Housing is the biggest issue of our time, it is the foundation on which a decent society is built. Food, shelter and education. Yet rents in Galway have risen by over 16% to over €1700 in the last year. Struggling families are paying over €1500 to rent a three-bedroom house in our city. There are now nearly 250 people homeless across our city.
Then there are the silent victims of the crisis you do not see, hidden in plain sight. Adult children living with their parents beyond an age which most people would consider reasonable. Generations of families crammed into two and three bedroom houses and students sleeping on couches or commuting hundreds of kilometers a day to attend college.
This was not always the way. If you work hard, play by the rules and do your bit then that very real aspiration of owning your own home should be attainable. It wasn’t a hundred years ago that you could buy a house or apartment in your twenties or thirties or even find a decent place to rent.
This catastrophe is entirely on Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Seven years of wasted prosperity and two housing plans later and the private rental market in Galway has collapsed and home ownership is beyond the grasp of many hard working people.
The State needs to rediscover its ambition when it comes to housing. We need to go back to building as we did generations ago in the 1930s and 70s. The state must become the lead developer of housing in this country and the Minister needs to finance local authorities to go out and directly build. Shoveling money to developers will not solve the housing crisis.
Report after report shows that rents are continually increasing while the number of properties in the private rental market simultaneously evaporate. The State must take on a more direct role, as the private market has vastly different objectives when it comes to housing.
The week before last, we saw a nice bit of political theatre where opposition party after opposition queued up to express no confidence in the housing Minister Darragh O’Brien with the Government benches hitting back that the opposition have not brought forward any solutions in the area of housing.
That is not true of my own party. Labour have in our costed budget launched last September, said that we should spend an extra €1.5 billion on public housing next year and scale up its ambition on cost rental.
The Government were dragged kicking and screaming into implementing a winter eviction ban. We have relentlessly called on Government to invest more in the tenant in situ scheme, even in the short term, to empower Galway City council to buy back homes where tenants would otherwise be evicted. This would be an immediate way of stopping people ending up in emergency accommodation.
They belatedly took up our suggestion of increasing the income threshold for social housing but instead of a meaningful increase to keep pace with inflation, extortionate rents and the cost of living, they upped the limit by €5000.
This Government has completely failed to grasp the reality of renting in Ireland. This piecemeal intervention will continue to lock people out of accessing State support that they so desperately need. They need to stop applying sticking plasters to gaping wounds and roll out a revised income eligibility model as soon as possible.
This Government refuses to listen, as Einstein said ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. Galway needs stronger representation at the top of Government. There have only been 85 affordable homes earmarked for delivery in this city since the current Government took office.
The new Government must involve more than a change of personnel at the top but a change of policy. The new Government and new year are an opportunity for renewal. Government must renew its efforts to solve this intractable crisis and change tack. Housing for all is not delivering for Galway and as President Higgins said ‘it isn’t a crisis anymore – it is a disaster’ and the State must step in.
