In the wake of the €336,000 bike shelter scandal and the €13.8 billion Apple windfall, it is a dangerous time for pre-election promises and giveaway proposals.
The real questions facing Ireland are about infrastructure. There is a huge gap in our infrastructural development. In a society with 5.3 million people, we need to invest in major infrastructural projects. It makes sense to build out our road network, especially if we want to have balanced regional population growth. That means building the Galway ring road, the Cork-Limerick motorway and completing the Mullingar-Sligo motor route; the road access to Kerry; and the long-promised route to Cavan, Donegal and Derry. Whether we succeed in electrifying road transport, or transforming it to hydrogen or other renewable fuels, this island needs greatly improved regional connectivity.
The recent all-island railway strategy, even if it were partly delivered over the next 40 years, simply will not suffice to meet Ireland’s transport needs.
Housing is another investment priority. We need to radically alter the way in which we meet the housing needs of an expanding population. We already have a housing deficit of 300,000 dwellings. Rents have mushroomed in real terms over the last 10 years. For renters, the conventional aim of eventually owing their own homes appears to be receding like the horizon.
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Sinn Féin’s proposal to amend the Constitution to confer a constitutionally litigable right to housing on every adult citizen, leaving the unelected judiciary to somehow oblige elected representatives to provide everyone with a home, is absurd.
In fairness, that is not a lead balloon thought up by Sinn Féin. The Coalition put that idea on the agenda for its Housing Commission which found that while there was no need for such an amendment – there is nothing in the Constitution preventing the Oireachtas and Government from meeting our housing needs – the creation of a legal right might assist in some way. Let me repeat that there is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that in any way impedes the provision of adequate housing in this State. Involving courts in supervising housing policy and delivery is at best useless, and at worst a further obstacle to tackling the crisis.
The State is already capable of compulsorily purchasing lands needed to meet our national housing needs. The price of such compulsory purchase orders needs not be extortionate, prohibitive, or unfair; landowners would be subject to capital gains tax (at 33per cent). Moreover, the value of land acquired can lawfully be discounted by reference to the social costs of servicing the lands infrastructurally.
We already have a residential zoned land tax of 3 per cent on unused residentially zoned land. Land hoarding can be dealt with by taxation and compulsory purchase. The State can easily acquire greenfield, derelict or underutilised land zoned for residential development and set targets based by development leases for its use in providing social, affordable, rental and private owner-occupier developments – whether apartments or houses.
We definitely do not need the creation of local authority direct labour building companies, mooted by Sinn Féin. None of the postwar major urban local authority schemes in our major cities were built in this way. The idea that somehow workers, tradesmen, designers and site managers of construction projects employed directly by local authorities would build significant housing schemes more cheaply or faster than contractors is simply daft ideological posturing.
In fairness, Sinn Féin seems to sense the absurdity of such a proposal by suggesting that this approach should be tested out on a pilot basis. Have we learned nothing from the Leinster House bicycle shelter about the capacity of State agencies to deliver value for money to the taxpayer?
The idea that a rented property would in future have to be sold with the tenant in situ rather than with vacant possession has already been floated by Sinn Féin. This would have serious negative consequences for the private single residence rental market. A purchaser of a second-hand home with a tenant would be obliged to demonstrate that the home was needed for his or her use.
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Tenants who bring in fellow residents – who then become entitled to tenant status – would be able to prevent a lessor from recovering possession of their property long after they had moved on. These proposals together, with a suggested rent-freeze regime, would simply drive more and more landlords out of the market.
Likewise, the proposed plan for affordable housing presupposes that the State would retain ownership of the land on which affordable housing is built. Purchasers of these homes would only have “the right to pass the property to their children and subsequent generations” while the State would continue to own the land itself. We need a new approach to housing policy – not the Coalition’s policy or the Sinn Féin alternative.