'We haven't come so far as a country, Joe. In fact we've gone backwards'

Irish Daily Mirror

25-05-2025

I was surprised to hear Joe Duffy cheer Ireland's social progress on the Late Late Show, saying: 'We've come so far as a country.'
The legendary broadcaster was chatting last week to Patrick Kielty to mark his retirement after 27 years of listening to the nation on Liveline. The Ballyfermot man is one of our most down-to-earth public figures, and I'm a big fan.
But I'd have thought he'd be highly aware of the realities of life in Ireland today, specifically the social ill of housing that's destroying families. Instead, Duffy's takeaway was how - less than a century ago - we were yet to abolish the workhouse, and therefore we'd advanced as a species.
'We have come so far and I think that's absolutely brilliant,' he said. 'We should acknowledge it without losing the context of the housing crisis and all that carry on.'
It's a pretty low bar if you're using Dickensian workhouses as a starting point. The only way is up, from there.
But I don't think by any standard we can look around at how ordinary, hard-working people can't afford to rent or buy; or witness kids queueing up at soup kitchens; or know families are living in one room, and pat ourselves on the back. We can't take record homeless figures of 15,000, including nearly 5,000 children, and conclude we've done a good job.
In fact, about 100 years ago, a golden age of housing was about to start.
Ireland moved from the 1920s of cramped tenements, collapsing houses and the worst slums outside of Calcutta, to large scale construction of social housing. Most of the houses built from the 1930s up to the 1970s were council houses. At one stage, it was as high a 55% of all housing output. To put that in perspective, that figure is 5.5% this past decade.
As many as one-fifth of people were accommodated in social housing during that time. I was one of them.
I grew up in a council house built in the 1970s. Shamefully, I used to be slightly self-conscious about this. Now I think I was lucky to grow up in a time and place where people could raise families, without need for two incomes, in a decent home.
Wealthier friends of mine lived in big detached houses and that suited them. But we were just as happy in our Rockypool estate.
Then, over time, there was a deliberate shift away from social housing, with it effectively ceasing after the economic crash. The Government outsourced it into the private market, killing two birds with one stone, so they thought.
Landlords were happy, state was happy - with the landlords paying nearly half the rent income back to the taxman, it benefitted both to let rents get higher. But it predictably backfired.
Ultimately, it's this flip from social housing as state investment to social housing as private profit that created a housing crisis that's been going on for 11 years.
There's this received narrative that housing problems are a constant, that this is just the latest phase of an ongoing issue.
They're not: they were caused by government policy that could not have been more guaranteed to cause a crisis if someone sat down and designed them specifically for that purpose.
Just one example of this is how our leaders let rents go as high as they could go before bringing in basic rights for tenants in a crisis, such as rent caps and protection from being turfed out your own home in a matter of weeks.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan said it in the Dail in 2014: "We need rents to go a little bit higher."
Another is how they responded to spiralling rents by boosting the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), paying more money into landlords' pockets, instead of limiting what they could squeeze out of renters. They refused for years to bring in a rent cap.
Then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed in 2021 it was a profit-driven business, saying: "One person's rent is another person's income."
So don't buy into the political handwringing about it, and the headlines about state 'solutions' to a crisis it has engineered and maintained.
The housing crisis is now an established housing system, and the reason it hasn't been 'solved' is because it suits too many people.
In my view, it's comparable to why America does not have a functioning healthcare system and instead lets the citizen shoulder the financial burden.
I don't believe we've come so far as a country. Instead, we've gone backwards.