Tensions emerging between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over housing

Deep scepticism in Fine Gael over the evictions ban has amplified the low rumble of inter-party tensions between the two big parties of the Coalition in a way that is likely to become a feature of life in Government from now until the next election.

Fine Gael’s grumbles about being bounced into the ban by Fianna Fáil were half-hearted enough. Senior figures knew that a ban was a political inevitability once its possibility had been flagged a few weeks ago in The Irish Times and then more or less endorsed by the Taoiseach at the EU summit in Prague — even as Leo Varadkar was simultaneously pouring tepid (if not cold) water on it in the Dáil.

And at least some of those senior Fine Gael figures are self-aware enough to know the tactic of musing aloud over something like this in the media as a way of putting it on the political agenda, leaving the media and Opposition to do the work of pushing it towards fruition. It is not confined to Fianna Fáil and some of those grumbling have even been known to engage in the practice themselves.

There’s a bit of a history between the parties on housing

There are objections in Fine Gael, and misgivings in Fianna Fáil for that matter, about the eviction ban — not least because it may accelerate the exit of small landlords from the rental market, further constricting supply.

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But also because Fine Gael Ministers know that it will be Varadkar, or the taoiseach as he will be then, who has to justify the lifting of the ban next spring.

There’s a bit of a history between the parties on housing. Fine Gaelers took umbrage at the way Fianna Fáilers trashed the record of Eoghan Murphy, and before him Simon Coveney, before and after they came into Government. Part of Fianna Fáil’s response to criticisms of slow progress on housing has been that it had to more or less start from scratch when it entered the Coalition. Fine Gaelers understand the rationale, but it riles some of them all the same.

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Last week Fine Gael had a couple of breakout sessions after its parliamentary party meeting to brainstorm ideas on … housing. Many of them, unsurprisingly, found their way into the newspapers — underscored by no shortage of Fine Gael figures privately griping that the pressure on housing was building and that output from O’Brien’s flagship Housing for All policy needed to improve amid fears that performance will dip next year.

The backlash to the story was anything but contrived. There was real frustration and anger from Fianna Fáil, privately and publicly. “They basically outsourced housing to us for the last two years and let us do a 360 on their market-focused policy,” fumed one TD over text.

Kildare North TD James Lawless and Dublin North-West’s Paul McAuliffe tweeted defending Fianna Fáil, with the former going in studs up on his Coalition colleagues, pointing out that Fine Gael had been in charge of housing for 10 of the last 12 years and pleading “spare me” in a follow-up piece in the Sunday Independent.

Rumbling underneath all this is the countdown to the changeover in the Taoiseach’s office in mid-December

There were also exchanges over the concrete block levy being introduced by a Fine Gael Minister and resisted most loudly by Fianna Fáil backbenchers.

Rumbling underneath all this is the countdown to the changeover in the Taoiseach’s office in mid-December — and the changes that this will mean for the modus operandi of the Coalition.

Fianna Fáil will have to get used to the fact that their leader is no longer the Government’s chief spokesman — and many of them fear that Fine Gael’s interests will be at least as important to the new taoiseach as the Government’s.

Combine that with the realisation that the two parties will inevitably be electoral rivals, and tensions between the two parties seem unlikely to disappear — rather the opposite, in fact.