"Sensational reporting" has reinforced the negative image of public housing in Ireland, according to the Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal.
Mr Robert Molloy told yesterday's National Policy Conference on Social Housing that reporting had contributed to "the ill-informed and unjustifiably negative image of public housing".
Sensational reporting had also served "to undermine the considerable efforts of local authorities and local communities to address the problems that arise due to a complex range of social and economic factors".
Mr Molloy said he was surprised at the negative reporting that followed the publication of the Social Housing in Ireland report in which seven housing estates around the State were studied. He said some sections of the media had "largely ignored the findings of the report and concentrated almost solely on social order problems in some estates".
While he fully accepted that problems existed in certain areas he stressed that local authority housing had made a fundamentally positive contribution to Irish society over the years and considerable progress had been made by many authorities in improving the management of their estates.
Mr Tony Fahey of the ESRI, who edited the report, said he was also surprised by the tone of the media coverage. "We were all appalled by some of the reporting. It was as if people went through the report and sought out the worst bits," he said.
However, part of the blame for the negative image of local authority housing could be laid at the door of the Department of the Environment which had collected little in the way of statistical information on local authority housing estates.
"Where an information vacuum arises it will be filled by something. One of the reasons there has been so little appreciation of the overall picture in the local authority sector is simply that reliable information has not been available about the successful as well as the problem estates," he said.
The Irish social housing sector was extremely small at 9 per cent of the housing stock. It was also extremely marginalised in the social and economic system with a very high levels of dependence on Social Welfare.
However, a distinguishing feature of the local authority system in Ireland was that a tenant purchase option had been in existence here since the 1930s. "I don't think there is anywhere else in Europe where the use of social housing as a route to home ownership has been so long established and has been such a major feature of the system for so many years," Mr Fahey said.
Almost 30 per cent of the dwellings now in use in Ireland were originally built as local authority rental accommodation. Since the beginning of the century, 300,000 houses had been built by local authorities, but over 200,000 had since been sold.
Since the late 1980s local authority housing output had fallen to relatively small proportions compared to what it was in previous decades. In the mid-1970s local authority housing had accounted for almost one-third of housing output. After falling to as low as 4 per cent in the late 1980s it had climbed again to close to 9 per cent.
Given that the norm was that local authority housing formed 20-25 per cent of overall output, "the order of output which is needed from the local authority sector may well be of the order of 20 per cent of the housing stock, not 8 or 9 per cent as at present", he said.
