Is Ciaran Cuffe lost in a ghost estate?

An excited Ciarán Cuffe, as opposed to an excitable Paul Gogarty, wrote on his blog about what he wanted to achive now that he had finished up his staycation on the Beara. There is a whole list of ambitious things to do, or just talk about. One of which was a review of the nationwide survey of ghost estates carried out by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, where Ciarán is whiling his time away as junior minister,  with the intention of coming up with a plan to put the empty houses in Ireland and the excess Irish hotel capacity to use.

One of the things he promised was by the end of September we should have "some good analysis completed, and be in a position to sit down with stakeholders and offer some positive advice on these issues."  

As the excellent Nama Wine Lake notes its now October 01st and neary a peep out of Minister Cuffe? Did he forget to do the work? Was he over excited after his holidays or is it just another sorry episode in the demise of the Greens - a party that made big promises about being in Government but when it got there didnt really know what to do. 

Is he waiting for permission from Fianna Fail or maybe Ciarán's still driving around a ghost estate wasted on the noxious fumes of planet Bertie. Save yourself some trouble Ciarán and get in contact with Sinn Fein to learn about solutions to the housing issue.

Housing Campaigns

The construction of housing was one sector where the Govt. caused much wastage and squandered so much investment. Dont mind those people who say we the people got carried away with ourselves. Its the responsibility of the Govt. to manage the economy or not to. They choose not to.

Now its time to clean up the mess and try to salvage what we can. As we noted previously there is significant housing over supply in most Irish counties. Whats going to be done with all this housing? Is it going to be left rot or can something be done to put that housing stock to work on behalf of society. After all through NAMA we'll end up paying for most of that housing again (didnt we already pay for it once through the state's over generous subvention of developers via tax breaks)

Cork Sinn Féin has launched a Cork Housing Campaign. Its a major new policy document titled 'Lets End The Wait' and was presented to the media by the party's five Councillors, Jonathan O'Brien, Fiona Kerins, Henry Cremin, Thomas Gould & Chris O'Leary, at Cork City Hall.

There are now more than 8,000 families on the housing waiting list in Cork. Thats an increase of more than 1,000 in just two months.

The campaign will focus on several core issues:

•A charter for social tenants
•Help for those facing negative equity
•Clearing the waiting list
•Reforming the housing list
•Providing genuinely affordable housing
•Improving housing maintenance
•A new deal for private tenants

There'll be a series of meetings across Cork to discuss the policy with local communites in Cork. The first public meeting takes place in Togher Community Centre on September 16th at 7.30pm.

NAMA is about managing the decline in value of properties. But a property with no one likely to live in it has no value. These houses represent sources of capital but if nobody lives in them they are worthless.

Its time to put all this otherwise wasted capital to productive use.

Visualising the Failures of the Govt's Construction policy

Economist Ronan Lyons has put together a nice picture which shows how directionless the Irish construction industry was, how purposeless so much of the economic activity of the Celtic Tiger and clueless the Irish Govt. So clueless that some counties already have 12 years of housing supply already in place while others have under a year.

Western Irish Counties like Donegal and Kerry are particularly over supplied. As Martin Ferris noted in his report on the future of Farming and Fishing in Western Ireland the over reliance on construction encouraged by the Govt. at the cost of other types of investment would result in increased emigration as that industry collapsed. Unfortunately there was no alternative in place to prevent renewed rural emigration.

Ronan's picture is here. How many year's supply of housing is there already built in your south Ireland county?

Working Class housing in 20th Century Ireland

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The housing conditions of the 20th Century Irish working class were frequently abysmal.

Famously Dublin was a city of Georgian splendour with infamous slums tenaments.

Tracking the history of Irish labour, the conditions under which they lived and worked and tracking the history of class and class relationships in Ireland is the focus of the IrishLabour.com website.

The below is an enjoyable post taken from Irishlabour.com and is posted to highlight a site that may be of interest to readers who would like to explore the history of Irish Labour. There is a wide range of posts on Irish involvement in the Spanish civil war, the unemployment protests of the 1950s or the tax protests in the late 70s.

Fascinating website and an enjoyable read:

Below is an article by Ruth McManus. It’s from 2003 and was first published in International Labor and Working-Class History.

The title is ‘Blue Collars, “Red Forts” and Green Fields: Working Class Housing in Ireland in the Twentieth Century.’

Her book, Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs (Four Courts Press, 2002) is in the public library system, and is available for purchase from Four Courts here.

She says on her website that the article is available for free from the Cambridge Journals website, but it’s a dead link.

However, I’m going to assume that it’s ok to reproduce the article online for research purposes, so here it is below.

Have a read. It’s excellent

[PDF of McManus' article is here.]

* [Photo from 'Darkest Dublin' collection, RSAI]

Home possessions set to soar.

Joanne Spain has an article on the Home Possessions crisis on the Irish Left Review. As she notes its an elephant in the room that nobody seems to want to face up.

Sixteen months after the Dublin government committed the state to underwriting the six main banks’ total deposits and loans, and half a year since the introduction of the NAMA initiative - the issue of home repossessions has come to the fore. Billions of euro have been invested in the banks, eleven to be exact. Not a cent has gone into helping people talked by the banks, developers, estate agents and government policy into buying overpriced houses at the peak of the boom.

Most of these people are now sitting in houses with massive negative equity, trapped in extortionate long-term fixed rate mortgages, and saddled with 30-year debts that they are struggling to repay in the current climate of wage cuts and job losses.

All of these people will have been pleased to hear the government announcement at the start of February that it is committed to helping homeowners struggling with mortgage payments. However, the ambiguity about what form this help will take and the fact that the government is not talking about implementing any plan until the summer, is no help. The only ‘help’ on offer for the past year has been a moratorium on repossessions, but that has run out now and only applied to the six guaranteed banks anyway. Almost one home a day was repossessed last year following proceedings by non-guaranteed banks.

Read the rest of the article

Government fails to meet need despite oversupply of properties

Here is an article from Eoin O'Broin from this weeks an phoblcaht


Government fails to meet need despite oversupply of properties




There are more than 100,000 households on local authority waiting lists in the 26 Counties while 300,000 homes lie empty across the state. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Official government figures claim that only 56,000 households are on the waiting list. However this figure is from April 2008.

Since then the recession has caused a dramatic increase in the numbers seeking social housing.

Last December, The Irish Independent published new figures obtained from the Department of the Environment which estimated that the housing list was closer to 100,000 households.

Even this figure is an underestimation, though, as the statistics exclude many categories of households, including those deemed by local authorities to be living in overcrowded or materially unsuitable accommodation, or people in transitional housing programmes.

In January the National Institute for Spatial and Regional Analysis (NISRA) released an estimate of the number of vacant homes in the state. Combining a number of sources of data they have estimated that there are 302,625 vacant homes, not including holiday homes, across the 26 Counties.

NISRA have also produced an interesting analysis of the relationship between house building and population growth, county by county.

Their study estimates that from 2006 to 2009 the supply of houses in the state outpaced projected population growth by 154%.

For example, in their study NISRA estimated that Dún-Laoghaire Rathdown would need an additional 538 units to meet its projected population growth from 2006 to 2009. However during that period an oversupply of 7,139 units of accommodation were built. That’s an oversupply of 1,224%!

Dublin City Council had the largest oversupply in terms of actual numbers, with 15,363 units representing an oversupply of 401%. Cork County came second with an oversupply of 11,018 or 115%. Limerick City had the largest percentage oversupply in the state, with a massive 1,252%. Only Galway City came close to matching supply and demand, with a 2% oversupply.

Despite this oversupply of housing, in each of these areas housing waiting lists also increased during the same period.

If the Irish Independent figures published last December are correct, then local authority waiting lists have increased by 130% since 2005.

The newspaper’s figures estimated that the waiting lists in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown included 4,406 households; in Dublin City included 6,108 households; in Cork County included 4,880 households; and in Limerick included 1,468 households.
In each case, the number of vacant homes identified by NISRA significantly exceeds the number of families deemed by the Department of Environment to be in need of local authority housing.

The reason for this situation is very simple. During the Celtic Tiger housing supply was determined primarily by market forces, central government tax incentives, and developer-led planning decisions at a local level.
Little if any consideration was given to strategic planning based on social need.
Central and local government failure explains why there are hundreds of thousands of vacant homes side by side with hundreds of thousands of people in need of housing.