Hello. Welcome to Irish Passport.
Let’s do it.
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
I’m Tim McInerney.
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú Naomi?
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording 1, 2, 3.
OK.
Welcome back to the Irish Passport podcast.
Naomi, you don’t have any spare decapitated pigeon heads in your pocket, do you?
Tim, don’t! Listeners, there was this awful video which was during the rounds on social media last week. So, this maniac of an English tourist, well, first of all, his whole group like it through abuse at these girls that were protesting and then one of them casually took a pigeon’s head out of his pocket and threw it at them.
Yeah, they did. I mean, like they had an actual pigeon’s head. I think they were on a stag tour or something.
I don’t know. They were dressed up be like the UKIP colours, like purple trousers and all this stuff.
You have to kind of see the video to believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Well. I mean just checking if anyone else is carrying around pigeons’ heads in their pockets.
Tim, like what is he doing. Like in his pockets. Like who just think about the sequence of events that could have led up to that. Like what? Because I kind of assumed he must have seen it on the ground and like put it in his pocket.
Yes.
But then someone mentioned that he could have actually decapitated the pigeon himself.
Well, yes, this is the question, you know, which one was it or was it either and you know, is one better than the other? I’m not even sure. Anyway, anyway, anyway, the reason I mentioned that, aside from the fact that that’s a pretty strange story from this year, is that the protest in that video was a demonstration for affordable housing which brought Dublin City to a standstill not so long ago.
Yeah, it was by an activist group called Take Back the City and we’ll be hearing from them later, because they’re fighting back against a massive housing crisis which has gripped Ireland in the last few years and which we’ll be talking about in this episode.
Protestors chanting
People are in overcrowded condition. People are homeless, people are couch- surfing. We have people that are in their early, late 20s, early 30s, late 30s, that can’t afford to move out– 40s, 50s — that can’t afford out of their ma and da’s house.
I was in that house for three years and then the landlord ended up, the bank said that if they’d be possessing the to property, they ended up taking the property back off of us, which left us homeless. I’ve got a lot of family. They’re struggling to themselves; you know what I mean? They’re living in caravans out back gardens, living in caravans parked in driveways. And, do you know what I mean, and meanwhile there’s a whole lot of houses boarded up all over and no one to give them out to anybody. I’m just so frustrated at the fact that they think that this is okay. They think that this is fine. They think the people should live like this. What gives them the right to say to people should live like this?
I live downstairs. The kitchen is just on my right-hand side. There’s a fridge down here. The window that I have covered is too cold, so I put the sellotapes on to get rid of this cold. And just in front of my bed is a bathroom.
My son, he should be starting big school. And the only reason he’s not starting big school is because I don’t know where I’m gonna be in a few months. So that’s why I have to keep him in creche an extra year. The hardest thing of being a single dad in a homeless connotation, from my point of view is, is stability. Not knowing where you’re going to be in three months’ time or not knowing where you’re going to be in six months’ time. It’s the not knowing is the hardest thing. Getting a house would be like Christmas.
You get up in the morning at six o’clock. Drop the kids to school. It takes us two hours to get there some mornings. It’s supposed to be temporary accommodation. We were promised we wouldn’t be here for long, but we’re still here 14 months later.
There’s enough land, already zoned, residential to build 114,000 public homes.
It is outrageous and indeed obscene to have buildings with nobody living in them when people are looking for buildings to live in.
They’re hoarding and they’re hoarding to drive up the prices. And all of this feeds into a real violent human crisis of homelessness. It’s violent on the families. It’s violent on the children. And where do you draw the line between breaking the law and treating the most vulnerable in our society in this way?
If your plan is to basically steal from people to get your agenda, you’re gonna have to go back to the drawing board. It’s the same as you can’t solve poverty by taking money out of someone else’s pocket.
Or everybody go forth and occupy. Like if government won’t supply, we’ll occupy.
Join the protests! Join the protests! Join the protests! Join the protests! Join the protests!
You just heard a selection of recent media clips from the state broadcaster RTE speaking to government ministers, representatives of Take Back the City, anti-homelessness campaigners and people directly affected by this whole crisis. Many people in Ireland are finding it pretty much impossible in recent years to find somewhere they can afford to live. It’s an issue that absolutely everyone in the country is talking about right now.
You might not have heard about it if you don’t live in Ireland, but if you do, chances are you, or someone you know, has been directly affected by it. In a nutshell, there’s an endemic shortage of accommodation in Ireland and what there is, is hugely expensive.
Just taking Dublin as an example, rent and house prices have risen in the city by a whopping 70 percent in the last six years. That’s since the market’s low point after the crash in 2012. In the meantime, people’s incomes have stayed pretty much the same.
Mmhm.
According to figures released by the property website, myhome.ie, the average house in Dublin is valued at nine times the average income. When it comes to rent, things are even worse. The average wage right now is 3181 euros, which is pretty good by any standard, but the average rent right now is 1875 euros, which is almost 60 percent of that. And that just gives a glimpse into how tough things are going to get if you’re earning any less.
Yeah, right. OK.
What this creates, even for people who are earning good money, is a kind of rent trap. People are paying so much in rent every month that it’s just impossible for them to save up a deposit for a mortgage. So, there are more and more people depending on the rental market for longer and longer, and that in turn drives up rent even further. The situation is truly dire. Like homelessness actually has now reached record levels. More and more people are being kicked out of their homes or they’re just unable to find a home in the first place. It’s an issue that also impacts on hundreds and thousands of immigrants who left during the financial crash and who are trying to come back now that the economy has picked up a bit again, and the problem is that there is just nowhere for those people to live.
This crisis has been building steadily for years, and there’s a feeling that it’s at some sort of a tipping point now. Very few people are unaffected by it, and pretty much everybody of our generation will have a serious struggle finding a home.
Another by-product, of course, is that it is seriously damaging Ireland’s reputation. Abroad, especially post-Brexit, now that lots of U.K. businesses might be looking to relocate to new EU premises, Ireland should be a number one destination. It should be the obvious choice. It’s English-speaking. It’s got close ties to U.K. and American markets. It’s got a developed tech sector and of course, those controversially low corporate tax rates. But rent and house prices have become so expensive that even people working for big, multinational companies are struggling to find accommodation they’d be happy to live in.
So, today we’re going to lay out the historical reasons for how Ireland got this way. We’re going to take a look at the country’s strange and passionate relationship to property ownership. We’ll trace how the construction industry completely froze in the aftermath of the global financial crash in Ireland and how it left a huge shortage of homes just as the economy is picking up again, ensuring that economic recovery doesn’t mean very much to a huge chunk of the population.
We’ll also hear a report from that movement that is grabbing the headlines. The Take Back the City movement who are taking things into their own hands by seizing and occupying properties that are lying vacant in Dublin.
The heavy-handed response to this group by authorities has recently fuelled a kind of outpouring of support for their tactics. And it really feels like this issue is starting to snowball.
Now Ireland, let’s remember, is in a pretty dynamic moment of change and there’s lots of will and motivation around to overturn old systems that clearly just don’t work anymore. We saw that, of course, with the energy that fuelled the last two referendums on equal marriage and abortion.
Unlike those referendums, though, the housing crisis isn’t simply a case of a lot of people voting either one way or another. There aren’t any easy solutions to this problem — certainly no quick ones, as we’ll see. But in order to get a sense of the cultural impact of this crisis, why don’t we hear from your report, Tim, and find out about the history of affordable housing in Ireland.
On the 22nd of September 1880, Something strange happened near Lough Mask in County Mayo. It was a normal enough day as days go, even though the weather reportedly was miserably wet and windy. The locals here were among the most deprived in Ireland, overwhelmingly small hold tenant farmers, they worked tiny plots and usually lived in one-roomed dry-stone cabins. These people didn’t own their house or their land, nor had their parents or their parents before them. Instead, like all tenant farmers in Ireland, they paid rent to the local landlord. In this case, the landowner was the magnificently wealthy Earl of Erne, a member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish elite, and peer in the British House of Lords. Lord Erne owned over 40, 000 acres in Ireland, which wasn’t so unusual for his social rank. By 1870, fewer than 800 of the richest landlords owned about half of the country between them. The total number of landowners in 1876 amounted to just 0.2 percent. And of the entire population, the Earl of Erne didn’t live here in Lough Mask, though, his family pile was Crom Castle in County Fermanagh. Instead, the Lough Mask estate was left under the watchful eye of an English land agent, Captain Charles Boycott. Captain Boycott was charged with managing Lord Erne’s extensive farmland and collecting rent from his tenants. Notoriously petty and intractable, he was unpopular from the start. In the autumn of 1880, though, it seems that he went just that little bit too far. The harvest had been bad that year, and tenants were unable to pay the normal rent. They had already begged Boycott to grant them an abatement. But the answer was firm: Pay up or leave. When they couldn’t, on the 22nd of September, Boycott sent out the local process server, along with 17 police escorts, to deliver eviction notices to 11 families. The first three evictions went ahead as normal. The tenant farmers packed up their things and faced the bitter rain outside. As the server arrived at the fourth cabin, however, the resident, Mrs Fitzmorris, was already waiting for them at the door. In an instant, she raised a red flag above her head, and the men reported hearing howling from all around them. Before they knew what was happening, the police escort was being pelted with mud and bricks and branches and stones and manure from the hills above. The women of Lough Mask had been waiting, and on signal of the flag they descended on the server and his men in a violent attack. So bad was it that the server and those 17 policemen were later found cowering in Boycott’s big house at the edge of the lake. But this was just the beginning. The next day, locals descended on Boycott’s House. By the time they had left, they had taken the servants and the estate labourers with them. Boycott was left alone in his parlour with his terrified wife, acres of unharvested cash crops and no rent. Within a few days, the postman refused to deliver him letters. The blacksmith refused to shoe his horse. The shopkeepers wouldn’t serve him. The laundress wouldn’t clean his clothes. And the barber declined to cut his hair. No one in County Mayo would so much as look at Captain Boycott or his family until he acquiesced to the tenants demands: fair rent, fixed tenure and free sale of Lord Erne’s property. It wouldn’t have taken Captain Boycott very long to figure out who was behind all this. These actions were part of a mass rural agitation movement known as the Land Wars. They were mostly organized by the Irish National Land League, headed by two Irish nationalists named Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell.
The ideas that underpin the Land War, particularly from Michael Davitt were extremely radical and actually questioned any right to private property. In some ways they were much more radical thinkers than social Democrats who talked about taxing the rich a bit to pay for redistribution of income. The proponents of the Land War, particularly Davitt, basically questioned anyone’s right to private property.
That was University College Dublin Professor Michelle Norris, author of Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State. While Davitt’s dreams did not come to pass exactly, the rhetoric of Charles Stewart Parnell in particular would change the pattern of land ownership in Ireland forever. Just three days before the boycott, he had given one of his most famous speeches to a crowd in Ennis dramatized here in the 1947 Hollywood film named simply Captain Boycott.
Charles Stewart Parnell (actor) :
Now, what do are you do to a tenant who does bid for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted?
Kill him! Shoot him!
Charles Stewart Parnell (actor) :
I think I heard somebody say shoot him. There is a very much better way. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him! Shun him on the roadside when you meet him; in the streets of a town; in the shop; on the fair green and in the marketplace, and even in the house of worship. By isolating him from his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed. Shun him! cut him! Brand him! Excommunicate him! If you do this, you may depend upon it there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame as to dare to face the cold accusing finger of public scorn.
The public humiliation of this English military Captain by a rabble of barefoot Irish peasants inspired an international media frenzy. Reporters were sent from far and wide to the west of Ireland to find out just what was going on. A relief fund was set up in Boycott’s name and trainloads of partisan Orangemen from Ulster were sent to Lough Mask to help harvest the crops. In the end, as it turns out, they just ended up eating him out of house and home. In all, the British government spent an estimated 10,000 pounds trying to save Boycott’s harvest, but all to no avail. By the end of 1880, other boycotts had sprung up all around the country, landing a new word to the English language. Boycott himself finally left his money and estate behind him and took the boat back to England. The actions of the Land League were instrumental in pressuring the British government to reform property law in Ireland.
So, over the period of 40 years from the 1880s until 1920s there was a series of acts passed that regulated the letting of farmland and regulated rents and security of tenure. Then the state stepped in to subsidize tenant farmers to buy their farms from landlords. And in some ways, it was a bailout of the landlords, many of which were not in a good economic situation at that time. But it resulted in just an enormous public subsidy for the transfer of land from landlords to tenant farmers. And it resulted in an enormous social revolution in Ireland as this small farmer class became more economically powerful and politically powerful, and really became the kind of economic backbone of the country.
In many ways, these British land acts were intended to smother the nationalist movement in Ireland. By caving into the peasants demands, Westminster believed that they would remove the incentive for Irish farmers to support the Land League and parallel nationalist organizations. What they got instead, though, was a new and highly tenacious agrarian landowning class. Before 1880, only three percent of Irish farmers on their holdings. By 1922, notes Michelle Norris, two thirds of them had bought their farms from their landlords, representing a transfer of some 11 million acres. Small property owners rapidly became the new economic engine of the country and some of the loudest voices of nationalist activism. Here’s University College Cork Professor Cathal O’Connell, author of The State and Housing an Island Ideology, Policy and Practice.
The Land Act between 1870 and the turn of the 20th century was effectively a political intervention by the British state to pacify the Irish rural tenant farmer class. The culmination of this was the establishment of a class of proprietors in rural areas. These were tenant farmers who then became owners of their own holdings. It created a sort of a march to nationhood really, which culminated in the establishment of the new Irish state in 1922.
While the Land Acts had more or less solved the rural housing problem, overcrowded tenements and slums still continued to blight Ireland’s towns and cities. During the war of independence, this was actually one of the major issues that the rebel governments proposed to address. In 1922, however, when the 26 southern countries of Ireland finally broke away from the United Kingdom, the new independent Free State government was less enthusiastic about radical housing reform.
The new free state was conservative. It was frugal. It was flinty. And it was austere. One of its architects, General Richard Mulcahy, described his colleagues as being probably the most conservative revolutionaries ever to put through a successful revolution. And so, once the new state was established in 1922, the Democratic programme of 1919 was really dismissed as idealistic. In order to secure the loyalty of key groups in the population the new state wasn’t really interested in working class loyalty or affiliation, it was more interested in middle class loyalty. And therefore, the housing policy reflects this in the form of very generous grants and incentives to aspiring owner occupiers. So, anything the ideology of the new state was in many ways reflected in its housing policy. It was ruralist. It was agrarian. It was conservative, and it was wedded to the principles of private property as the defining organisational construct of the new state.
That meant that the roots of the Irish welfare state were different from the European norm. Governments started spending more and more money as the 20th century rolled on subsidising property redistribution rather than subsidising income redistribution via, for instance, social security benefits or subsidizing public services. So, our public services in Ireland remained weak throughout the 20th century, some would argue they’re still weak compared to Europe. But it didn’t mean government wasn’t spending money on things. They were just spending money on different things. And they were spending a huge amount of money on home ownership. It is what I call a property-based welfare state, not a conventional Western European social security benefits and social services focused welfare state.
Over the long term, this policy came to shape the culture of property in Ireland, nursing a sort of national obsession with homeownership and deepening stigmas around rent, welfare and social housing.
Our obsession, if you like, with homeownership has been manufactured through policy choices made by the governments that the middle-class households exited the private rent sector but was precluded from social housing and in the sense, exercise constraint rather than choice in becoming a homeowner. And over the following decades, we see the level of homeownership in Ireland rising to an all-time high in the late 1980s to about 80 percent.
In the countryside, finding a secure piece of land, especially with a bit of road frontage, became an achievable dream for many of the rural middle classes. In the cities, Government built social housing continue to lag behind, only really built when absolutely necessary.
It wasn’t until the 1930s when in fact when Éamon de Valera came to power that we begin to see large scale slum clearance taking place in urban areas. It probably took another three decades for the Irish state to really solve the, or attempt to, solve the urban working-class problem. And really that’s an ongoing challenge that’s faced in our cities and towns at the moment.
During the slum clearances of the 1930s, some of the most iconic social housing in Ireland was built, particularly in Dublin, where the architect Herbert Simms replaced torn down tenements with Dutch-style modernist buildings, many of which still mark the streetscape of the city today.
Certainly, in Dublin at the time, they would have been primarily built as replacement housing on the site of cleared former tenements. So, from the kind of modern eye it was, it was very progressive in the sense that they tried to keep communities together and we rehouse in the same location.
After Simms death, however, many of his principles were abandoned. A new housing crisis in the 1960s saw families living in tents along the canals and tenement buildings falling down in inner city streets. A new activist movement started taking over empty properties to push the government into action. This action came in the form of huge, low-cost housing projects such as the iconic high-rise apartment complexes in Ballymun to the north of Dublin City.
The answer was the Ballymun housing project, named Europe’s biggest industrialized housing contract and entailing the largest program of civil engineering and development works undertaken for an Irish local authority housing estate. With a population today of about 13,000, larger than most provincial towns in Ireland, the Ballymun housing project represents a revolutionary departure from all previous local authority housing schemes.
Ballymun was one of the most ambitious and optimistic projects of the new Irish state. Built on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966, it’s seven landmark towers were named after the heroes of the 1916 rebellion. At the time, these flats were about as modern as flats could be, particularly in that each one had access to television satellites. In fact, they were so sought after that candidates had to pass a special interview before being allocated housing there. Within a decade or two, however, they had become a byword for crime and dilapidation. Isolated and lacking public amenities, the Ballymun flats became infamous for drug abuse and social problems. In 2013, not even 50 years old, they were demolished by the very state that built them.
It looks as though the Ballymun tower blocks may be coming down. The 200-million-pound plan drawn up by Dublin Corporation would see the blocks go one by one as groups of residents are rehoused in phases. There are 20,000 people in the flats. Today, they greeted what they know of the plan with a mixture of welcome and scepticism.
According to Cathal and Michelle, this was a step backwards for a government that had become addicted to private housing. I asked them if they could see how Ireland could break this century old cycle of privileging middle-class homeownership ownership above accessible housing for everyone.
I think in many ways the problems of the previous model where we built mass social housing estates, there were problems, but I think the problems are overstated and the benefits are forgotten. And the benefits in terms of providing people with good quality housing at an affordable rent and security of tenure for life were enormous. And in my view, far away the benefits of the model is at the moment, which is trying to fund people to secure their own private housing. And I think the only solution to the situation we’re in is to increase social housing output. So, going back to building on a larger scale.
While I suppose the message is very simple: Build. Build big. And build where it’s needed, and what I mean by that is we seem to have many impediments of the way we should undertake a large-scale mass social housing programme. One of the most frequently cited is that we shouldn’t go back to building large scale social housing estates like we did in the 40s, 50s and 60s because this creates the problem of ghettoization. The evidence is that social housing, when it’s built to a good standard and it’s managed effectively, is a very successful tenure. And I think that sort of message need to get through and then we need to get on and build houses.
Thanks so much for that report, Tim, that was really fascinating, and I think it really got across like how powerful an issue this is in Ireland. Another thing that comes across is as well is like had the culture of home ownership is really influenced by government policy and that can have a roll-on effect for generations.
Yeah, for sure. And that if that government policy change, that the culture could change with it. You know, there is definitely this idea in Ireland that our obsession with property is somehow part of our DNA, you know. And I suppose in the last few decades, it’s easy enough to see why you might get that impression. Anyone who remembers the economic boom in Ireland in the 2000s will remember just how off the rails that whole obsession got.
Absolutely. Like during the boom years, property was this common topic of conversation among everybody. Banks were lending pretty easily, so Irish people were essentially bidding against other Irish people up and up, inflating prices with borrowed money. And there was this sense of like unrealism, like we were kind of forgetting ourselves. Like, for example, housing estates were being bought up before the amenities or the infrastructure could catch up with the construction. One thing I remember clearly were people buying these gas, mushroom shaped outdoor heaters for their patios and this sort of spending on garden stuff for me is like the symbol of the boom because it’s so massively wasteful and expensive and also divorced from reality like this is Ireland; there’s only gonna be a few days in the year where you could actually like have a barbecue.
Yeah, absolutely and even on those few days, in case you’re wondering, listeners, those gas heaters things like 100 percent do not work in Irish weather, so, yeah absolutely, divorced from reality. So, yeah, it did feel a bit like we were a people possessed at times. But in retrospect, of course, you know, this wasn’t in our DNA. This was a cultural reaction to government policy. People really were making loads of money from the housing market. And for a while there, it was, you know, a way to make your life better. So, with cheap mortgages and lots of encouragement, it’s not hard to see why people got carried away.
Then, of course, it all came crashing down. So Ireland had a dose of what was affecting the rest of the world as well: Easy credit, essentially. And what happened next began in the United States. So, you might remember lenders over there had been pushing out mortgages and loans as fast as they could, including to people who were unlikely to pay them back — certainly, if there was any kind of economic downturn — and then they were selling on those mortgages to other institutions where they were repackaged into whole bundles of different mortgages and then being labelled as totally secure investments.
But of course, we now know, they weren’t.
They were not and people started to default on these loans. And suddenly these big financial institutions discovered they had big holes in their balance sheets and enormous lenders started to fail. And basically what happened then was the whole system freaked out. All the banks were afraid to lend to the other banks because they feared they wouldn’t get their money back and people started withdrawing their money.
OK. So, this is the so-called credit crunch. In Ireland suddenly, nobody was able to pay for those over inflated house prices anymore because there was no credit available and there was a massive property crash, right?
Yeah. At one point in Dublin, houses had fallen in value by over half and apartments by over 60 percent of what they had been valued at before. The government had also been spending kind of stupidly for ages, particularly by cutting taxes for everybody during the boom years. And it was suddenly faced by this horrendous mix. So, there was suddenly a hugely increased demand for social spending because the construction industry collapsed and there was a massively increased number of people needing unemployment support. The taxes that were coming in plummeted and infamously the government had to guarantee the banks to stop them collapsing because if they had done, basically, no one really knows what could have happened or how bad it could have got. Because remember at this time, people were beginning whether to doubt that if they went to the bank to get out their savings, their money would still be there.
Right. OK. So, all that came to a head in about 2008, 2009. So, how did we get from there to here in 2018?
Well, basically, after that crash, a lot of people who bought houses at a very high price were stuck in what’s called negative equity. So, they had a huge mortgage, but they can’t sell the house to pay it back because the house is now worth less than what they borrowed. So people were stuck in the properties that they bought, and they were now too small for their growing families. Sometimes they were in isolated estates where the amenities that were promised were now permanently on hold.
OK. Right. And of course, for people who didn’t buy during the boom, I suppose, like ourselves, Naomi, there was a huge aversion, a cultural aversion, to entering into the property market because, you know, we had all just watched it implode before our eyes.
Absolutely. And of course, don’t forget, no one could get a mortgage anymore. The banks were winding in their lending. The only people who could buy easily then were people who had cash up front.
So, what you end up with then is this sudden stagnation in housing construction, right?
Yeah. The instant the entire construction workforce essentially emigrated to America, Australia and U.K. and other places. So, Ireland still to this day has a big shortage of builders and carpenters and electricians and so on, because they all left, you know, so the people who you need to build houses aren’t there. There’s a shortage of them. And what’s more, the big developers were forced by government policy to hand over their assets into an organization called NAMA.
OK, that’s an acronym, listeners. It’s not a character from The Lion King or something. It stands for National Asset Management Agency, which has become pretty notorious since the crash. It was set up to absorb all the bad debts, basically. It was a way of tidying up the crisis.
Yeah, it’s sometimes called the bad bank as well. So, in this context developers could no longer build, Even if they wanted to because they didn’t have control over the sites on land that they had accumulated. But during this whole time of stagnation, the population kept growing. So a shortage of housing began to accumulate without being addressed and it was growing larger and larger every year.
And yet, ironically, at the same time, there was a surplus of under used houses all around the country. There were all these so-called ghost estates, which are random big developments of houses or apartments that were maybe never finished.
The thing is, though, these houses were in the wrong place. And that’s one of the reasons why they were left empty, because they weren’t in places where the jobs, where were there were amenities or even basic infrastructure sometimes and in the meantime, they were just left to just fall into ruin.
Oh, god. Right. What a disaster.
Remember, there are other kinds of under occupancy as well. So, like if you walk around Dublin City Centre, for example, you might notice that a lot of the buildings are used really inefficiently. So, a lot of upper stories of the, you know, the terraces, for example, are basically empty with just retail on the first floor.
Right. Sure. And considering the current context, actually, there are an astounding amount of buildings in central Dublin and in the centre of other cities that are just standing empty, which must drive people crazy.
Like, it does. It absolutely does. There’s a lot of complicated reasons for those empty buildings. Sometimes the ownership is obscure. A lot of this stuff is the legacy of the property crash and everybody going bust. Sometimes they’re owned by banks. And also a lot of overseas investors came into Ireland while property was cheap. They were the only cash buyers around and they bought up a lot of properties as investments. So, they may be sitting on the property waiting for the moment they think is right to sell it. So, that obvious lack of occupancy in buildings right alongside, cheek by jowl, with people who are sleeping in parks and along canals because they have no house, that’s really fuelling frustration.
OK. Right. So now, of course, the government in power at the moment is headed by the right-leaning Fine Gael party. They’ve pretty much been in government since the crash. And they’ve been coming under enormous fire, as you might imagine, for letting this problem get so out of control. You might remember, listeners, that back in May I spoke to Fine Gael’s minister for the diaspora at the Irish Embassy in Paris. So, while I had him, I asked him what the party was doing to make Ireland affordable for returning immigrants. Let’s take a listen. If I were to move back to Dublin tomorrow, let’s say, I would be facing rents that are more expensive than Paris. So, how is this, his is a major concern, surely, and how are we going to fix this?
And you’re right. I mean, Indecon, in carrying out that survey of over 1,500 returning emigrants, cited housing and the cost of housing as a significant issue for them. We are as the government — two things happening. First of all, we’re working with local authorities around the country to deliver the largest ever housing building program in the history of the state. But alongside that then, because Irish housing has always been provided by both the public sector and the private sector, the challenge right now is when we had the crash of 2008 and 2009, our private housing sector providers went over the edge of a cliff. They went bankrupt and the vast majority of them did. And we’re now seeing the very, very slowly ratcheting up of that sector again. So we’re looking at plasterers, electricians, carpenters coming home from Australia and Canada and other locations to be part of the new housebuilding endeavour. And we’re looking at those companies slowly but surely going back into housebuilding. But it’s exceptionally slow. It’s been, if you consider it was a behemoth of a sector and when it shut down, which essentially it did in 2008, 2009, it’s been exceptionally difficult to ratchet up that kind of delivery again. If you look at Dublin right now, look across the skies of Dublin, it’s just construction cranes everywhere. But there in the main working, around commercial, around offices, hotels, we’ve now got to look at moving them back into housebuilding again. And we in the government have made the process of securing planning permission for large housing developments, very straightforward in comparison to what it was in the past. So, we’re saying to developers, if you have the expertise, and obviously they do, if you have the land banks, and obviously they do, we’re going to make the environment in which you can build housing as streamlined as it possibly can be and remove some of the bureaucratic blockages that might have been there in the past. So, when it’s an issue of supply and demand, when the private sector begins to deliver large scale housing developments in Dublin, because predominately that’s where the demand is, you would see the rent starting to level off and hopefully people not being discouraged from returning to Dublin because of rents.
Do you have any idea how long that will take?
From talking to my colleague Eoghan Murphy, who’s the Minister for Housing, and from talking to the Taoiseach, we expect that the private sector itself will certainly be back to the level of housebuilding that we need because we were building 90,000 houses a year before the crash, which we obviously didn’t need. You do need to build between 25 to 30,000 houses per annum in order to keep up with normal demand. We would hope to see that happening sometime towards the end of 2021, 2020, that particular timeframe, about two to three years.
Okay. So, housing stock back on track and rents back down to normal levels in three years, 2021, according to Minister Cannon. Is Fine Gael perhaps being a tad ambitious, Naomi?
I mean, the policies they’ve already rolled out so far have not worked, obviously, as the crisis has only gotten worse and worse. I spoke to Lorcan Sirr, who’s senior lecturer of housing at the Dublin Institute of Technology. He told me that the government is quite disingenuous on the housing issue. For example, the way that the Department of Housing was measuring the number of houses that were being built was, until recently, completely incorrect and they were overestimating the real numbers.
The government will come out all guns blazing, and they’ll say two things: One, building houses takes time. Shortcuts really can build a house in 18 months if you have your mindset to it. So, I don’t think they would. The other thing they will come out and they will say is that we’ve got x houses in the pipeline. The pipeline is like tomorrow, it’s always there, but never comes. And so they’re always discussing this pipeline, what’s coming down the track. The emphasis is always on not what they’ve done but what’s gonna happen tomorrow. The reality is that they haven’t their policies to date have been very much pro-facilitating housebuilding industry rather than facilitating affordable housing for people. And that hasn’t worked. I mean, the industry are kind of, you know, taking everything they can get and not giving much back in return.
Another thing Lorcan mentioned was that housing policy in Ireland is not proactive. Like, say you wanted to design a city or a country from scratch, like you would come up with a plan for where people live, right?
Yeah, sure. So, you would take into account like population growth, demand, where are the jobs going to be; where are people going to need to live, etc., etc.
Exactly. And you would want to come up with a programme to make sure that the houses were there where and when they needed to be, right?
Right.
That’s not how the Irish government treats housing at all. So, instead Lorcan Sirr told me the main job of the Department of Housing is to hit target numbers of houses being built and find ways of coming up with those numbers. And they also announce policies that are a mixture of things that the industry and the house builders are demanding and things that the government essentially things will win votes for them.
Right.
Occasionally a big crisis hits and the government is forced to do something in response. But it’s all reactive, never proactive.
Policy in Ireland, you don’t really have a housing policy. We have a set of numerical housing output targets, and that isn’t it housing policy. So, what you find is policies are reduced to things that are A. Politically popular like help to buy or B. That we can tick a box and say we’ve done what we said we were going to do. And so it’s all about a numbers game and to say, well, we delivered x houses this, x houses that year, you know, forgetting things like the quality, location and the most importantly, the affordability of the houses that are being produced.
Even worse, the response to people needing help with housing is to give them an allowance to rent in the private sector. And that increases demand for rental properties, reducing the number available and keeping rents high for everyone. Whatever the government is willing to pay, that sets like a minimum level of rent. The government is also buying houses to turn into social housing rather than building houses directly, which further reduces the stock available for everybody.
So, last year councils in Ireland built fewer than 400 houses last year. The housing waiting list is over 70,000 households. But what they’re doing instead is they’re buying houses, which is taking away stock that everybody else could buy and are pushing everybody to just 351 families a week being put into the private rent sector. And again, it’s tightening the supply for everybody else who might want to rent property, so that’s why you see the average age of 1500 euro a month.
Something that a lot of people notice, though, is that there does seem to be a lot of building going on in Ireland, like the sky is full of cranes, but the house shortage isn’t decreasing And that’s because these developments are what’s most profitable for the developer and not what fixes the housing crisis.
There is obviously a housing shortage. The problem with the shortage isn’t being met for several reasons. And one of the reasons is much more profitable to build student housing and hotels than to build housing for sale. And the second one is that the more houses you build the more workers you need, and we have a shortage of workers, the more expensive it becomes. So, it’s not like the traditional economics 101 where if you increase supply prices come down. With housing quite often it’s the other way around. Supply goes up, prices go up. And partly it’s because you need more labour and more staff and it’s more expensive to build housing, but also, you know, housebuilders are astute enough and often they’re not going to flood the market.
So, if I’ve got this right, private developers actually have a vested interest in keeping down market supply so that house prices will stay high. And at the same time, the government is continuing to rely on them to provide affordable housing, which the developers have zero intent on doing.
I mean, these are private companies, so they don’t want to flood the market in such a way that it causes house prices to collapse. I mean, that would be self-destructive to them. Like if they lose money, they have to fire people are closed down, so they’re acting completely rationally, and their own self-interest happens to be against the interests of many people in Ireland. You know, so that’s why national housing policy can’t really be handed over to the private sector.
OK. All right. So, let’s come back to the point made by Michelle and Cathal earlier. Why doesn’t the government just build more houses? Build big, they said, build now.
National and local authorities taking charge and building houses has basically been hugely out of fashion for a long time, since the early 90s basically. Lorcan Sirr told me as well there was a change in the rules in how these entities could borrow that made it much more difficult to do. And at the same time, policies came in like allowing people to buy their own council houses, which reduced the stock that there was available nationally. There’s still a huge ideological reluctance for governments or national authorities to build, and that’s the same whether it’s Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil in government and it’s not exclusive to Ireland either. It’s the same in many European countries. There’s a kind of popular wisdom or prevailing assumption, some people call it neo-liberalism and other people hate using that word, but it’s a belief basically that the government should reduce its role as much as possible and just leave everything it can to markets to sort out and to the private sector.
The government and the private housing in particular have a massive conversion to the mass building of social housing, which is one of the reasons that we see so few council houses being built. There are hundreds of council houses, council housing estates, around the country and there’s a handful of them that have legitimately bad reputation. A lot of the problems in social housing don’t necessarily stem from the people, they stem from the economic circumstances.
Now, one of the most alarming things about this crisis is the escalating figures of homelessness all around the country. This includes people, of course, who are literally sleeping on the streets. But there is also another, more invisible kind of homelessness, which is growing, where people are just moving around, living with friends or with family, sleeping on couches and stuff but with no real possibility of affording a new place to live. And I suppose a lot more people are now realizing that with the way things are going in the rental market that this could happen to them at any moment.
It’s interesting to note that this housing crisis is not new, but it is now starting to affect more well-off people. And this is adding to its political momentum. And there’s criticism of that because, you know, it’s not worse if a middle-class person is homeless. What’s happened is that the shortage of housing has gotten so bad that it’s affecting middle income people and it means there’s a whole new set of voices that are taking against government policy.
We’ve always had housing problems, and this has typically affected lower income households, but politicians don’t really care about. So, the reason that housing is because such an issue is that: A. It’s affecting what would traditionally be conservative voters, so the political parties are getting it in the neck from the parents of their own voters who say my son is a doctor and we can’t afford to buy a house; and B. It’s also affecting our international reputation.
Basically, the causes for homelessness are usually a combination of various things. So, there’s some factors that are called institutional, so that could be things like being released from a hospital or from care without having somewhere to go. There’s also personal reasons, for example, mental health issues or a relationship breakdown. And then there’s structural, which is stuff like unemployment, lack of housing, things that, you know, individual people have nothing to do with. The big change that has happened, is that the main reason why people are becoming homeless in Ireland is now structural. So specifically, it’s people who are being evicted from the private rental sector. For example, that could happen because the landlord decides that they want to sell the house that they were living in. They lose their home and they literally cannot find another one they can afford.
So, the context is pretty desperate all around. Let’s talk a little bit about the action groups that have been demonstrating. So, Take Back the City has been around for a while now protesting against this housing shortage but in the last few weeks, they suddenly shot to the headlines.
Right. So, this is a coalition of housing groups that had occupied vacant homes in Dublin City Centre. They were using these houses to highlight the amount of vacant or derelict buildings that have just been left to decline while people are still being made homeless every day.
Now, one of the key demands of Take Back the City is that the council salvage vacant and dilapidated properties by putting them under compulsory purchase order. Councils and governments have full power to forcibly buy properties sometimes. For instance, when they’re building new roads or something, so they could do it here. In fact, the Council of County Louth has already provided almost 100 houses by doing just that, so they could be leading the way for further action down that route. There are other issues that Take Back the City are highlighting too. For instance, the first house that they occupied had been rented out as a set of rooms that were just crammed full of bunk beds, mostly to Brazilian’s, I think, who were still learning English and they were very much being taken advantage of. And there are actually whole Facebook pages reportedly in Spanish and Portuguese targeted at renting illegal standard accommodation to people who have just arrived in the country and who can’t get anywhere else to live.
What really put Take Back the City at the front and centre of media attention, though, was an eviction. On September 11 this year, a group of private security people wearing balaclavas turned up to evict them from a house that they had been occupying on North Frederick Street in central North Dublin.
OK. And, as with so many scandals in recent years, one of the main factors here was that it was all captured on video, which then proceeded to go viral immediately on the Internet. You have to remember too, listeners, that in a country where terrorism is not a distant memory, the sight of unidentified men in balaclavas turning up to a forced eviction presses all the wrong buttons.
Right. And even worse, alongside the men and balaclavas was a contingent of police. And this image of these heavies appearing to be backed up by national police, it just has a really sensitive historical resonance.
Sure. So, unsurprisingly the situation got heated very quickly. A group of protesters quickly gathered outside the property and confronted the police and security. Ultimately, the housing activists were removed from the house and six people were arrested. The protesters marched through the centre of the city before calling for another protest the following night in solidarity with those who had been arrested, and that protest was massive.
Yeah, the second protest drew huge crowds and there was this big sense of momentum growing, like an outpouring of anger about this, that it shouldn’t be this way. Like people were feeling desperate just to demand change on the housing shortage, which has just been going on for years and years. It felt like all this spare political energy that’s been floating around since the repeal vote was kind of settling on this housing issue. Take Back the City since organized a day of action in which they blocked O’Connell Bridge in central Dublin and held protests all around the city to demand action. That’s where the so-called “pigeon dad “featured.
Right, lest we forget. Now, this eviction it did divide popular opinion to a certain extent in Ireland. Some people defended the actions of the police since, after all, this house didn’t belong to the activists and these, some people considered the eviction as a simple restoration of law and order. Like, you know, there are lots of reasonable reasons for eviction, too, like, say, a tenant becomes violent or stops paying the rent and wrecks the place, or what have you. And some people were worried that private property rights were being threatened or questioned by the protest.
Right, yeah.
Here, for instance, is what Fine Gael councillor Paddy Smyth had to say on the Clayburn Live show on the 17th of September.
[skipto time=48:50] Paddy Smyth
:
They’re disobeying court orders. They’re taking possession of property that isn’t theirs. And effectively, if we don’t have property rights, if we don’t have ownership rights in this country, we do have anarchy.
On the other side, though, you have this very, very strong sentiment that throws back to, you know, Mrs. Fitzmorris raising the red flag against Boycott’s process server. You know, that the law as it stands is fundamentally unjust and that the only way to change it is to challenge it and to show its flaws by breaking the law through collective action. Let’s hear from the Take Back the City activists themselves. We have a guest report from Dublin resident Molly May O’Leary, who went along to an event in Dublin of which the group was organizing occupation training and was kind enough to send us in this report.
In Ireland, a shortage of housing and crippling prices appear to be getting worse and worse. The number of homeless people reach a record at just under 10,000 — and almost half of them were children. As frustration grows among the public, a coalition of activists called Take Back the City grabbed headlines with radical tactics, occupying unoccupied buildings in the city centre. I went along to a Take Back the City event; which organisers were training activists in occupation and anti-eviction tactics. I spoke to people about why they’re there.
We’re in the middle of a housing crisis and the government, frankly, isn’t doing enough to solve it and the situation is getting worse, so I think it’s up to people, up to individuals and communities and groups to organize and educate and try and do what we can to bring about meaningful change that’ll make a difference to people’s lives.
We have a huge housing price in the country. I mean, there are people sleeping in tents and on the quay in Cork, you know, people living in squats, emergency accommodation, just waiting for years on the housing lists, so the government doesn’t want to build for public housing, so something has to be done about that.
Taking their houses and then like filling it up with immigrants and they’re like packed in like sardines and shit. It’s like, it’s fucking terrible, you know, like people just kind of ignore it and they’re like, you know, tenements ended in the 70s. It’s like tenements didn’t end in the 70s, we still have tenement-esque apartments in this city.
We got something like 79 hotels cleared for development in Dublin last time I checked. And in a time when we desperately need more housing, that’s just absolutely ridiculous.
I’m here just because I think that the housing crisis is, it’s a really horrific issue at the moment, I think, in Dublin at the moment. And I didn’t hear of this event until today, but I feel like I want to get more involved in the socio-economic welfare of Dublin and try and help this city to be more of an inclusive place.
With so many people homeless on the streets and so many empty houses, it’s just, I think it should be common sense, really. And I think there’s a solution to the problem. And I think it’s so exciting and great to see people mobilizing here and starting to change things and I think we can do. We have the power.
As a young person who’s grown up in Dublin and seen the decline in living standards of a large part of the people of this city, I find it really inspiring that a group of young activists put themselves at risk and took affirmative action rather than just words. And I want to join in on them now.
The spokesperson of the movement is Oisín Coulter. I asked him what the aims of Take Back the City are.
I mean, our core demands have always been that we want to CPO vacant property. We’ve named three specific vacant properties that have currently been occupied. We want those to be CBO by the council and given back to their communities immediately. We want to end evictions, particularly evictions into homelessness, which are still widespread and it’s the reason that we’re running this training right now. We want universal public housing. One of the reasons, in fact the reason, that we have 10,000 people homeless and over 3,000 children homeless is because of evictions. So, yeah, we want a ban on evictions. It is clear to everyone walking around the north of the city, walking around Dublin, that there are at the very least hundreds, if not thousands of buildings that have clearly been bought, are not owned by people who are in nursing homes. They’re owned by vulture funds and they’re owned by private landlords who have left them derelict in order to drive up the value of property in Dublin and to profit from that value increasing. They are the buildings that should be CPO.
Journalists were banned from the event, so I wasn’t allowed inside. But Oisín Coulter explained that the evening was aimed to train people on what to do to resist an eviction, from legal advice to what to do if someone starts breaking down the door.
So, it’s practical training for tenants to resist illegal evictions. It is peaceful. It’s based upon what the law is. It’s about telling them the resources that they can go to, how they can get in touch with local housing action groups, who can then come along and support them; ho should you call first; what do you do if they brought heavies and they’re coming in through the door; what are your legal recourses in terms of, say, for example, the RTB or indeed the court system; how the guards treat these situations. That’s the kind of rough outline.
I caught some of the attendees after the event finished and asked them what they had taken away from the training.
We learned how to stay safe. And one of the key things is communication. Communication is online. It’s text. It’s also, you know, what’s going on in your community, all sorts of stuff.
I think it was pretty informative, just kind of about what exactly goes on, which is really why I went, sort of wanted to find there once I find out how it goes down; like when, how it takes the residents by surprise, and just how you can sort of peacefully just gather in order to support people inside and make sure that this isn’t done quietly. The people aren’t just quietly being evicted, you know, out of their homes then the buildings boarded up without any consequence or any evidence of that happening.
So, what is the housing crisis all about? One attendee summed it up in a rap.
Rob to survive in this criminal detention but rob the whole country and you get a fat pension. All the big suits, pulling schemes, backed by henchmen. Irish people look on, they’re just sitting on the bench, man. I’m sick and tired of this lack of interest in our youth. Their heads are buried in the media but don’t know the truth. Celebrities and false idols on a constant loop, a you believe every single word that are telling you. Once again, it’s clear romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s time for the terrible beauty to be reborn. We might have pushed the Brits out to a certain degree, but now the enemy’s internal. How the fuck can’t you see? Sean Ó Muirighthe.
OK.
Or Murray. Murray The Rogue One, if you want to hear my music. Also, Broke Poets Society. Check that out. You’ll be hearing plenty more stuff like that.
OK. It was great to hear those voices, actually. But let’s look at some of the possible solutions then that might be at hand for this whole situation. The thing that I would suggest immediately is that, like Paris and Berlin and lots of other European cities, that Dublin established heavy restrictions on Airbnb and similar rental models. Obviously, Paris is a big tourist destination and had a major problem with that. You know, all the hotels were going out of business, for instance, and at the same time nobody could, you know, find a place to live. So, from now on in the city, you can only rent out your flat on Airbnb for four months of the year, which frees up those accommodations for long-term rental. You know, that’s a measure that could go a long way in Dublin, where according to the property website, daft.ie, more than half of the rental properties are now being let as short-term holiday stays. What about you, Naomi? Do you see a way out of this? Do you think that, like Ciarán Cannon predicted, in the next three years, that we could be back to stable rents? Is that even possible?
Three years is optimistic, but of course it’s possible to fix this. Of course it is. Like one of the sad, sad things is that the numbers of people that we’re talking about are large for Ireland, but hugely manageable in the scheme of things. So these horrendous situations that we’re talking about where families have to leave their homes and just have nowhere to go, the number of families that are finding themselves in that situation in Ireland each month is in the very low hundreds. So, we’re talking about 100, 200, around that ballpark. Like, you could gather all of those people together in one place and be able to see all of them at once, you know, like the number of facilities that are needed to process and house them are not a lot. It’s not that much. It’s fixable. It’s not an impossible situation. Like a house can be built in 18 months and any decent sized development of social housing would start fixing this problem and putting a dent in the numbers immediately.
Naomi, why aren’t you running this country again? Ever thought about throwing in your lot with the presidential election crew for the next round?
Oh, God. Tim. Let’s not even go there. Like, a presidential election is one for a future episode.
Yes.
And by the way, I want to remind all the candidates for President at the moment that as Irish president, you cannot set policy anyway.
Oh, right. It’s the wrong job for you. You need to go for Taoisaech. Anyway. So, on that note, I think that’s about all from us for today. While you’re waiting for our next episode, by the way, don’t forget to check out our competition to win a bespoke map of Ireland from Brian.
As always, do check out our exclusive miniseries, Halfpints, which you can access by coming a supporter of the podcast. All you need to do is head over to www.patreon.com/theirishpassport and become a subscriber today.
Thanks for listening, everyone. And Slán!
Slán!