The establishment of a housing activation office and a tsar to lead it was supposed to be a bold statement of intent from the Government. However, amid a torrent of criticism, it has rapidly become bogged down and is becoming difficult terrain for the Coalition.
There are three interconnected problems.
First, pressure has been heightened by the suggestion that National Asset Management Agency (Nama) chief executive Brendan McDonagh will take up the position. There’s no shortage of construction industry insiders who fume privately at the putative appointment of McDonagh. He crossed swords with many developers during their time in Nama and they blame the bad bank for what they perceive as a narrow focus on selling off debt.
There may be some merit to this, but against that argument, McDonagh is a long-time survivor of the upper echelons of Irish public administration, which may be as valuable a skill set in the role as an intricate understanding of home building.
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Cases will be made for and against McDonagh, and all would be abstract until the unit demonstrates results (or not). But what is tangible and politically dangerous is McDonagh’s annual salary of €430,000, which would be expected to travel with him to the new position. We are in an era where the topic of public pay is particularly dangerous, and a public servant‘s salary can become a long-lasting talking point – just ask Robert Watt. If McDonagh’s pay remained at its current level, the hard political reality is that it would offer an evergreen criticism that the Government has appointed a leader earning such a salary, but that the housing crisis continues.
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The second aspect is the process by which McDonagh became Minister for Housing James Browne’s preferred candidate. On the Fine Gael side, there is confusion over how exactly his name came to the top of the pile. A spokesman for Taoiseach Micheál Martin suggested on Tuesday that Browne would have taken advice within his department and that the appointment is at his discretion. That would seem to run contrary to the view from Tánaiste Simon Harris, whose spokesperson said Harris’s view is that the appointment should have been vetted by Coalition leaders before becoming public.
As it stands, neither the Taoiseach nor the Tánaiste have publicly endorsed Browne’s backing for McDonagh. Logic would suggest that Martin will ultimately back his Fianna Fáil Minister but in public, he has stuck rigidly to the line that no decision has been made on who will hold the office. Meanwhile, Browne’s public endorsement of McDonagh has left him seeming isolated, for now at least.
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Finally, there is the investment of that same political capital in the office itself. Its establishment is a programme for government commitment, although the document makes no mention of a tsar or equivalent. However, the Government has struggled to explain what exactly the office will do that is not already being done.
It was first mooted with plenty of promises to kick down walls, but talk is cheap. Many questions remain, including how exactly it will interact with existing structures in the Civil Service and utilities to remove blockages, how its success would be measured, and what executive authority it would bring to curing stalled housing projects. None of these things are easy, and if the answer were as simple as opening a new office, surely it would have been done by now.
The Coalition’s housing subcommittee meets on Thursday to try to thrash out a way forward. But turning around what the Coalition had hoped would be a quick win is looking like a tall order.
