Upom the return of the Dáil in February, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that certain aspects of the Irish political sphere practice “absolute fundamentalism” on housing issues.
This week, the new government has found itself under fire once again but not over the issue of speaking time for half-in, half-out independents or a sluggish response to Storm Éowyn – their old nemesis, the housing crisis, has raised its head again.
Despite astroturfing campaigns on social media, immigration wasn’t the biggest issue of November’s general election nor was it Gaza – it was housing.
An exit poll conducted by the Irish Times, RTÉ, TG4 and Trinity College found that housing was the main issue on 28% of voters’ minds, far and away the biggest issue (the cost of living crisis was on 19% and health was on 17%).
The new government has heard those concerns and is absolutely dead set on creating the same set of conditions which nearly handed Sinn Féin victory in 2020.
The Housing Commission has recommended that the government abolish rent pressure zones, introduce a system of “reference rents” where landlords would be allowed to charge in relation to property size and location and encourage more private elements to take part in the housing market.
Suddenly, Martin’s not-so-subtle digs at Sinn Féin, Labour and the Social Democrats for practising “absolute fundamentalism” make sense; the new government believes ideology in the housing sphere is perfectly fine when they do it but bad when the opposition does it.
Speaking to reporters in Paris last week, Martin stated “you need both” when asked about state and private participation in the housing process.
“You need state and private sector investment and the opposition are not coming up with concrete proposals at all.”
“They’re saying no to this, no to that, but they’re not actually coming up with viable, concrete proposals, in my view. And we certainly don’t need a state construction agency. I don’t support that proposal.”
Labour and the Social Democrats both negotiated with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in December with a view to forming a new government; in Labour’s case, their demand of creating a state housing agency was flatly rejected (one of Labour’s clear demands for going into government) and the Social Democrats walked from talks once it became clear that their demand of 50,000 state-built homes a year were not going to be met.
In 2020, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael similarly rejected demands from the Greens to hold a referendum on the constitutional right to home ownership over the lifetime of that government.
Prior to the 2020 election, it could have been argued that Fianna Fáil slightly favoured more state intervention in housing matters while Fine Gael were staunch acolytes for letting the free market do its thing.
The latter approach was the philosophy of former Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy, whose policy of co-living and employing more of a classical supply-side approach made housing the biggest issue of the 2020 general election.
Murphy became the fall guy for Fine Gael losing over 15 seats across the country as his party teamed up with their century-old rivals Fianna Fáil as a resurgent Sinn Féin suddenly found themselves winning the popular vote after an election dominated by housing issues.
The election made household names out of Sinn Féin’s Eoin O’Broin (who, when asked about the Taoiseach’s new housing proposals, said “renters should not have to foot the bill for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s failures in housing”) and future Social Democrats TD and housing spokesperson Rory Hearne (who said the government has created “a generation of renters”.)
In his 2024 book Running From Office, Murphy claimed that he wanted to enact relatively progressive ideas such as expanded renters’ rights, turning NAMA into a developer and setting legally binding targets that the government must build a certain amount of homes each year.
In the book, he claimed that more senior members of Fine Gael at the time put the kibosh on his plans, citing the party’s need to display fiscal conservatism.
The media discourse which surrounded the book painted Murphy as the starry-eyed idealist who watched too many episodes of The West Wing, thinking that the magic of electoral politics alone was able to solve the pressing issues of a nation.
Murphy defends his tenure as Minister for Housing in the book, effectively saying it wasn’t his idea to make the housing market so reliant on the free market, it was Fine Gael’s, or in other words, “an older boy told me to do it.”
Strangely, Fine Gael are running away from their ideological north star, Margaret Thatcher.
It has been well documented that Thatcher made it her mission to turn Britain into a “property-owning democracy” and a 2014 article from The Guardian noted that under her tenure the number of British people who owned a home went from just under 10 million to around 13 million.
There were 3,808 people in homeless accommodation on Census night in April 2011, mere weeks after Fine Gael took office; figures for December 2024 saw that figure stand at 15,199 and that was a decline from the previous round of figures.
Fianna Fáil, the other half of the equation, were winning general elections with over 40% of the national vote simply because they were building houses like it was going out of style.
Speaking in Trinity in Dublin, former Taoiseach (and if the rumours are to be believed, presidential candidate) Bertie Ahern remarked “if I had my way again, we would have probably got the 90,000 houses built somewhere down to about 50,000.”
“If we did that, we would’ve stabilised it at 50,000. But what happened was, the year before I left government it was 87,000 houses and about two years later we built 8,000 homes.”
Ahern stating that his government built too many homes is strange in this current climate where the lack of housing is the main issue.
He inferred that the government building as many houses as it did pre-2008 set expectations too high for the average Irish voter.
The second-longest serving Taoiseach’s in the country’s history stating that he would go back and build fewer houses is odd; Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s combined share of the vote in November 2024 was 42.7%, while in May 2007 it stood at 68.9%.
Much has been said about the decline of the traditional Fianna Fail-Fine Gael monopoly on votes and why Sinn Féin has emerged as a viable contender for the crown and the solution is simple.
Reams of academic papers and mountains of column inches have been dedicated to exploring the decline of the traditional duopoly.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s housing, stupid.
Reports of people sleeping in cars so they can simply take part in a house viewing isn’t a sign of a healthy home ownership market; in any other country, you would call it a sign of a broken system.