A Mayo View: Greatest distress in housing crisis is suffering by those on wrong side of it

The director of housing services at Mayo County Council, Tom Gilligan, has had a tough week or so.

And he may well feel he was thrown under a bus by whoever leaked his ill-advised discussion document which proposed a boycott on owners of holiday homes in the county in order to force them to sell their properties to meet local housing needs.

The adage 'using a sledgehammer to crack a nut' immediately sprang to mind when reading his controversial email circulated to members of the council's housing strategic policy committee.

The email was dispatched just days after members of that committee had agreed to defy legal advice by exploring the prospect of placing a tax on the owners of holiday homes.

So the seeds of Mr. Gilligan's proposal had not been entirely of his own making, yet the suggestion of a boycott against such property owners was an error for which he later apologised for distress caused.

However the controversy, albeit an embarrassment for the council in many respects, served to indicate that those involved in addressing Mayo's housing crisis have entered the realms of desperation and utter frustration.

One suspects this is caused by a lack of dependable support, direction, guidance and leadership from the Department of Housing, a body which may talk the talk but struggles hugely when it comes to delivery.

So while Mr. Gilligan did the right thing in apologising to the owners of holiday homes for whatever distress was caused to them, it cannot be overlooked that the real, heartbreaking and soul-destroying distress being suffered in this housing crisis is by the people who cannot afford to purchase or acquire a home for their families.

They are the people who surely feel boycotted by the system, left out in the cold by a government that has failed and continues to fail to grasp the unprecedented housing needs problem, not just in Mayo but across the entire nation.

And these are the people which Tom Gilligan was, one suspects, thinking about when he penned his discussion document, albeit going somewhat astray in parts of it despite his best intentions.

One can only imagine what it is like for officials like Mr. Gilligan when dealing on a daily basis with the genuine demands of people and young families caught on the wrong side of the housing debacle.

They must feel let down by a government that has made their jobs virtually impossible to manage, with very little hope of matters changing in the near future.

Finally, in the likely event of Mr. Gilligan modifying his discussion document ahead of the next meeting of the council's housing strategic policy committee, perhaps he might call on the government to officially declare a national housing emergency in recognition of the scale of the problem rather than continuing to fail at adequately addressing it.