Very few issues expose the limitations of public opinion polling than housing, and very few polls expose those limitations quite as explicitly as the second half of this weeks’ Irish Times poll, which was released this morning.
Most of the results in that poll are unsurprising: The Irish public overwhelmingly opposes Donald Trump, but also wants a trade deal with the USA at all costs. Call that the fear and loathing response, where the instinct is that the orange man will hurt you but we should come to some sort of arrangement with him to head off the worst of it. That is also the position of most Irish politicians.
When it comes to domestic issues, though, is where the contradictions are really exposed. 49% – almost half of us – say that housing should be the top priority for the Government. This dwarves every other issue, with “better services” (17%) and “immigration” (just 10%) trailing in behind.
When asked “is the Government’s housing plan working”, just 7% of voters say that it is. 73% of voters by contrast say that “the Government needs a new housing plan”.
Now, that’s all well and good – but what exactly is a new housing plan or what might one look like? Opinion polls cannot answer that question, and in fairness to the Irish Times they do not even try. All that we can divine from the poll is that the public wants more attention paid to housing and that they would like the Government to do something – anything – different.
But what if I told you here that the problem is with the public, and not the Government?
For example, I would argue that the single biggest issue with Irish housing policy is that Irish voters have gotten it into their head that it is the Government’s job to fix it. Every year we are treated to housing plans that could just as easily have emerged from Stalin’s politburo in the 1930s: Five year plans with construction targets and numbers and spending figures designed to transform the Irish housing landscape and deliver the 50,000 homes per year this country allegedly needs to keep up with population projections.
This is what the public says they want – and yet everything the public does also suggests that this is the precise opposite of what they want.
For example, An Bord Pleanála in its most recent figures – for 2023 – revealed that it dealt with 3,272 planning objections that year, of which only 28% were disposed of within the statutory time frame. You might think that 3,272 is not that many, but remember that these were individual planning objections related to developments, not single homes. Many of them will have been single homes or structures, but many of them will have been for large scale housing developments. One appeal to An Bord Pleanála might well be delaying the construction of 500 housing units.
Further, what the voters want is often contradictory. Ask the voters in an opinion poll about whether they want housing built to the highest standards of energy efficiency and they will answer in the affirmative. Ask them if they want their houses to be more expensive and take longer to build, and they will answer in the negative. But of course, more energy efficient housing is more expensive and takes longer to build.
It is precisely because of these contradictory views amongst the electorate that the Government has landed in this mess. It wants more housing, but the public only wants more housing in certain places. Voters abhor housing shortages, but quite like the idea that their own 3-bed in Crumlin would be worth €650,000 on the open market because of those housing shortages. Housing policy can only be judged a success in the eyes of the electorate – as a collective body – if everybody is broadly satisfied with their own housing situation.
In this sense the Government has made a pointless and stupid rod for its own back, because few people will ever be truly happy with their own housing situation. Buyers will never truly feel that the home they bought was under-priced, and sellers will never really believe that the home they sold was over-priced. And as is the nature of the public, most of us will ultimately end up believing that someone somewhere else has gotten a better deal that we missed out on, for which the Government is the easiest group of people to blame.
If you want an alternative housing plan, I have one for you: De-regulate, De-regulate, and De-regulate. Allow people to build houses to 1990s standards of insulation if that means they can be built faster. Restore the rule where, to object to planning permission, you must be a neighbour. Confine objections to very limited grounds: Environmental, Aesthetic, and public health. Were it up to me (and you can all thank the risen lord that it never shall be) I would simply declare a full-scale Government withdrawal from the field of housing development altogether.
We didn’t have these problems during the Celtic Tiger. In fact, we had the opposite one: That we were building too many houses. In the last full year of the Celtic Tiger, 2007, Ireland’s construction industry managed 78,000 housing starts. What’s the difference? The Government wasn’t setting targets and getting involved.
If you can’t see that, then you’re probably going to remain upset about Government housing policy for some time.