There’s a first time for everything, even in opinion writing: In this instance, the “first time” is me saying the following: You really should read, if you can, Una Mullally’s column in the Irish Times yesterday.
Una is, it is fair to say, very upset with the tenor and tone of the election campaign:
Perhaps in time we will look back on this campaign as some sort of fever dream. How could you possibly explain it to someone who was away from Ireland for years, and returned to a context where anti-immigrant (racist) bigotry had become normalised?
How could anyone,attempt to frame the fundamental issue in Irish society in terms of policy – housing – as the fault of anyone but those who designed and implemented those housing policies? Where has this misdirection come from?
The current wave of unhinged ire that has shouted the loudest during this campaign, and will hopefully end up with few votes in support of its intentionally divisive nihilism, has deep racist and fascistic roots. But its contemporary context can also be traced back to disinformation that circled around the accommodation needs of refugees and asylum seekers pre-pandemic.
She goes on to lament this apparent increase in right wing sentiment, and argue that it might have been prevented, if only, she says, we had built enough homes:
If there was no acute housing crisis in Ireland, the difficulties people face – homelessness, inadequate “emergency” accommodation, ridiculous rents, unaffordable homes, life milestones stalled – could not be leveraged to seed, articulate and spread racist and xenophobic resentment around scarcity of shelter. The mental and emotional toll of the housing crisis has created a profound sense of social stress. No immigrant, no asylum seeker, no refugee is to blame for that.
There’s undoubtedly something to that: If we lived in a society where housing was plentiful and cheap and easily accessible by all who wanted or needed to be housed, there is no doubt that general societal contentment would be higher, and that establishment politicians would be benefitting from it. Every successful Government since the dawn of time has understood that people who are happy with where they live and feel that their lives are affordable tend to become more conservative (small c) and hesitant to change their leaders. Housed societies are happy societies. Societies with no housing? Well, then you get the Mongols.
The problem, of course, is that try though she might, Una will never be able to tell us precisely how many homes that the state should have built and provided in order to forestall this unpleasant drift into migration skepticism amongst the general public. Would an extra 100,000 homes have done the trick, even assuming that such a number could have been built? It’s unlikely.
The problem of course is that housing is a market, even when the state has full control over it: The number of homes is matched against the number of people who want to buy homes, and the price of homes is worked out from there through supply and demand. If the demand for housing is static, it is fairly easy to bring the price down.
The difficulty, which Una is unable to understand – or perhaps unable to admit – is that the demand for housing is not static, especially in a world with the levels of mobility that human beings now possess. If that demand is not regulated and controlled, then every effort to increase supply will fail as more people will come into the market seeking to be housed. We have seen this very phenomenon in Ireland with immigration: The more generous our housing and accommodation benefits for migrants, relative to the rest of Europe, the more people who came here seeking to be housed and accommodated.
Una’s imagined solution to this is that if we had just built enough homes, this would have forestalled anti-immigration sentiment. The problem is that she’d still be wrong, even if the state had a turnkey own-front-door house for every migrant, and every domestic citizen seeking one.
Why would she be wrong? Well, for the simple reason that housing is only one aspect of the problem: People also need school places for their children; GPs when they are sick; roads on which to drive; policing in their neighbourhoods; and so on, and so on.
What those – like Una – who insist migration isn’t the real problem miss is that this is not simply a housing crisis, but an infrastructure crisis: The state cannot cope with its population growth, which is why towns like Roscrea are having to trade their hotel away for the dubious benefit of being seen as more compassionate than Denmark, where hotels are not traded away for the accommodation of migrants.
In this sense, the elections on Friday – and indeed the General Election to come – are in reality a maths test for both the electorate and the politicians. If you are somebody who favours increased immigration, then the questions that need to be answered are simple mathematical ones: How many new homes do we need to accommodate the population increase? How many new schools? How many new hospitals? How many new roads?
The problem is that these questions cannot be answered – literally cannot be answered – without reliable population projections. You cannot say how many homes you will need by 2030 without first knowing how many people will be in the country in 2030. The only way to get that number right – by definition – is to enact some restriction on immigration.
If, by contrast, your policy is that people can move here and seek asylum on an unlimited basis (and remember, this remains the policy of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, the Greens, Labour, Sinn Fein, and the Social Democrats) then you simply have no way of knowing how many homes or schools the country will actually need.
To solve any maths equation, you need to know at least two of the variables: When 2 + 6 = X, we can say for certain that X is 8.
When 2 + Y = X, then you simply cannot solve for either X or Y.
“Y” in this case is the level of immigration. If you know that it is 6, you can solve the equation and figure out what X stands for. If you don’t know what it is, you’re lost.
Our politicians, at least those of a pro-migration bent, are lost. Some of them, like Fine Gael, want to “reduce” migration, albeit at the eleventh hour, but have no target in mind or no number they can point to. They also, it might be added, have no track record of success.
What none of them can say, and none of them are willing to advocate for, is a limit on migration that might allow them to solve the infrastructure equation.
On Friday, this is a basic test for you as a voter. Una Mullally, I’m afraid, has already failed it.