Mick Clifford: Why successive governments put landowners ahead of the common good

For decades, governments enriched landowners through rezoning while failing to deliver a fair, functioning planning system

Justice minister Jim O'Callaghan. The response of the current administration to the housing crisis has a whiff of desperation about it.

Crises can make people crazy. The housing crisis can make a collective government crazy, or so it appears from the recent musings emerging from its core.

Last Sunday, at an event to commemorate the IRA leader Liam Lynch, Jim O’Callaghan threw in his tuppence worth to further the aims of a republic. He wants to place the common good and public interest ahead of any special interests in the area of housing.