Irish Examiner view: New government in sight as deal finally done
The 34th Dáil reconvenes in Leinster House next Wednesday. Stock picture: Maxwells/PA
There was no white smoke belching from a chimney in Leinster House yesterday, but a new Government is in sight — even if we have not seen ministers collect their seals of office from Áras an Uachtaráin yet.
The element of suspense was negligible: Since the election in November, most observers believed the numbers ensured Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would do a deal with the Regional Independents Group and the two Healy-Rae brothers, and so it has proved.
Close attention will fall on the draft programme for Government — its proposals include some very worthwhile aspirations, including smaller class sizes, gym membership tax credits, a new transport police, the retention of the pension age at 66, and a phased ending of the means test for the Carer’s Allowance.
Although it may be interesting to retain a copy of the document for consultation before the next election, even closer attention will be paid to those who implement its measures.
The makeup of the Cabinet and the allocation of minister of state roles will fuel plenty of speculation in the coming days, even if one deputy has jumped the gun already.
Kerry’s Michael Healy-Rae said that a junior ministry was going in his direction when asked this week.
The general perception with recent coalitions is that the smallest party involved, such as the Greens in the last administration, functions as a mudguard of sorts for the bigger parties.
If a backlash occurs against the incumbent Government — all but guaranteed in these volatile times — the voters are usually seen as “punishing” the smaller party at the polls.
That may not be the case with the new Government, with deputies supporting Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael so disparate that even their collective name acknowledges geography rather than ideology.
However, we may be getting ahead of ourselves. There is no shortage of challenges awaiting the new administration, which will have to get off to a running start.
The new Government will face one problem that has defied the efforts of successive administrations to solve it. The housing and accommodation crisis in Ireland is so multifaceted and piercing now that it appears capable of impacting negatively on almost every sector of Irish life, and we are sorely in need of imaginative responses to it.
It is interesting to consider the Spanish government’s recent announcement that it proposes to impose a tax of up to 100% on real estate bought by non-residents from countries outside the EU, as it seeks to tackle Spain’s housing crisis.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez gave some background when announcing the measure earlier this week: “... in 2023 alone, non-European Union residents bought around 27,000 houses and flats in Spain. And they didn’t do it to live in them, they didn’t do it for their families to have a place to live, they did it to speculate, to make money from them, which we — in the context of shortage that we are in — obviously cannot allow.”
This surely sounds depressingly familiar to many readers in Ireland, particularly those seeking to find homes in areas popular with tourists.
The urgency of the Irish situation was only reinforced by another news story emerging this week about the slow provision of social housing in Dublin. Three separate regeneration projects in the capital’s inner city have been delayed for so long, almost 600 council houses have been lost while another 1,700 public homes have not been built.
One of the regeneration projects, based in St Teresa’s Gardens, began 24 years ago.
It should be pointed out that Mr Sánchez declined to offer details on how his proposal would operate or how it would be enforced. There are doubts about his government’s ability to get legislation enacting these proposals passed.
However, we are not in a position to scoff at another jurisdiction seeking answers to a housing crisis. Not when our own urban regeneration projects have been rumbling on for a quarter of a century without completion.
A US government ban on social media site TikTok may begin this Sunday unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. TikTok has been criticised for its data collection and close links to the Chinese government, leading US officials to declare it a security risk.
For those Americans devoted to the clips and memes of TikTok, there seems to be an obvious replacement on hand.
Many of them have been taking (virtual) refuge on a similar site — RedNote, the international version of Chinese social media site Xiaohongshu.
RedNote provides a familiar experience to TikTok and recent group chats involving thousands of new users were tagged #TikTokRefugee.
Not all was as it seemed, however. According to reports in Forbes, “posts addressing politically sensitive issues, such as the Chinese government’s role in internet regulation, were flagged or quietly removed”. Forbes added that “RedNote’s privacy policy explicitly states that the platform collects a wide range of personal information... [and] also grants the platform the right to share this data with ‘third-party service providers’ or ‘relevant government authorities’”.
If one of the main motivations behind the American drive to ban TikTok is the concern about Chinese government agencies accessing users’ data, then what happens if its replacement does the same?
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