Coalition leaders stopped short of endorsing the Nama chief executive to be made the State’s new housing “tsar” on Tuesday despite the Minister for Housing publicly backing him for the role.
James Browne said on Tuesday that Nama boss Brendan McDonagh, who is expected to retain his €430,000 salary if appointed to lead a new Housing Activation Office, was his preferred candidate for the role.
Mr McDonagh’s name has been publicly linked to the role at the Housing Activation Office for some time, but Mr Browne’s intervention led to a thinly veiled rebuke from a spokesman for Tánaiste Simon Harris.
A post-Cabinet briefing for journalists on Tuesday was told that Mr Harris’s view was that appointments of this scale “should be discussed between [coalition] leaders in advance of any name being made public”.
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The matter is set to be discussed further at a meeting of the Cabinet subcommittee on housing on Thursday.
Coalition spokesmen were not able to give a firm timeline on when the appointment will be made or when the chief executive of the new office will begin duties. They said the new office would enable the removal of barriers to construction on specific sites around the country.
The Taoiseach had earlier insisted there would be no additional salary cost for the role of director of the new office because the appointee would be seconded from within the public service.
Mr McDonagh is seconded to Nama from the National Treasury Management Agency, and it is expected that were he to be appointed his salary would be unchanged.
Micheál Martin confirmed in the Dáil that the Cabinet had approved the establishment of the Housing Activation Office, but said no decision had been made on the person who would head the new agency as he faced criticism from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and others.
She called it an “extravagant gold-plated salary” and Ireland’s “most expensive job-share” of the role of the Minister for Housing.
Ms McDonald said the Government missed its housing targets year after year but its answer was another “bureaucrat on an eye-watering salary” and it was taking people for fools.
Meanwhile, some Government TDs are privately concerned at the ongoing controversy. One Fine Gael TD said they struggled to understand the amount of political capital being expended on the matter.
A Fianna Fáil TD privately urged the Coalition to get on with making decisions that would have an impact on the building of homes
There is also much private criticism from within the property development sector, where critics question how applicable Mr McDonagh’s experience with Nama is to homebuilding.
In the Dáil the Taoiseach insisted there had been a significant “step-change” in housing delivery, with more than 48,000 social houses added to housing stock, more than at any time since the 1970s. Overall housing targets for the past three years had been exceeded with 130,000 houses built. He hit out at Sinn Féin’s opposition to the help to buy and bridge the gap schemes, which he said would have halted building momentum.
He said “no decision has been taken in terms of who will head off that office”, but “the person will be seconded from within the public service” which “basically means there will be no additional cost in salary or whatever, to housing or to anybody for that matter, in terms of secondment within the public service”.
Social Democrats housing spokesman Cian O’Callaghan said “the Government’s big idea is another gimmick” . He said it was “hiring as housing tsar the head of Nama who oversaw the sale of thousands of homes and billions of euro of development land”.
