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Insightful, illuminating works by leading housing commentators both ultimately ask: remembering our past, while looking to the future, what kind of Ireland do we need to build?
At what point does the term “crisis” become inaccurate? It implies the need for an urgent solution but, after 12 years of an acute crisis in our housing system, we are still waiting.
Governments come and go. New plans and schemes are launched. A group of experts is appointed to a Housing Commission , their report almost immediately forgotten. Election cycles see political parties promising to build a fantastical number of new homes, but the numbers climbing stubbornly higher are rents, house prices and the people experiencing homelessness .
Into this morass come new books from two of Ireland’s leading commentators on housing. Lorcan Sirr is a housing policy analyst, senior lecturer at Technological University Dublin and a regular contributor to The Irish Times. Ronan Lyons is associate professor in economics at Trinity College Dublin, and widely known for his quarterly Daft.ie reports on the Irish housing market.
Sirr’s Housing a Nation: Seven Generations of Land, Politics and Power reflects on the history of land and housing in Ireland, starting before the Famine and exploring the context and consequence of past approaches to housing policy up to the present day. In Brittle, Lyons focuses on analysing our present housing situation, before he shifts his attention to future solutions.
Each book looks at housing through a different lens but it is the many points of consensus that stand out upon reading. Both texts offer insight and illumination, not only into the technical challenges of housing but the political, cultural and social context in which housing choices are made.
This effort to relate how housing shapes broader society leads both Lyons and Sirr to narrativise the lives of invented characters and use their stories to demonstrate and highlight the human cost of policy shortcomings. This choice is wise, and it works. It ensures that the human consequences of mistakes and delays are not lost in debates over data. Sirr examines what happened over the centuries to bring us to our current impasse.
Behind housing policy, he writes, are “decisions … shaped by dogma, influenced by power … often ideological in nature, divorced and removed from the reality of everyday life”. He returns to this theme throughout the book, revealing how the same pressures and processes of the past recur in the present and lead us to reproduce the same failings and inequalities. Sirr begins in 1821 with a vivid description of the small cottage inhabited by “Will and Eliza”.
The pernicious threat of eviction hangs over these powerless tenants at the mercy of their landowners, standing in contrast to the living conditions of the Anglo-Irish landlord in the Big House. From this starting point, Sirr spans seven generations of a fictional family to take the reader through the first census, the mapping of Ireland, Griffith’s valuation and the construction of the workhouses.
He describes how the conditions that produced the Great Famine rested, in large part, on a dysfunctional land system. The decades of emigration that followed held back any prospect of economic growth and decimated the population. Land reforms, brought in to undermine popular support for the Home Rule movement, were not sufficient to arrest momentum towards self-governance.
Post-independence, Sirr focuses on the interplay of land, housing and power with a perceptive review of the political and social influences on Irish housing in the 20th century. The role of the architect Herbert Simms and the building of new suburbs in Dublin to meet the needs of a growing population highlight the successes of earlier eras.
The influence of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid on suburban planning in the mid-20th century seems remarkable at this juncture, and shows the enormous change Ireland has undergone in recent decades. Sirr also points to an anti-urban bias that dominated for decades, and the idealised vision of a rural, agrarian lifestyle that left the planning and development system with a cultural distrust of dense housing, where illicit activities and subversive ideas might spread.
A detailed account of the Ballymun flats project gives greater context to the pressure to provide alternatives to slum conditions in Dublin’s tenements, and the fatal tragedies that befell families when these tenements collapsed. While visions of urban neglect and decay remain all too familiar to Dubliners, efforts to tackle the appalling squalor of the tenements have improved life for many. The continued, if slow, expansion of the social and affordable housing sector should offer hope.
In Brittle, Lyons foregrounds the invisible nature of many forms of housing precarity, including the absent households that are never formed or counted in homelessness data by virtue of emigration, couch-surfing or the lost opportunity for new family formation. He highlights the many young people who have had their lives delayed or truncated by the lack of housing options, observing the invisibility of many people’s experience of this crisis.
He defines a category of people – the “blocked” – who earn too much for State subsidies but too little to access accommodation provided by the private market. This group includes young people, the newly arrived and those experiencing relationship breakdown. Their experience, Lyons says, is evidence that “Ireland increasingly produces households who are expected to fend for themselves in a system structurally incapable of serving them”. It is this structural failing that Lyons attacks.
With his extensive technical command of economic and tax policies on housing, he pinpoints a series of decisions that have contributed to our current situation. These include the abolition of domestic rates, the expansion of section 23 tax relief, and the transfer of social rental properties into private ownership. Though popular with those in a position to buy, this left the State’s public housing stock heavily diminished by the time of the global financial crash.
Lyons’s analysis is lucid and persuasive, arguing that the overarching political push for home ownership since the 1930s has undermined the health of the rental sector and left many tenants unprotected and living in poorly maintained accommodation. He speaks of “assumptions that policymakers carry into the room with them” that may explain why our housing patterns reflect an Ireland that no longer exists.
Given our familiar history of emigration, decline and stagnation, we never planned for economic success or sustained population growth. It is this pessimism that creates structural underprovision. When future projections are proved wrong, the panicked rush to plug gaps exacerbates the problems by avoiding the harder work of restructuring the system as a whole. As Lyons puts it, “any of the interventions addressed symptoms of the housing crisis rather than the mechanics producing it”.
Lyons argues that, while individual policy choices may have seemed reasonable in isolation, when combined with other political decisions, they created a wholly untenable housing system even before the Celtic Tiger bubble. When the economic crash occurred, despite thousands waiting on local authority housing lists, construction fell to historic lows that did not match the scale of outstanding demand. Almost immediately, the knock-on effect was a spike in homelessness – particularly, family homelessness – as far back as 2014.
Lyons does not only diagnose our housing maladies but offers detailed suggestions for solutions. This includes expanding supply in urban centres through a model that plans housing and infrastructure together at the city level. One of the challenges posed by Lyons’s suggested solutions is that they confront embedded cultural beliefs around participation in planning and ownership of the family home.
Sirr captures the history behind this preference for home ownership, while Lyons shows why our demographics – smaller households living longer – would suggest that we may be too focused on larger family homes for owner-occupiers. While each book differs in scope and emphasis, both Sirr and Lyons ultimately pose the same question: remembering our past, while looking towards the future, what kind of Ireland do we need to build?
Regardless of whether the current tax windfalls continue, we will emerge from this period with a much larger population, crammed into sprawling cities and traffic-clogged suburban towns. As we grow and change as a country, so too must our housing system. The system inherited from previous decades has failed to produce the housing we need for today’s Ireland, let alone Ireland of the future. Real policy solutions may require a change in our politics and mindsets.
Certainly, as we attempt to tackle and correct past mistakes, honest and frank conversations about available trade-offs and choices are not just advisable, but essential. Housing a Nation and Brittle differ in emphasis and details, but Sirr and Lyons would appear to agree on this: if we do not adapt at a policy level, we will continue to limp on indefinitely, hoping for the best. Housing is a complex policy problem. A “house” means different things to different people.
It is, simultaneously, the bricks and mortar that represent a financialised asset, and a person’s home and place of safety. In industry parlance, the house is a “unit”. The number of units that will be delivered in a given year is determined by either the purchase price or the rental yield that can be achieved.
For the lone mother raising her small children in a single cramped hotel room, this “unit” is a dream she longs for every day of her life: a secure home where she can raise her children. At the heart of our problem in Ireland is this contradiction. As a country, we’ve come a long way since the abject misery of subsistence labourers surviving in smoky mud cabins, so vividly evoked in Housing a Nation.
But we didn’t intend to throw off one form of subjugation only to find ourselves trapped in a “brittle” housing system that cannot meet the needs of the population. When housing is secure and affordable, it fades into the background. When it is absent or precarious, there is nothing more urgent or pressing. Lyons writes that we’ll know we’ve succeeded when we’re no longer talking about housing.
Rather than continuing to tinker at the edges of a broken system, a much more fundamental shift is needed. Future generations will thank us. Rosemary Hennigan is a novelist who previously worked in housing and homelessness policy in the NGO sector.
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