Govt should serve the interests of people, not developers
From the richest to the poorest countries in the world, the provision of housing or shelter for all of society is recognised as a moral obligation.
This moral obligation for states the world over, has at its origins the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 when the right to adequate housing joined the body of international, universally applicable and accepted human rights law.
The difficulty with this moral obligation for a State, which stems from a human right to adequate housing, is that social housing policy has always been fashioned on a notion of what a person or a family is entitled to, rather than what duties and obligations the state has. The end result in Ireland has been a State system that successively passes the buck to another organ of the state while those on waiting lists are forced to compete against one another to have their human right vindicated.
Fr Peter McVerry SJ, a champion of the poor and the homeless, has recently described the upsurge in homelessness that his charity is dealing with as a tsunami that will bring down the Government.
While local authority funding has dramatically decreased in the past 12 months, arguably the most expensive service that it provides, social housing, has seen its waiting lists increase 42% in one year from 45,000 to 65,000.
Major struggles
During that same period, where 20,000 or so households applied for social housing, the economy at large created 60,000 new jobs. The headline figures of improvements in the overall economy are clearly masking major struggles at the lower end of the economy.
The reaction from the Government to this problem appears to be to look at ways to borrow money to fund the construction of houses in the long term and in the short term increase rent allowance caps where families are at risk of losing their homes.
Rent Supplement is paid to people living in private rented accommodation who cannot provide for the cost of their accommodation from their own resources. This means that instead of €40 a week rent allowance, it may go up in some cases to €45 or €50. Clearly with Ireland’s debt running at 120% of the overall size of its economy and our European legal obligation to halve that debt, borrowing from the international markets to fund the creation of social house building will be a very difficult task.
Arguably, something much more radical is required, a solution that undoubtedly in the short term would increase enormously the financial burden of the State, but in the long term may provide a much more sustainable system of social housing.
If the adequate provision of housing in Ireland was a constitutional right, the failure of the State to uphold its citizens’ constitutional rights would provide recourse to the courts system to have their rights vindicated. Currently, it is only the court of public opinion and high-profile charities like Fr McVerry’s, which push the needle on reform. However, if there existed a constitutional, as distinct from just a moral obligation on the State to provide adequate social housing, it would likely lead to much more long term and sustainable solutions.
The courts will have regard to financial constraints of the State to vindicate such a right but the insertion of such an amendment in the constitution would present a clear framework that legislators must adhere to rather than waiting for the Simon Community or Fr McVerry to appear on RTÉ to ensure that action be taken. This would be a radical proposal for Ireland, but similar concepts exist in other constitutional democracies.
Fundamental right
For example in the largest democracy in the world, India, its Supreme Court have recognised the right to adequate housing as a fundamental right protected under the constitution.
Early on in 2000, Bertie Ahern’s Government attempted to find a legal solution to the provision of social housing by amending planning and developing laws to link the granting of planning permission to developers for residential development to the provision by developers of land, houses or sites to be used for the construction of social housing. At the time this was a radical proposal, but it was quickly watered down on foot of intensive lobbying by certain vested interests in the construction sector. This was predictable, given the then Government’s close links with major developers who funded the election campaigns of Fianna Fáil.
Risk
Today, once again, we risk having housing policy dictated by the same vested interests who plunged Ireland into an economic quagmire in 2008.
The developers, builders and bankers who leaned on Fianna Fáil to create massive demand for housing back in the early 2000s, succeeded in their lobbying to drive house prices up to 16 times the average Irish income.
Today, once again, we see the same vested interests leaning on the Fine Gael-led Government to drive up housing demand and hike up house prices. The recent announcement of the Government’s Construction Strategy is a deeply worrying sign.
The plan is clearly designed to serve the interests of developers, rather than the thousands of families who are either homeless or desperately trying to provide adequate housing for themselves.
The Government would serve the interests of Irish people best by recognising that its duty is to provide a housing strategy for people rather than simply for developers and builders. The guiding principle should be to support the provision of homes for our people, not a quick buck for speculators. That is the moral choice that faces the Government.