It was an honest admission by Minister for Housing James Browne that we need a Housing Activation Office. It is, however, a half truth. The truth is that housing is not a Government priority at all, and certainly not an emergency. Inertia and the strength of the status quo ensure that housing remains at the top of the agenda as a totem of political impotence. Departments and agencies are in business-as-usual mode.
Housing gets enormous amounts of money, and endless new initiatives. Output falls short of promises, but has sharply increased. However, the demands of a growing population and a full-employment economy mean that affordability falls further behind. Homelessness is a driver of disaffection that has shrivelled the political centre. What it has never had is the alignment of State power with political responsibility. Browne’s problem is that while he has almost all responsibility, very little power is within his reach in the department of housing. To call that out publicly would upset the apple tart, as Bertie Ahern memorably said.
Houses themselves are simple, standard things. But it is the land, planning, water, sewage and transport that are the knotted processes choking delivery
Unlike the Department of Health, where the causes and cures of its problems are largely within its own remit, the opposite is true of housing. It is justice that oversees the courts and legal profession; finance that is responsible for the banking system and macroeconomic policy; public expenditure that controls the financial allocations and nit-picking permissions required to move anything in the system; energy oversees the electricity grid; transport has the roads and public transport; higher education the skilled workers; the local authorities much else. And everything else is the responsibility of agencies. The agencies are behind the firewall of boards that reflect too well the aversion of their parent departments to any real responsibility for housing. The status quo survives successfully.
The former housing minister Eoghan Murphy regretted afterwards not declaring a housing emergency. He wasn’t allowed to do so because it would have shifted responsibility. In the economic crash, Covid and Brexit politicians at the centre of government aligned the State to an overriding exigency. In our system, the centre consists only of the departments of the Taoiseach, finance and public expenditure. Housing has been an overriding political priority since at least 2016, but at every juncture a conscious decision was made to subcontract responsibility rather than take it on. The shunting of accommodation for asylum seekers to the department of children was a farcical consequence of offloading responsibility as far away as possible.
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Ireland has the most centralised system of local government in Europe and ministers under the Ministers and Secretaries Act of 1924 are a corporation sole – meaning that the powers of their department are vested in them personally. In over a hundred years, the only significant change to the Act was to increase the numbers of ministers of state. On paper: all-power. In practice: paper tigers. Ministers recycled functions out to agencies, leaving themselves with responsibility but not power.
The issue is not about co-ordination, it is about power and how it is used. A priority is something that is done before other things. Houses themselves are simple, standard things. But it is the land, planning, water, sewage and transport that are the knotted processes choking delivery. These are led by other departments and agencies with other priorities, as well as a lack of capacity in skilled resources, and occasionally of calibre.
An indefinite emergency is impossible. What is required is sufficient political and administrative brutality to inculcate new norms across the board within two or three years at most. Wholesale reform of local government is impossible in the short term, but a directly elected mayor in Limerick John Moran says he is willing and able to expedite delivery locally if given the means. In the meantime, delivery in local authorities depends on the priorities and capacities of CEOs, who are as unaccountable to central government as they are locally. Agency boards, appointed through a public appointments process, are not effectively beholden to their minister – who, if they are not the minister for housing, have other priorities anyway.
Our system leaves the department of public expenditure in charge of everything but it is responsible for nothing. Housing receives hardly a passing glance from finance. Taoisigh spend their political capital elsewhere.
Housing is the issue that will determine that fate of a government that represents the last stand of the remnants of the political centre. The alternative, if it is taken, will be radically different. If every stop were pulled out, it is possible – but only just – that an appreciable difference in housing could be made in three to five years. There are now only months remaining for a recasting of the system, under a centre that is galvanised and in control.
