One of the flagship policies announced by Mary Lou McDonald this weekend at her party’s Ard Fheis was that rent increases would be banned by a Sinn Fein Government for a period of three years.
There’s an obvious point to be made about that policy, before one even thinks about discussing it on its merits: Dáil terms, absent an early election, last for five years, not three.
Therefore it is a racing certainty that were such a policy to be adopted, it would expire just as the Sinn Fein Government was starting to move into it’s “getting ready for re-election” phase. You do not have to be a soothsayer to imagine the scenes in the Dáil: Opposition TDs, unable to help themselves, breathing heavily about the prospect of poor working families suddenly being subjected to massive rent increases, and the Sinn Fein Government standing idly by and about to let it happen.
We’ve been through all of this before, with this Government, and the eviction ban. The pressure would be to extend the ban on rent increases for another two years. Then you’d be into a general election: Would Sinn Fein really enter that election on a promise to let their ban expire, with parties to their left (and, knowing the cynicism of FF and FG, to their right as well) promising to keep it in place?
It is not hard to see how such a policy would either be extended indefinitely, causing all sorts of economic problems, or cause a massive scandal as it was terminated, causing Sinn Fein all sorts of political problems.
But none of that matters right now, because the theme of this weekend’s event was clear: Sinn Fein will say whatever they have to say to get into power, and worry about the consequences later. The theme of the weekend was very much “making promises that are impossible to keep”:
Eoin Ó Broin says a SF housing minister would ‘move and heaven and earth’ to make sure everyone has a roof over their head.
His party would end homelessness for over 55s in a single year, he pledges pic.twitter.com/xGVqcLkkhF
— Christina Finn (@christinafinn8) November 11, 2023
How do I know, for example, that a promise like that from Eoin O’Broin is impossible to keep? The simple answer is “maths”.
There are only so many homes in the country, and those new ones that are being added are not all being built by the Government. A good many are private homes, and a good many more are being built by county councils. How is the Government going to get every over-55 year old a home inside a year? There are only really two ways of doing it: Either you intervene with county councils to kick other people off the housing list (or push them down the list to make them wait longer) or you kick other people out of homes in which they are already living. There is no third option. But I guess “we will kick migrants out of their housing and grow the waiting list for single mothers” is not as politically appealing a prospect, for a speech at an Ard Fheis.
Eoin O’Broin was not alone, though, in making ludicrous promises about housing. His party leader went right back to it, in her speech:
She said the party would implement a real emergency response to the scourge of homelessness.
“We’ll cut red-tape and bureaucracy. Bring thousands of vacant homes back into use. Harness new technologies for housing construction. Deliver the biggest housing programme in the history of the state,” she said.
That paragraph in bold could have been a quote from the leader of any single one of Ireland’s political parties. In fact, you could insert it into any Irish leader’s speech from the last 20 years, and not change a word. Enda Kenny could have said it before 2011. Micheál Martin before 2016.
There is a gulf in Irish politics in between the understanding of outcomes and processes. I’d wager there’s not a single party or TD in the Dáil who wouldn’t, if it was just a matter of money, solve housing in the morning or fix health in the afternoon. The problem is that it is not simply a matter of money, nor is it a matter of simply promising to make things happen through force of political will.
In both housing and health, the process problems are much bigger than the financial problems, or any lack of will to fix either issue. For example, when Mary Lou says above that Sinn Fein will “bring thousands of vacant homes back into use” she says it at the same time as she says Sinn Fein “will deliver the biggest housing programme in the history of the state”. The basic problem is that you can’t do both.
The reason you can’t do both – if this really needs to be spelled out – is not because of a lack of money, or intent, but because of a lack of manpower.
If all your builders are working on delivering the biggest housing programme in the history of the state, then they simply are not available to bring thousands of vacant homes back into use. The state and the economy have limited resources. Government’s job is to direct those resources, and choose between various options. If you could just do everything, we wouldn’t need a Government at all.
Irish politicians have never understood this. Or at least, they have never had faith in the Irish voter to understand it. The result has been years, if not decades, of the same nonsense: Promising everything, delivering almost nothing, and losing the faith of the electorate in the process.
Sinn Fein would like us to think they are different. On the evidence of this weekend’s Ard Fheis, they’re just more of the same.
But the truth is that all of these issues start, and finish, with the voters. We keep rewarding this kind of nonsense from our politicians. So we keep getting more of it. And Sinn Fein, like the rest of them, is placing a big bet on voters being gullible.