Housing - An existential Mayo crisis

"If FFG keep persisting with bland vanilla pawn pushing politics, SF will be in power after the next general election"

by Dr. Richard Martin

I moved home to Castlebar in 2021 during Covid. I was living in Dublin at the time. Dublin 4, opposite the gates of UCD, in a one bedroom flat.

Damp. Mould. Dust. And extortionate rent.

Before I returned home, I was accepted to a very prestigious PhD programme in UCD.

The PhD was in Data Science in conjunction with Industry and Science Foundation Ireland. €25,000 a year funding tax free. I was also going to work with a good friend and outstanding researcher in fluid mechanics. Everything was set in motion.

However, there was one little hitch in the plan. I was paying €1,600 a month rent. Multiply that by 12 and you get €19,200. I had to check that on the calculator a few times.

To live in Dublin at that time I needed to pay roughly €20,000 a year to live in a sub-standard hovel, and I was lucky to find the hovel. Very lucky.

Bear in mind that was nearly five years ago now, so the price of the rent has likely increased substantially, for essentially a hovel.

As much and all as I would’ve liked to have completed the PhD in applied mathematics, it just wasn’t feasible financially. I would’ve been under too much financial pressure and wouldn’t have been able to focus on the research thesis properly.

I also realised that even if I got through the four years of the thesis and came out the other side, I was still going to be caught in a rent trap in Dublin.

Owning a house or a flat was completely and totally out of reach. Even if I had a job paying €70,000 a year it was still going to take a considerable amount of time before I had a deposit for a house saved.

At the time I used to spend a lot of time at night on Daft looking at house prices in the Dublin area.

To get anything decent you’d need €400,000 at the bare minimum. A deposit is 10% so €40,000 has to be saved before you can even think about approaching the bank manager for the mortgage.

I would then look at the house prices in Castlebar. My hometown. The house prices were far cheaper. Half the price.

After a while it sunk and it was a no-brainer. Go home. If you want to own a house. If you want any quality of life, pack the suitcase and head for the M50.

Otherwise I was doomed to pay extortionate rent for substandard accommodation for the rest of my life.

I came home and I lived with my parents and worked from home with AIB and Flutter. I didn’t have to commute. I didn’t have to pay any rent.

I saved and fortunately I was able to buy a house in Castlebar in 2024. I am one of the lucky ones. It was doable in Castlebar. In a big urban centre? No-way.

I read a piece in this paper where Councillor Harry Barrett proposed a motion declaring a housing emergency in the town at the May meeting of the Castlebar Municipal District. It was passed. All his colleagues agreed with him. But what of it?

The only people who can effect meaningful change are in government buildings. This current government has run out of excuses. If they cannot get to grips with this existential crises then they do not deserve to be returned to power.

FG have been in government since 2011. They can no longer shrug the shoulders and blame all and sundry. The crash was in 2008. The Troika left town in December 2013. From then on, FG have been at the wheel and done nothing. Basically.

Eoghan Murphy was the FG Housing minister for three years.

A friend lent me the book he wrote. ‘Running from Office’. I flicked through 30 or so pages and felt nauseous.

I left it on the shelf for my friend to collect again. Even looking at that book closed makes me shudder. He won’t be remembered as one of the better cabinet ministers.

FF have been in power since 2020. Covid hit and then the Ukrainian war started. But, by the end of this government they will have spent 10 years in government buildings.

We need between 50,000 to 60,000 new homes built every year to meet demand. Last year 30,300 homes were delivered, well short of the projected 40,000 homes promised.

Right now as I write there are five properties in Castlebar to rent on Daft.ie. All of them are between €1,400 and €1,600 to rent.

There is a total of 33 properties to rent in the entire county on Daft. There are 84 properties for sale in Castlebar at the moment. Most are out of reach for the ordinary worker.

There is a hidden poverty trap in Ireland today - working people who are living in rental accommodation and who don’t qualify for HAP. The rent is so extortionate that they have no chance of saving to buy a house so they are stuck on this hamster wheel indefinitely.

The gulf in wealth is widening all the time between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. This is not the Republic envisioned by Pearse and company.

So what’s the solution? The problem is obvious, but how is it solved? In my view, there’s too much weak politics at the moment. Where are the leaders in the current government?

We need someone like Noel Browne, Donough O’Malley, Lemass or Haughey to stand up, show leadership and take responsibility. Haughey, for all his faults, could make a decision.

Setting up bodies and agencies is a nonsense. The Minister for Housing should be able to get to grips with the situation and if he can’t he should step aside.

There have been very insightful contributions made by leading economists and academics recently. Why not listen to them and enact legislation accordingly? What have we got to lose?

In an opinion piece about the blight of wholesale dereliction across the island, David McWilliams argues: ‘Owners need to be turned into sellers and be given a profitable opportunity to sell for a specific period of time. This could be 18 months. During this period, they avoid CGT if they sell.’

Before you argue that this rewards bad behaviour, it is important to understand that it would be for the greater good. A dereliction amnesty would use the same logic as a tax amnesty. When previous late 1980s governments introduced tax amnesties, they were overwhelmed with revenue.

Amnesties work. They give people an exit strategy. As the old saying goes, 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’

In another piece Lorcan Sirr argued: "Councils building housing is critical. It is the only delivery stream that we can control and it remains part of the State’s social housing stock.

It also delivers better value: urban councils built a three-bed house in 2024 for as little as €264,000, and a two-bed apartment for €290,000, including all costs and land where applicable, and even less in rural areas.’

In the ESRI, Kieran McQuinn recently wrote about the slowdown in supply of housing which is caused by the ‘funding gap’.

The funding gap is the difference between the actual amount of credit required to fund the construction of the required number of housing units and the actual amount of credit in the financial system at a point in time.

Basically, the banks need to loosen the purse strings to allow developers do what developers do, which is develop. We need risk-takers and innovators to build houses.

The guidance and advice is all there for the current cabinet. If FFG keep persisting with bland vanilla pawn pushing politics, SF will be in power after the next GE.

In the end, he who dares, Rodney, he who dares.