Michael Clifford: Government limping on as if housing is not an emergency

Emergency powers have been extended to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic but the government remains unwilling to bring in powers which could lead to real change in the housing emergency.

Very little appears to have changed in the last 18 months regarding the response to the housing emergency. Picture: Dan Linehan

When is an emergency not an emergency? The most pressing, current emergency, the pandemic, is set to continue well into the autumn 

(Yes, we do have more than one emergency, but we will come to that). 

If necessary, it will be stretched all the way to next year. After that, who knows? Maybe some of the emergency measures will be retained indefinitely in case they come in handy further down the line.

This week, we were told that it was necessary to extend the timeline for the huge powers conferred on government in order to deal with the pandemic.

These powers have had a major impact on personal liberty, restricting freedom of movement, and of association. 

At first, most people accepted that it was necessary to revoke the kind of freedoms we all take for granted in a liberal democracy; lives were at stake. 

The most pressing issue at the outset of the pandemic was the prospect of the health service being overwhelmed; that appalling vista required a dramatic response.

Today, we are hopefully coming out of the worst of the pandemic. 

By this weekend around 45% of the adult population will be vaccinated to some extent, including those who would have been most vulnerable to hospitalisation and life-threatening illness.

Yet the Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly told the Dáil on Tuesday that it was necessary to extend the draconian powers in case a further outbreak of the virus required a swift response. 

Civil liberties groups and some commentators and politicians have raised questions as to whether it is necessary to continue with the suspension of some basic rights.

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Other drastic measures have also had to be taken in response to the pandemic emergency. 

Since March of last year, the government has been spending money like it is going out of fashion; according to a Central Bank report, the cost of all the measures deployed to tackle the pandemic in 2020 was €24.6bn.

This was made up of €16.4bn in additional expenditure, of which €10bn went on income supports, and a further €8.2bn on tax deferrals, credit guarantees and loans.

The vast majority of this spend was entirely necessary to alleviate hardship and ensure that the economy didn’t suffer irrevocable damage. 

This week, we were told that the financial support measures will be extended until October and will also be subject to a gradual withdrawal.

Collectively, the full array of responses to the pandemic was mind-boggling in scope. 

Crucially, the response was also proportionate to the threat posed to life as we knew it, particularly to the lives of some of the most vulnerable in society.

Contrast the swift and entirely fitting response to the pandemic with the response to another national emergency to which another cohort of the most vulnerable in society were in greatest danger.

By 2016, it had become obvious that a housing emergency was upon us; the most brutal expression of this was the ballooning numbers of those without any homes.

In one week in June 2016, the Department of the Environment calculated that there were 4,152 adults and 2,206 children living in emergency accommodation, mainly hotel rooms. 

The number of children living in these conditions had increased by over one-third since the previous December. 

The damage being done to developing minds and bodies in such a milieu was obvious and most likely long term.

The response to that emergency was a pledge by the minister of the day, Simon Coveney, that hotel room living would be a thing of the past within 12 months. 

The following month, the minister produced another response, a plan called Rebuilding Ireland that promised to tackle the emergency head-on.

Unfortunately, Rebuilding Ireland was notable for the absence of any kind of proportionate response to the emergency at hand.

There was nothing about tackling the convoluted route local authorities had to travel to plan for housing. 

No urgency was attached to identifying and preparing public lands for the swift construction of homes.

Nothing about an immediate intervention on one of the central aspects to the emergency — the price of land. 

There was no move to reform a rezoning process that gifted landowners with millions of euros on the back of the public interest. 

There was nothing to tackle spiralling rents or the complete imbalance of power between renters and landlords, which was daily contributing to the ballooning homeless figures. 

In fact, there was really very little in the Rebuilding Ireland plan that suggested it was designed as a response to an emergency.

By the following year, the situation had, as had been widely predicted, deteriorated further. 

Mr Coveney had moved onto greener pastures at Foreign Affairs. 

The hotel rooms kept filling up; when asked about this, Mr Coveney suggested that his “pledge” in 2016 had really been a “target”.

His successor Eoghan Murphy continued in a similar vein, doing what he could but under no circumstances regarding the situation as an emergency. 

In October 2017, Sinn Féin proposed a Dáil motion declaring housing an emergency. 

Mr Murphy said that he had no problem declaring the emergency but only if he believed that “such a declaration could actually lead to new powers, powers that were needed to fix our housing and homelessness problem, powers that we did not already have”. 

The response summed up the government’s position: We will do what we can but we will not create any powers that might discommode or even anger vested interests for whom this is somebody else’s emergency. 

There was none of the urgency that we were to see when faced with the pandemic emergency.

There was no willingness to do things that might be considered excessive in normal times, no question of going the extra mile, mobilising society in order to protect the most vulnerable.

That was then and that is still now. 

The latest flashpoint in the housing emergency was the bulk-buying of houses by vulture funds that hit the headlines earlier this month. 

The practice had been going on for a few years, but the Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien reacted as if he’d just heard about it. 

He did as his predecessors did — he responded with a bit of tinkering designed to give the appearance of doing something rather than making a real difference.

Notwithstanding all we have learned in the last 18 months about the proper response to an emergency, very little appears to have changed as far as housing is concerned. 

Measures will be taken but they will not be proportionate to what is required; new powers that might have a serious difference will not be sought. 

Those who matter will not be discommoded in pursuit of the common good.

Things will simply limp on as if housing isn’t an emergency at all.