Unfinished estates - It’s time we had a new New Deal

LAST week’s announcements on the scale of the difficulties faced by our banks, especially that privateers’ plaything Anglo Irish Bank, were staggering and depressing.

The seemingly unavoidable liabilities may well undo hard-won social, educational, infrastructural progress. The banks’ debts will put much of what is regarded as everyday in a functioning European society beyond our reach, maybe for decades.

As we have argued before every citizen is entitled to be very angry with those who led us to this sorry point. Sadly, that anger will stand for little more than beer froth unless it is harnessed to bring about real and deep change. Anger without involvement is just more self-destructive and delusional hot air.

Today we focus on a group entitled to be especially disappointed with how their interests have been served by business and the State institutions designed to protect them from the excesses of capitalism.

We look at some of the people trapped the estimated 650 unfinished housing estates across this country. People who live in developments abandoned by insolvent builders. People who, in some instances, live on glorified building sites. Some have to cope with unfinished roads, pathways or even effluent systems. In some instances residents, many of whom are in negative equity, have to live beside open sewage treatment plants. A good number do not have basic street lighting.

Because of the convolutions of our planning laws and the legislation surrounding builders’ bonds — designed to protect who? — any attempt to go to the courts to resolve these issues is so drawn-out as to be ineffective. Basically it seems a waste of time, energy and hope to expect a resolution to come from structures already in existence. It’s time to think outside the box.

Last week SIPTU chief Jack O’Connor suggested that these are extraordinary times and that we may need extraordinary solutions; solutions that once would have been dismissed as naive and exploitative.

Almost eight decades ago one of America’s great Democrats President Franklin D Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, a programme designed to counteract the Great Depression. Though we are not at the point just yet — we hope — the guiding principles of the New Deal are as relevant today as they were then.

Historians call them the three Rs: relief, reform and recovery. Relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy to normal levels, and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Each of these ideas have a role to play in resolving the dilemma of unfinished estates.

There are tens of thousands of unemployed construction workers, many of them apprentices unable to complete courses. Surely it is not beyond our wit to devise dignified programmes that will allow these unemployed workers to be organised to finish these estates? This would have obvious benefits, most of all involving people with nothing or little to do in meaningful work.

Schemes could be financed through social welfare, builders’ bonds if available and, say, NAMA. It might have a huge benefit for the exchequer generating taxes through the wise use of welfare funds. It would complete estates and possibly encourage people to buy houses, encouraging badly needed economic activity. Of course there would be complications, as many as you could shake a builder’s bond at, but it would do something that needs to be done and it would show that part of the solution to our current difficulties is in our own hands.