saw what the market rents were for a small one bedroom flat, €1,200 a month! The Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) would cover just half that. His pension brings in €897.43 a month. So after rent he would be left with just €297 a month to live on. Impossible!
The Council might be able to offer him something but not for a few years. What will he do until then? At his age he couldn’t face a hostel full of drug users. Nothing wrong with them mind you, but not at his age. Maybe he’ll find a bedsit in the city centre. They were banned a few years back but he’s heard there are still a few on offer. The prospect of an outside toilet up a flight of stairs at his age and with his enlarged prostate gland is pretty daunting.
John has six months before his Notice to Quit comes up. Something will come up. Maybe his landlord will change his mind. But to be honest at 70 years of age he never thought he would be facing this.
Other real people
These are not fictional stories. They are real cases from my constituency clinic. And there are thousands more.
I could tell you about the student who may have to leave college midway through his degree in business management because the rent is so high after a 17 percent increase, the third such hike in three years. Even with his part-time job he can’t manage. He could commute but the five-hour round trip every day would have a real impact on his studies. Maybe he should just pack it in and get a job. The local supermarket in his home village is looking for full-time staff. Who knows, after a few months there might even be a supervisor’s role.
Then there is the young graduate, working hard in her first job having to choose between paying for rent, fuel or food as payday approaches. A while back the cooker broke but the landlord took a month to fix it. Living on takeaways for four weeks straight is no joke. She could have taken him to the Residential Tenancies Board but flats are so scarce these days she didn’t want to risk being hit with a Notice to Quit.
Or the working couple in their thirties desperate to save a deposit to buy their own home, forced to live apart because there isn’t enough space in either of their parents’ houses for both of them. When there are young children involved the separation is even more painful. And because house prices are so damn high, even when they have the deposit securing the mortgage is not guaranteed. They could always look for somewhere outside the city. What a choice; never-ending commutes or impossible mortgage payments.
I could take you to Traveller halting sites where families are living in Dickensian conditions which should have been eradicated in the nineteenth century. I could introduce you to families with special needs children living in accommodation that is so unsuitable it is actively holding back their physical and emotional development. I could bring you to Direct Provision centres where families who have secured their legal right to remain in the country are trapped in their hotel room for years because they cannot secure private rental accommodation.
These are the human faces of our dysfunctional housing system. They are people who are doing everything right. They get up early in the morning. They work hard. They care for their children. They respect their neighbours. All they want is the chance to have a place to call home. But our housing system is so bad, abnormal and difficult they simply can’t access secure and affordable accommodation.
In the pages that follow there will be a lot of facts and statistics. But behind every single number stands Una and Sean and their five children, Laura and her twins, John, struggling students, hard pressed renters, delayed first-time buyers, those living on the absolute fringes of our housing system and tens of thousands like them. Victims of a housing system that is abnormal, impaired and disruptive of normal social relations.
A Dysfunctional System
Why is our housing system like this? Was it always this way? What decisions were made, or not made, and by whom, that resulted in such dysfunction? Does it have to be this way? What alternatives are there? How much would they cost? How long would they take to implement? What do we have to do to get those in power to listen and act? Do we have to take power ourselves to make the necessary changes?
These are the questions that I will try to answer in the pages that follow. In asking and hopefully answering them I am trying to achieve a number of things. Firstly, to fully understand why we are where we are today. Secondly, to describe what a functional housing system could look like. And thirdly to set out a plan of action for all those who believe, as I do, that change can only be achieved through mass social mobilisation and progressive parliamentary action.
My central argument is that our housing system is this way because it was designed so. People in positions of power took advice and made decisions which resulted in the dysfunction all around us. Sometimes they did so with sincere and genuine intent. Other times they were incompetent, corrupt or greedy. But what matters is less why people made these decisions, more the impact those decisions had and continue to have on the lives of real people.
The key features of our current housing system are an under-provision of public non-market housing and an over-reliance on the private market to meet housing need. This involves massive subsidies to landowners, developers, landlords and investment funds. It is based on a conception of housing as a commodity rather than a social necessity. It prioritises, whether intentionally or not, profit over need and as a consequence generates levels of housing inequality and poverty which are structural requisites rather than unintended consequences of the system.
Any alternative functional housing system must reverse these trends and place the large-scale provision of public non-market housing at its very centre. Housing is too fundamental a need for human well-being to be left to the boom and bust cycle of the market.
The book that follows attempts to make the argument, in as convincing a manner as possible, that at the core of our dysfunctional housing system is an over-reliance on the private market and thus the key ingredient to a stable, secure and affordable housing system is public housing.
But slogans and sound bites are not enough. The people in need of safe, secure and affordable housing deserve more than that. They need a credible, costed and coherent alternative to our current dysfunctional housing system. One that can be implemented in the real world, that can secure the active endorsement of a majority of the people and that with the right kind of Government could start to be constructed from today.
Somewhere between the sincerity of inadequate amelioration and the energy of impossibilist rupture lies a pathway to a functional housing system that guarantees all people a place they can call home. The book you are about to read tries to signpost that pathway and offer a glimpse, albeit sketchy, of the final destination.
Movement 1
The State Gets Involved
Modern Housing
The formation of the Land League in 1879 marks the beginning of the social movement for modern housing in Ireland. It is no accident that Michael Davitt’s first-hand account of this turning point in our national history is titled The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland.
The demands of this powerful national network of tenant farmers was to shape the State’s response to housing need in the decades that followed. In turn these changes, in both urban and rural Ireland, laid the foundations for the housing system that was to develop during the course of the twentieth century.
Midway through the nineteenth century 80 percent of the population of Ireland lived in dwellings made of mud on land rented from landlords. Half of these comprised single-room huts with no windows in which families and animals lived, ate and slept together. The other half had more rooms and usually windows but could still only be described as basic.1
The remaining 20 percent were divided between those living
