Una Mullally: Berlin has dimmed the lights while Dublin’s are still blazing

At night, Berlin is a dimly-lit city. It can be disconcerting. This autumn, it’s darker than ever. Conversations about energy conservation and gas shortages dominate. Come winter, the lights will be off on many buildings and monuments across the city. As Berlin’s residents see the city prepare for the winter, they take that lesson home with them.

Arriving back from Berlin to Dublin last week at night-time, the first thing that struck me was the brightness of everything. Empty offices with their lights on. Lit billboards. Blindingly bright digital advertisements. Illuminated signage on closed shops.

Our conversation about energy usage has orientated around subsidies and people cutting back in their homes, but it’s time for Government, local authorities, and the virtually empty corporate office sector, to get real.

Good on you for using a microwave instead of the oven, or turning the washing machine on at night, but it’s pretty worthless when it comes to broader energy conservation

It feels as though we are still sleepwalking into a three-pronged crisis that will dominate the winter; housing, energy, and small businesses going to the wall. We need three plans that are actually all connected. They’re about the cost of living, for sure, but they’re also about systemic change.

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The budget to prepare for — if not counter — the issues Ireland will face this winter, felt reactionary, loaded with short-term thinking, and wasteful. This was a “giveaway” budget, apparently, but there is no point throwing money at things that are broken. Fix them, and then they won’t cost you as much. Systemic change doesn’t need to be all about money. It requires creativity, smart ideas, and new approaches.

Let’s take small, independent businesses. Hospitality in Ireland is already taking a hit. Places are closing left, right, and centre. Trading conditions are frankly hostile for many, and even entities with big pockets, such as Press Up, closed multiple businesses in Cork. How on earth are the small guys going to cope?

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They’ll get subsidies for their energy bills, but we need much broader protections, because these businesses are already dealing with debt carried over from the pandemic, rates, and staffing shortages. The latter is underpinned by the housing crisis. We need a large collective effort to maintain Independent businesses in villages, towns and cities.

That means action from local authorities and Government to lower operating costs for businesses across rates, protecting streets that have integrity and character when it comes to Independent businesses so they aren’t shoved out, and commercial rent caps aimed at independent businesses that demonstrate community value.

You cannot compare your community’s local cafe with large international restaurant brands, and yet they’re all swimming in the same toxic sea right now.

We also need national shop-local campaigns to remind people to spend their money in small, independent businesses come Christmas.

Run housing? Could these people even run a bath?

Next up, energy. There is a nonsense at the heart of Ireland’s energy usage. Households (who will be frugal, because the bills will come) are being given all sorts of tips, and yet we have a Government ploughing ahead with data centre developments.

Good on you for using a microwave instead of the oven, or turning the washing machine on at night, but it’s pretty worthless when it comes to broader energy conservation, when householders’ money is essentially subsidising energy-hungry industry. Public buildings and monuments should not be lit at night. Brightly lit advertisements look ridiculous at this point in time. Data centre development needs to be halted immediately.

Pretty much everywhere in Europe has an energy crisis. But nowhere has the extremity of our housing crisis. So, let’s have an emergency cost of living-in-Ireland plan, please, that isn’t just throwing more money at broken ideas. Darragh O’Brien has failed as Minister for Housing. It is frankly astonishing that he is still in his job, and doubly hilarious that he is being touted in the media as a “future leader” of Fianna Fáil (although perhaps that does demonstrate the slim pickings in that party).

It’s also ridiculous that he’s still parroting nonsense about “objections” being the primary issue stunting housing “supply”. It’s Government policies that created the housing crisis. If we didn’t have a policy crisis, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. Little of what he has done has helped renters, who are shouldering so much cost and stress.

This winter, the Government needs to not just introduce an eviction ban, but embark upon a process to cut rents by at least 50 per cent to bring us close to the European average. Then we need to ban corporate landlords who raise rents and rinse profits. We should use the money that will otherwise be pumped into HAP in future years to build public housing.

Local authorities should be put in emergency mode and told to identify every single potential apartment space over every shop and business in every urban centre. Invest in that, and there could be hundreds of new, affordable flats in our cities within months. Giving money to renters is an emergency measure, but how appalling is it that the Government has to subsidise landlords via renters because of the high rent their policies created?

Run housing? Could these people even run a bath? Maybe a cold one, come December.