is manifestly uneasy. As part of a strategic reset following underwhelming local and European election results, Sinn Féin was out last week with its new immigration policy. Housing, however, is where it wants the focus to be.
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Thursday’s launch is just one section from a wider policy the party is promising at the beginning of September. The document contains one big-bang idea – the eye-catching suggestion that 50,000 affordable homes can be made available for rent or purchase through the widespread purchase or provision of land by the State through a public housing fund.
This would cost some €13.2 billion over five years, with €6.9 billion coming from the exchequer. For eligible home purchasers, this would make the most expensive affordable home about €300,000, and for renters, it would cost no more than €1,000, with income limits for both classes. That €300,000 figure – first mooted by McDonald in an interview with The Irish Times last year – is rapidly attaining a political significance beyond the policy itself, with the Government insisting it lacks credibility (Fine Gael has a ticker on its website counting the days since Sinn Féin “tried to fool the public” with the claim). For Sinn Féin, meanwhile, it encapsulates the party’s core message – that voters are locked out of home ownership through conscious and deliberate Government policy and that there is an alternative.
“It’s a different way to try to solve the issue of increasing home ownership,” says Dermot O’Leary of Goodbody Stockbrokers and a member of the Housing Commission. “Essentially it’s a subsidy to increase home ownership whereas the current Government policy is to increase home ownership through a shared equity scheme. In this policy, the equity is effectively the land.” He warned, however: “It would be difficult to see how it would work out in terms of mortgage finance. In their proposal the security of the land would still be owned by the State – that’s complicated from a mortgage lending perspective.”
The rub is that the State would continue to own the land under the affordable home, and there would be conditions attached to the onward sale or rent – specifically, it could only be sold to another affordable scheme buyer, rather than on the fully open market, or rented as social housing as opposed to through a private tenancy. It’s certainly novel, at least in an Irish context. Whether it would mix well with atavistic Irish instincts about land ownership, or whether people would simply be happy to live in an affordable home remains to be seen. But expect this debate to feature prominently in the weeks and months ahead.
Certainly, the Government parties grabbed at it with both hands. Fine Gael released a breathless statement claiming “homeownership to be banned under Sinn Féin plans”. Fianna Fáil issued a statement from Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien saying the document is “really very weak” and contained “absolutely no detail” compounded by a “complete failure to answer even basic questions” on a scheme that was “exclusionary” and “built on foundations of sand”.
Ó Broin believes there is enough time to convince floating voters and those who didn’t vote in the local elections. “When people see the detail of our plan, when they get to talk to us on the doors, we can regain that ground and convince people that if they really want change in housing, there is only one alternative.” For Sinn Féin, a generational chance for its political project likely rests on this being proved correct.
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