Michael Moynihan: For so many of us, the words ‘housing’ and ‘crisis’ are inseparable

Clare Austick (left), President of Union of Students Ireland, and members of USI, outside Leinster House, Dublin, to take part in a “No keys, no degrees” protest and sleep out against a lack of accommodation for students. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

SLOW though I am to recall the golden days of yesteryear (eh? — ed), one story deserves a quick revival this morning.

In my previous life in the Oireachtas I recall being buttonholed by a politician in the Dáil canteen (not the Members’ Restaurant, I hasten to add) about something, and in the conversation he asked where I lived in Dublin.

In squalor, was the short answer but I offered a vague zone of the city as my home address, to which he replied that he had “picked up an aul’ apartment” himself when he’d won his seat a couple of years beforehand. (In a far nicer zone of the city than mine, but no matter.)

The conversation rumbled on until I suffocated him with a scone (in my head), but his description of “an aul’ apartment” was delivered the way I would have referred to a new jumper — an acquisition which could just about be managed a week before payday.

I didn’t begrudge the man his wealth and I still don’t, which as far as I know he earned himself rather than inheriting it. But the casual reference to what is for most people the biggest purchase of their lives crystallised the difference between those for whom the word ‘housing’ doesn’t automatically come with ‘crisis’ attached to it — and the rest of us.

It certainly resonated with me in the last week or so, when there was no shortage of incidents joining ‘housing’ and ‘crisis’ together.

No security of accommodation

Take as an example the episode of RTÉ’s Liveline last week which gave a platform to the terrible despair being suffered by people who have no security of accommodation.

The fact that many of the voices on air were middle-aged sharpened the experience for listeners, surely: at a time of life when one might expect to have settled down somewhere for good, or the foreseeable future, many of those speaking told tales of loneliness and uncertainty, with one woman saying that not only was she living in a shed in someone’s garden, she felt embarrassed to tell people she was living in a shed in someone’s garden.

Or consider the ongoing chaos being endured now by students trying to find somewhere to live near the college they’re attending. 

Maybe you or someone you know has a child who is sleeping on someone’s floor, or paying through the nose for a hotel, because there just aren’t enough units for everyone within a reasonable distance of their campus.

Or maybe it was the news that emerged in recent days about the increase in house prices in Ireland — that despite a world-changing pandemic and thousands of deaths, lifestyle changes for everyone, and real deprivation in the face of a terrifying illness, houses in Ireland are now even more expensive.

Spiralling prices

“The average price of a house is now almost €24,000 higher than it was a year ago,” wrote Noel Baker of this parish a couple of days ago, “with the rise in prices more pronounced outside of city areas.

“The latest quarterly sales report by Daft.ie, covering the third quarter of this year, shows a national increase in prices of 9% compared to 12 months ago, but it also notes that house price inflation is at 13% outside the largest urban areas.”

Ah wait, I hear you say, but surely this last item is good news, an indication that the economy is robust and rebounding from the lockdown? 

To which the only answer can be:

How robust is the rebounding if people are living in garden sheds?

The link between the soaring cost of houses and the lack of rental accommodation is so obvious that it needn’t be spelt out, although it might be worth making the point that we now have something new at play in the Irish housing market —the vulture funds buying up entire developments in one fell swoop, pardon the pun. More on this at a later date.

There are long-term effects from this lack of accommodation. The damage being done to the mental and physical health of those who can’t access housing cannot be overstated, and is something that the country will be dealing with for years.

Not enough houses are being built and those that are are unaffordable.

By country, I mean all of us, but maybe some parts of the country are more affected than others.

For instance, if students can’t get accommodation in university cities then that will narrow the constituencies attending those universities considerably — to residents of those cities and to the wealthy outside those cities.

An Ireland which makes it a de facto impossibility for non-wealthy students to get a third-level education is one storing up problems for itself, to put it at its blandest. 

The professions become more closed off, with fewer and fewer entering those professions from outside the accommodation exclusion zones in operation around the universities and colleges.

Are there any solutions?

There was a flicker of light in Berlin last week, where a referendum passed which seeks to get the local government to buy housing owned by large property companies in the German capital, a referendum driven by rising anger over rent increases.

If enacted, it could mean about 226,000 apartments being transferred into public hands, which would obviously be good news for the 84% of Berliners who rent.

But will it be enacted? It’s a non-binding referendum, which means there’s no guarantee that the local government will be able to turn words into deeds, and court challenges to the constitutionality of the decision are expected.

If that wasn’t depressingly familiar for Irish readers accustomed to the usual screech for the constitutional rights of landowners when reform is mooted here, then there’ll be something equally reassuring about the chorus of complaints about the cost of nationalising so much private housing — that the money could be put into other projects...

You can see where this is going.

Housing is a particularly distressing problem because if you’re affected then it occupies so much of your attention it’s difficult to take a wider view.

And there are so many issues involved — financial, legal, political — that it’s also difficult to find a vantage point from which to view the entire problem.

Anti-dereliction stance

Kudos, then, to Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry of Anois, who have featured in this part of the paper in the past and who organised a Walking Festival to End Dereliction last Saturday.

It started at Cork City’s Nicholas Well Lane, and went through Shandon and the city centre before ending up by Odlums.

Frank and Jude discussed the derelict properties on the route, while there was poetry and music on offer also.

The amount of accommodation mouldering before our eyes in Cork, and all over the country, while people are sleeping on the streets, is a joke too dark for the edgiest comedians, yet it exists in plain sight in front of us.

Frank and Jude deserve credit for raising awareness of this issue, and also for showing a way to get a handle on the housing crisis — if dereliction is our starting point, then surely we can move on to the other problems in housing?