I will begin this article by acknowledging that the headline I’ve put on it is a teensy bit unfair to The Irish Times, in that Kathy Sheridan no more speaks for that newspaper as a whole than, say, my colleagues Fatima or Ben speak for Gript Media as a whole. Nevertheless, when an Editor – your correspondent included – publishes an article, he clearly feels that it makes a point that can meaningfully contribute to public debate. And thus, today, we had this from the aforementioned Ms Sheridan:
“As I suggested three years ago, if housing is indeed a national crisis, the Government should be prioritising information in the shape of weekly, accessible, Nphet-style televised briefings about progress or the lack of it. These could be fronted by a gimlet-eyed CMO-style housing tsar, with planners, independent experts and community leaders to tell us how the housing plan is going or not going, which public or private body, authority or utility is having problems and why, complete with up-to-date numbers – applications, approvals, rejections, commencements, completions.”
It is difficult to know where to start, really, so we’ll start with a concession.
You can certainly see the appeal of the idea: Cutting through political waffle by, essentially, appointing a housing strongman to oversee the delivery of homes to Ireland’s poor huddled and teeming masses of the homeless and the home-seeking. A commissar for housing, so to speak, to replace the elected Minister for Housing as the person responsible for building homes.
This is – though Ms. Sheridan would surely be horrified by the idea – essentially Donald Trump-esque anti-politics. The oldest populist idea known to man.
Where the right-wing populist is fond of saying “get rid of these politicians and put a hard-charging businessman in charge”, your left-wing populist will say “get rid of these politicians and put a gimlet-eyed expert in charge – but surround him with planners, more experts, and community leaders”. Notice that she doesn’t mention any actual property developers. In Ms Sheridan’s world, the decisions would be made by the real experts – the academics and the presumably self-appointed “community leaders”. Government by Tidy Towns committee. Kathy Sheridan has, in essence, turned into the lad in the pub who wants Michael O’Leary to run the health service, on the grounds that he would cut through all the bullshit.
Although, to be fair to the lad in the pub, he usually at least wants Michael O’Leary to be elected to the job, not just appointed as a kind of quasi-King.
Psychologically, I think, it is no coincidence that so many Irish people and members of the chatterati with left-wing souls so fondly remember the Tony Holohan era. The sight of a single, immaculately presented, clearly well-educated expert telling them precisely what to do from morning to evenfall every single day was thrilling to far more Irish people who would ever dare to admit it.
Ordinary politics, with all its delays and frustrations, just disappeared: Dr. Holohan could drive down Aungier Street, wielding the emergency powers theoretically granted to politicians, see people out frolicking in an unapproved manner, and summon law and order with a tweet. No politician could do that. He could issue commands and the populace would largely obey them. Again, no politician can do that. He could fix our society without having to make any of the dirty compromises necessary for re-election. To many people – disproportionately those on the left – this was all very exciting. There’s a certain kind of woman, of a certain kind of age, who all but fell in love with the good Doctor. Some of them even admit it.
But of course, it was also a disaster whose consequences have yet to be fully revealed. There is a reason, at the end of the day, why this country has so long delayed its covid enquiry, and that reason is not that we are going to find out that our children really did well from those long months out of school. Those people – and they still walk amongst us – who might think that such an enquiry should really recommend the canonization of Dr. Holohan might well find themselves disappointed.
Housing is a complicated issue precisely because we live in a democracy with competing rights. Powerful though the Government is, it is constitutionally prohibited from simply taking my land and building social houses upon it. Indeed, if you really wanted to speed up housing construction, the simplest way to do it would be to abolish many of the rights people have: Get rid of their right to object. Abolish the need for planning permission altogether, as they once did in Texas. What is planning permission, at the end of the day, if not permission from the public, represented by their councillors?
One of the reasons – probably the main reason – it is so hard to build houses is exactly that politicians have a right to object, on behalf of their voters, to new developments. If this is a crisis, then of course there is a case for covid-esque “emergency powers”. And just like in covid, “emergency powers” would mean power to compel things that the Government could not normally compel.
This is all a fantasy. And even were it true, it would not work. It would not work because all Kathy Sheridan’s housing Czar could possibly hope to achieve is to speed up the supply of housing, and could do nothing about demand.
You will note, of course, that she has not called for an Immigration Czar with Holohan-esque powers to do anything about the demand. That’s because on some topics, our friends on the left quite enjoy the inefficiency of Government, and how long it takes to do things. It might take years to get a home built – and that’s bad. It also takes years to deport somebody who has no right to be here – but that’s good.
And imagine the reaction, were I to call for something similar, in that vein: Imagine for a moment that I proposed that Michael O’Leary be put in charge of reforming the immigration system, told to hold weekly briefings on deportation numbers and improving the system. Imagine I wished that he were to apply some Ryanair logic to getting people out of the country who have no right to be here.
That, of course, would be tyranny, fascism, and anti-democracy. But Tony Holohan’s housing twin barging through the countryside with a bulldozer? That’s just sensible politics, if you write for the Irish Times.
As ever, the basic rule of thumb is the same: Authoritarianism for thee, pleb. But not for me.