President Michael D Higgins’s withering appraisal of the State’s housing crisis and of the official response to it was perhaps his most vehement intervention on one of the defining issues of the day. Housing was “our great, great, great failure”, he said in off-script remarks on Tuesday, “a disaster” born of skewed values that undermined the ideals of the republic.
The president’s words will have no direct impact on policy. Government insiders will bemoan the remarks as a simplistic response to a complex problem from a man who, unlike them, can speak without the burden of actually having to do anything to fix it. Already there has been some carping that Higgins is straying beyond the constitutional boundaries of his office.
The latter argument is overdone; while the Constitution does not envisage the presidency functioning as a parallel political power centre, neither does it set down clear red lines, and Higgins – correctly – is careful to couch his concerns on this and other issues in the language of principle rather than policy. It would be a problem if the president were to express views that people found objectionable, but on this he is well aware that he speaks, in rather general terms, for the overwhelming majority of people, whose patience over housing long ago ran out.
Therein lies the value in Higgins’s comments. With a crisis as big as this one, which is leaving large parts of the population without a suitable or affordable home (and, in too many cases, no home at all), there are two overlapping dimensions to the official response.
A lot has changed for US women since 2016. What does that mean for Kamala Harris?
Forty years of the Dart: ‘Dealing with the public is one of the hardest things anyone can do’
Mark Francis: Acoustic Oceans review – A fascinating development in the Irish artist’s decades-spanning career
Fake phone calls, meeting pretend-presidents and being ambushed by your parents on TV: The rituals of All-Ireland week
One is finding the right policies to deal with the problem – in this case the problem is primarily a chronic lack of supply. But the other dimension is rooted in rhetoric and, to use a word that Irish politics tends to disdain, ideology. This is about diagnosing the underlying structural and conceptual causes, finding words to express the nature and scale of the issue, and conveying a sense of moral urgency about resolving it.
Huge amounts of public money and vast amounts of official energy are being devoted to the housing crisis. Soaring inflation, an expanding population and rising building costs make the task harder. Still, there are some signs that that work will bear fruit. But it is painfully slow. And for many people the Government’s managerialist, fundamentally orthodox response – one that seems reluctant to question the deeper, longer-term reasons for the crisis or to shift into emergency mode in fixing it – seems inadequate to the task. The pandemic has shown people what a real national crisis response looks like, and this isn’t it.
At the most basic level, an official lexicon that refers to “units”, “commencements”, “completions” and “stock” betrays a failure to grasp what is being denied to whole generations: the dignity of having a home.