Housing Ireland:
Looking back, moving forward

Michael Punch

Issue 391, vol.98, Autumn 2009

Almost 250,000 housing units were completed between 1996 and 2006; but implicit in the statistical breakdown is that most of these tended to remain empty – as investment vehicles, or second / holiday homes.

It became harder for lower and middle-income households to take on a mortgage : households attempting first-time purchase required two earners. Meanwhile in the main private rental markets of Dublin, a single-income household on the industrial wage would have struggled to find an affordable one-bedroom unit. And this is not yet to mention the people surviving on the streets, in shelters, in emergency accommodation, in overcrowded dwellings or in illegally substandard private-rental units.

What had happened was that a consumerist / materialist concept of housing as a commodity, had come into tension with a personalist / developmental concept of housing as a home. In practice, Government-policy priorities suggested a clear commitment to the promotion of a private home-owning society (given the 1990s elimination of property tax, and the removal of the capital gains tax on the principal residence – together with numerous tax-incentive schemes to support property development). Meanwhile, at local authority level, public out-put on house building counted in this period for only 6% of the total – and much of existing stock was sold.

“Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power”, the Catechism of the Catholic Church warns us; economic life “is ordered first of all to the service of…the entire human community”. An overall economic policy needs to reduce dependence on the housing market – of itself all too subject to booms and slumps. And in order to reduce the environmental costs of unplanned market-driven development, there is need for a serious national urban, regional and housing strategy. Land for public uses, including housing, should be attained at existing use value, plus a fair element of compensation in the interests of social justice and the common good (as set out in the Constitution)…The vision is simply that all people will have access to a home in sustainable communities and in a living environment.