Utterly lost crossword6/1/2023 ![]() Affordable rent no longer exists for people entering the rental market. An ideological shift, rooted in common sense, has been needed for a long time, to create policy that foregrounds the construction of public and affordable housing.īecause Fine Gael is ideologically opposed to even facing that fact, never mind acting on it, the State never reasserted its role in home-building, and so we are left with a completely dysfunctional mess. These funds were never going to build public and affordable housing, which is what we needed. Fast-forward to Fine Gael’s decade in power, and the entities it decided to serve were institutional and international investment funds. Why? Because Fianna Fáil wanted to serve private Irish developers. Building homes through the local authority system was effectively ended in the 1970s and private entities could take over. Over and over again, experts and analysts point the finger at the divestment of responsibility by the State regarding home-building. This ideological entrenchment – spearheaded not just by Fine Gael, but also by Fianna Fáil – of treating housing as a commodity, and not a social need, has been catastrophic. But government has continued to double down for more than a decade on market-led solutions, further embedding the concept and reality of housing “stock” as an asset. If it did, we wouldn’t be in the midst of a disaster. The market does not provide what is necessarily needed. Policies, including documents such as Housing For All, which followed the failed Rebuilding Ireland, often appear more concerned with targets that can be used for political capital, rather than actions that are actually going to improve the crisis. One of the issues with housing in Ireland is that we have a housing policy crisis alongside a housing crisis. In a broken system, interventions without systemic change don’t work.
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