Gavan Reilly: No winners on housing if everyone is pulling in opposite directions

The calm before the storm. This is the pre-electoral silly season: the Dáil’s back next week for the final three or four days of its term before the election is formally triggered. In this void subjects will emerge as major media talking points; they might not quite warrant the level of coverage they get, but such is the silly season principle of having airtime and pages to fill.

Your columnist noted with some interest a weekend report about a possible coalition falling out over the setting of new housing targets. Simon Harris has stipulated several times that the government should adopt official targets for Ireland’s housing delivery before the general election. No surprise there, says you: his party doesn’t hold the housing brief, and its record in that portfolio is chequered at best; if there is an electoral advantage to be gained from Fianna Fáil from its record in the last few years, shared targets would negate it.

But it was nonetheless interesting to hear Darragh O’Brien explicitly voicing some reservation about how quickly the targets might be published. He told me, at a press conference on Wednesday morning, that there was no point in publishing figures if there was not also some kind of masterplan behind them for delivery, or at least a cogent idea of what sort of homes would be delivered and where they would go.

Was that a ‘Housing for All 2’? No, he said: it’s not necessarily about putting fine details on how the target is achieved; what he meant was that there should be a cohesive idea about where the homes will be built and the infrastructure that goes with them. That’s plainspeak for what official Ireland calls ‘a national spatial strategy’. And even if you’re a news boffin, you won’t have heard much about that, because that isn’t exactly around the corner.

This conscious uncoupling of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, on one of the country’s biggest issues, all comes against the backdrop of Sinn Féin having published a granular and itemised proposal for overhauling the housing and property markets – but which is also somewhat silent on the question of targets for delivery. Eoin Ó Broin, at least, says you shouldn’t set out on a programme without first knowing what the end destination is; Sinn Féin’s policy includes an independent audit, fully detached from government, to set targets.

All of this means we’re soon heading into an election, where despite increasing construction, prices have never been higher; rent has never been higher; homelessness has never been higher – and we’ll be fighting over not only what mix of homes there should be, but actually how many there ought to be.

Your humble columnist thinks Ireland deserves better than that. In the aftermath of the 2016 election deadlock, all parties got together and agreed a common approach to healthcare. They wisely noted that one government’s big reforms, if undone by the next government’s big reforms, would get us nowhere.

So, friends: why isn’t there a Sláintecare for housing?