Book Review: Rory Hearne's Gaffs is a difficult - but necessary - read

The Bay Meadows housing development during construction in Dublin 15 last year; all 112 houses were bought by global investment company, Round Hill Company, to be put on the rental market. Picture: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie

• Gaffs
• Rory Hearne
• Harper Collins Ireland
• pb €14.99

This is a very difficult read. Not because it is poorly written but because it is an irrefutable indictment of how so many citizens of this young, still-hopeful Republic have been betrayed by every government entrusted with a Dáil mandate over the last half century.

Hearne’s analysis of our man-made, politically midwifed housing crisis is more than chilling. It is frightening as it exemplifies the kind of social implosion empowering uber-right forces challenging once-secure democracies all around the world.

It is a very difficult read for those who cling to the hope that our participatory democracy — even if that means no more than voting for the party your grandparents supported in Christy Ring’s time — is how a society tries to become something better than it was yesterday. Anyone who reads this book and accepts the general principles offered by Rory Hearne cannot but feel a deepening sense of shame or, maybe better, the recognition of the dangerous naivety a virgin might briefly feel at a Berlin nightclub orgy.

That a generation — at least — of Irish people have been effectively indentured as property tsars’ serfs stains us all no matter where our political allegiances lie or shift. That this process of capture is extended as we celebrate a century of “independence” just adds a twist of the bitterest irony to the sorry tale.

However, it an especially difficult read for those ensnared on the utterly contrived, impregnable but inescapable hamster wheel we call a property market.

Hearne describes how supply is drip-drip managed to protect land or property values lest investors lose out by housing too many tenants at once. He describes how public land is offered to developers on terms so favourable prospective homeowners or occupiers must look on with the despair that overwhelms all but the strongest characters.

The minister-driven capitulation on Dublin’s O’Devaney Gardens is just one of the sharper recent examples of this stand-and-deliver philosophy as public policy.

He describes how corporate landlords leave properties empty rather than reduce rents, thereby cutting their asset values. He describes how land is hoarded with the collusion of our planning and tax regimes until the jackpot moment arrives — as it always does. He describes how various grant schemes offered as panaceas to one of the two great crises facing our society invariably feather nests other than those intended — or do they?

Like so many farm subsidies, these interventions can too often seem a way of indirectly supporting corporations rather than consumers or producers.

This is not an unintended consequence.

Hearne records that in 2017 finance minister, Michael Noonan, was candid and said bringing vulture funds to Ireland was no accident — he admitted that it was government policy and that government considered it a huge success.

He may well have had noble if misjudged intent but he grossly underestimated how voracious these vulture funds are.

Hearne records that since 2016 investors have spent €7bn buying or developing private rental sector apartments. In 2020 they bought 12,378 homes, a third of all homes bought in Ireland that year. That expansion continues.

Though 1,175 homes were built in Dublin in the first quarter of this year only 219 — 19% — were secured by first-time buyers while 739 — 63% — were bought by “non-households” which is marketing gobbledygook to distract from the reality that rich investors are buying up the lion’s share of anything available. Seán and Bridget Citizen simply cannot compete in such a rigged market even if they have what were once imagined as good jobs.

The Griffith Wood housing development by Cairn Homes; 342 apartments were bought by US investment vehicle Greystar while 35 apartments and eight houses not included in the Greystar deal were acquired by Dublin City Council for social and affordable housing under the terms of Part V of the Planning and Development Act. Picture: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie

Mr Noonan’s view was supported by a cabinet successor. Speaking in the Dáil, in January, 2017 then housing minister, Simon Coveney, harrumphed: “We are starting to see an appetite for risk and investment in residential property in Dublin. We have seen extraordinary increases in rent for residential properties which has changed that appetite … we need to make sure the incentive remains in place to ensure that money is investing significantly in residential property …”

In other words, a good bet for property oligarchs, but a tightening of the noose for anyone trying to buy a family home.

Indeed, a scout for one of the international funds so active here, according to Hearne, described Ireland’s property market as “the gift that keeps on giving”. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me and all that.

Mr Coveney may have come to regret red-carpeting too-big-to-control funds to turn our homes into chips on international roulette wheels but he and his colleagues stand idly by as this neocolonialism accelerates.

It may be unconnected, or it may just be his natural modesty, but Mr Coveney’s Oireachtas profile does not record that he was ever minister for housing.

Irish politicians of this century have presided over a growth-growth-growth stacking of the deck that even the unhinged Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, the 40% man, must envy.

The next time you travel northward along Dublin’s Griffith Avenue, you will have a chance to see one thread of our history in a way that pokes a sharp stick in the eye of the idea the once celebrated social contract.

Just before you reach St Vincent de Paul Church you will pass Griffith Wood, a complex of 377 apartments and eight town houses. They were built by Cairn Homes who bought the site from the Christian Brothers in 2014 for an undisclosed sum.

It is reasonable to assume the land was first bought by the brothers through public subscription. US investment vehicle Greystar bought 342 units from Cairn Homes for €180m. One of today’s hegemonies replaced one of yesterday’s fallen forces.

If that was the full story it would only mark political and social failure on a grand scale but that Griffth Wood stands cheek-by-jowl with Marino, one of the great social housing projects delivered in the very earliest days of this Republic, rubs something toxic into the wound.

My grandparents moved to Marino almost a century ago and were part of building a warm, supportive and powerful community. That endures today — a brother, an uncle, and their families still live there, myriad cousins too.

It is unlikely that Griffith Wood — where a three-bed apartment costs €3,600 a month and you will never have an opportunity to buy one — might be the catalyst for that kind of growth.

Today’s political class may be pleased with their efforts to attract investors but the man honoured in the name of Griffith Avenue and Griffith Wood — Arthur Griffith, who died just as Marino offered refuge to those escaping Dublin’s reeking tenements — would spin in his grave. Some of his peers would certainly be more proactive.

Some years ago one of the politicians in thrall to the markets’ blandishments chided us gently — patronised, really — when he told us in relation to another but related implosion that anger was not a policy. There can hardly be any other response to this book, especially when the cost of making the cowboy builders’ — facilitated by see-no-evil regulators — Celtic Tiger apartments habitable and the mica scandal are considered. Estimates put a €5bn price tag on those festivals of corruption, almost enough to compete with the new landlords taking over the Irish home market for a few months.

This is a very important book and we would be well served if we dedicated energy to confronting the housing crisis as that will define whether we become serfs or citizens — and if that crisis could be faced in 1922, why not now?

Important as this book is it cries out for proper, professional editing, there is far too much repetition, and more than enough hearsay offered as fact. In a book so laden with data an index would have been helpful.

Those caveats apart, it captures the greatest domestic challenge facing us all — especially our political parties and our relationship with them. Something’s gotta give ... and much sooner rather than later. The State must start building to avert social collapse; it is that pressing.