If you ever wanted Ireland’s fundamentally broken political system summed up in thirty five seconds of sanctimony, you will never do better than this:
Residents are concerned about new application lodged for St Paul’s lands at St Anne’s Park.
We have won every battle when it comes to St Anne’s & we intend to win this one too.
Remember – the High Court decision STILL STANDS.
Follow & support @ilovestannes & @loveclontarf_ie. pic.twitter.com/qbaC48Y0D7
— Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (@AodhanORiordain) September 6, 2022
The planning application in question is to build houses in Ireland’s house-starved capital city. The location is St Anne’s Park, in leafy Clontarf. The politician is without peer in being the most self-righteous preacher ever sent by the people, in their folly, to parliament. And the development he is opposing is on land that – no joke now – he himself voted as a councillor to re-zone as residential.
But that was before, obviously, opposing housing became more of a vote winner than building it. As cynical U-turns go, it’s about as blatant as you get.
There are a few things here, besides that revolting hypocrisy.
The first is that Deputy O’Riordáin is a TD, not a councillor, with no direct responsibility for, or involvement with, planning matters. Where houses get built in his constituency is a matter for Councillors, not TDs. As an opposition TD, he has no input into the decision about whether to build houses in St Anne’s Park at all. But of course, that’s not how voters in Ireland see these things – we demand that our politicians focus their energies on things not in their purview.
The second is that we need to stop blaming politicians – even raging hypocrites like O’Riordáin – for the housing crisis. It’s not, really, his fault. If he came out tomorrow in favour of building new homes in St Anne’s Park, he would lose his seat. He’s opposing this housing because of the Irish nimby two-step, where voters declare that they want more housing, but not here. And “not here” is the same thing said by almost everyone in the country. The net effect is that we’re all, in the end – or at least a substantial majority of us – opposed to new housing. Even as we demand action on the housing crisis.
The third is that, in almost every situation of this kind, the reasons not to build are thought up after the opposition to building, and it’s not that the opposition to building is ever based on the stated reasons. Just this weekend, somebody told me proudly of a local success in stopping a new development in a well known town in the country. They discovered, you see, that the proposed development might interfere with the habitat of one of our rarer bats. And thus, as so often, there was a sudden and mass conversion to the cause of bat conservation amongst the local population. If it had been a rare mushroom, there’d have been an emergence of mushroom love too. The truth is that the bat, or the mushroom, or the “character of the community” or the “impact on heritage” or whatever it is, work as the ex-post-facto reasoning for not building homes. The opposition comes first. We indulge this nonsense, and learn from it, in case we ever need to use it ourselves. Find a rare bat, stop a family moving into a house. It’s a great old system.
The fourth is that, I think, my good friend and sometime columnist Jason O’Mahony is correct when he says, as he often does, that a government that solved Ireland’s housing crisis would be tossed out of office at the first available opportunity by the voters. Because we do not, as a people, want the housing crisis solved if it involves building new homes where our homes already are. And it’s a small island.
All of this is very depressing. If you are so minded, pop on to google maps and take a look at St Anne’s Park. It is huge.
When Dublin City Council voted – and O’Riordáin voted with them, remember – to rezone a part of the park as residential, it did so because it believed a fair balance could be struck between the need for green spaces, and the need for more housing. That was a democratic decision, taken by our elected representatives. The opposition to building there has not been democratic. It has been pursued by local interests, through the courts, and an intense lobbying campaign, and An Bord Pleanála, and all of the other apparatus that the state has invented to make, in the round, building things in Ireland virtually impossible.
A prediction, for what it’s worth: Aodhán will sail back into the next Dáil, not on the strength of his relentlessly Stalinist demands to drive the hated Catholic Church from the public square, but on the strength of his opposition to new housing in his constituency. And, in the exit poll that accompanies that election, voters will list housing as amongst their top two or three concerns.
We are, as I end an increasing number of pieces these days, our own worst enemies. The Brits had nothing on us, you know.