Who Really Owns Ireland? by Matt Cooper: Too sprawling to stand up properly

Matt Cooper is a household name. One of Ireland’s leading business journalists, he hosts The Last Word, a daily radio show on Today FM, and writes weekly columns for the Irish Daily Mail and the Business Post.

His broadcasting and writing are wide-ranging and considered, generally with a pro-business focus.

His biographies of businessmen Tony O’Reilly and Michael O’Leary were shortlisted for Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year, as is his latest book.

Who Really Owns Ireland? is the third in a series of sorts, following How Ireland Really Went Bust (2012) and Who Really Runs Ireland? (2019).

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Running to almost 450 pages, the book covers an incredibly wide array of issues. The thread that runs throughout is who is buying and who is selling Ireland.

Across 10 parts and 40 chapters, Cooper lists an enormous volume of transactions running into billions of euros.

From the buying and selling of land to building hotels, apartments and office blocks, to investment in wind energy and forestry, the book tracks who is paying for and ultimately owning key parts of the State’s infrastructure.

Cooper says he is concerned with the large-scale transfer of assets since the Great Recession. He acknowledges that property ownership “is the chief dividing line between rich and poor in the State”. However, these concerns are not always worked through in his analysis of the transactions he details.

There are a number of chapters on who has snapped up the land sold off by Nama post-crash since 2010, and who has gone on to develop it.

In addition to the well-known Cairn, Glenveagh and Hines are a list of other investors including European and North American pension funds and Chinese state-backed capital.

Cooper is broadly positive about the role being played by such investment capital.

He is more likely to bemoan what he believes are obstacles to such investment, such as the planning system and Nimby residents and politicians, rather than the way in which much of this investment is driving the affordability crisis.

And it is here that the book starts to lose its way. Cooper implicitly takes the view that in a housing crisis all new supply is welcome.

He fails to interrogate the relationship between certain types of investment, their impact on development costs and in turn their contribution to the ever-deepening affordability crisis.

There is also another framing at work throughout the book, where private investors and developers are presented as benign while public actors, whether politicians or state agencies, are seen as obstacles to development.

This is not to say that Cooper lets the private sector completely off the hook. He is at time critical of some developers and investors for poor-quality work or speculatively sitting on sites. But these are the exceptions.

However, these biases, which Cooper is entitled to hold, are not the book’s main shortcoming. There is a much bigger problem with How Really Owns Ireland?

The author has clearly taken on too big of a task. The consequence is that unsubstantiated and in turn questionable accounts of specific events are a regular feature throughout the book.

[ Irish Glass Bottle site developers offer 86 affordable homes to Government but only 25 taken up ]

[ Nama chief defends discounted loans sale to debtors’ brother after ‘intimidation’ of receiver ]

His account of the Poolbeg Strategic Development Zone is a case in point. Cooper ignores the very positive work by Dublin City Council planning department and councillors of all political parties in agreeing, unanimously, the most ambitious master plan in the history of the State.

He also wrongly attributes to former housing minister Simon Coveney the provision of an additional 650 affordable homes in the 3,500-unit housing scheme. The credit for this goes to the Irish Glass Bottle Housing Action Group and the council members.

Cooper also errs on the issue of the why the council didn’t buy the land from Nama to deliver the affordable homes.

Nama and DCC had agreed on a significant discount for this land, but the Department of Housing and then minister Eoghan Murphy would not fund it.

Cooper also fails to mention that Dublin City Council executive and councillors along with the entire Oireachtas had called for the transfer of Nama’s remaining 20 per cent stake in the site to the State in order to drive down development costs and guarantee the delivery of the affordable homes.

Similar problems can be found in discussions of the Clonburris Strategic Development Zone, the Adamstown Strategic Development Zone, the Hines proposed rezoning at Liffey Valley and the battle between Johnny Ronan and Dublin City Council in the North Docklands to name but a few.

The absence of footnotes or an index makes these sections really challenging if not impossible to factcheck all Cooper’s claims.

While the ultimate responsibility for these weaknesses lies with the author, one has to ask why the editor did not rein in Cooper’s ambition.

[ Cairn Homes upgrades full-year forecasts as order book tops €1bn ]

[ Why not move Dublin Port now, rather than later, while we have lots of money and a housing crisis? ]

If they had, Who Really Owns Ireland? would have been a shorter and, importantly, much better book.

In the end the reader doesn’t really get a sense of either who owns Ireland or what we could do about it.

Instead, we get moments of good quality business journalism about who has bought what from whom punctuated by an analysis that seems more based on cloudy memory than hard facts.

Eoin Ó Broin is a TD for Dublin Mid-West and Sinn Féin housing spokesperson