Social housing - Growth of waiting lists is shocking

SOMETHING strange happened during the economic boom. We never built so many new houses, we never had so many new house buyers and we had a doubling of the number of families in need of social housing.

The failure to stem the growth of the housing waiting list, never mind reduce it, is shocking given the unprecedented national wealth that characterised the period. Housing was discussed in terms of a commodity, an investment and a sign of commercial success. It was rarely mentioned as a basic human right.

Yet it doesn’t take a disaster relief co-ordinator to know the first essentials for existence are food and shelter. And it shouldn’t take an international treaty to drive the point home.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, does highlight the point. Article 25 states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care, and necessary social services.” That declaration celebrated its 60th anniversary yesterday, meaning it came into being shortly after the end of the second world war when life itself was not a guaranteed right. Those who wrote and signed it were brave enough to commit them to paper.

By and large, Ireland has made good efforts to live up to the spirit of the document, but it looks like in the past decade we got lazy. The attitude seems to have been that human rights are for poor countries — we have wealth to protect us. Clearly that attitude didn’t work because it didn’t protect the most vulnerable.

Homeless charity Focus Ireland, writing in today’s paper, reveals it has worked with more than 6,000 people this year compared with 5,300 last year — a 13% increase. That’s before the worst of the recession bites and before the current trickle of house repossession cases becomes the anticipated flood. There are real fears the 59,000 households awaiting social housing (compared with 27,000 in 1996) will have to let many more join the line. The result, Focus Ireland warns, will be the prolonging of hardship for many, increased instability in family life and the further breakdown of communities. Given the debates that have raged all week about the chaos that can afflict a community to the extent that children end up running amok with handguns, this is an outcome that should be avoided at all costs.

Cost, of course, is the big stumbling block.

Focus Ireland argues the expenditure would make economic sense, quite apart from being morally correct. Spending on social housing would provide jobs as well as homes.

However, there is another option — buying up some of the thousands of empty and unfinished homes that were built in the dying days of the boom. It might gall builders to sell prestige developments cheap and it might rankle with existing owners to see local authority tenants move in next door. But it might also remind us that a house is first and foremost a home.

With deep economic difficulties ahead, many who never thought they’d see a hard time again could be glad the country’s memory was jogged.