Walk around any village, town or city in Ireland and you’ll see notices on the doors of cafes and restaurants looking for staff. The housing crisis has many stories to tell, and one of those is how it is exacerbating staff shortages across the board.
As we look on at the UK shooting itself in multiple appendages and creating worker shortages by pursuing regressive immigration policies, what about the worker shortages the Irish Government is causing through the housing crisis it created?
The majority of accommodation available in Dublin now is empty luxury apartments, with owners keeping the rent high rather than reducing it to what people can afford, and luxury student accommodation.
There is an oversupply of expensive student accommodation in Dublin city, and the rent is too high for the average student to afford, so some blocks have already changed their use to tourist accommodation or “co-living”. We could have had affordable, permanent housing on these sites, but the profit yields of companies were prioritised over what people needed and could afford.
We're witnessing another form of the stupor politicians fell into during the Celtic Tiger, as they keep telling us the broken things are working
The minimum wage in Ireland is €10.20. If you’re working 40 hours a week, that gives you €408 a week, or €1,632 a month. A studio flat – aka, bedsit – on the North Circular Road will set you back €1,350. A tiny one-bed flat in a divided-up house on North Strand Road costs €1,550.
We are now in a situation where the cost of a month’s rent is approaching the equivalent of a working month’s pay of 160 hours on minimum wage. This is before deductions of income tax, PRSI, and USC, and before you buy a stitch of clothing, any food, pay for a bus fare, or a rising electricity or gas bill.
How on earth does the Government expect people to work in an Irish city when they can’t afford to live in it? At the outset of the pandemic, there was much soul-searching about what “frontline” encompassed.
People who spend most of their days on screens for work (as an infamous viral tweet declared: “Let’s stop pretending there are different jobs. There’s only one job and it’s emails”) began to broaden their definition of “frontline” beyond medical and emergency services workers, to retail, public transport workers, cleaners, and so on.
But as hospitality “comes back”, where are the staff? The housing crisis, as the Government will increasingly find out, is anti-business, unless you’re in the business of being a landlord, of course. Where will the thousands of new construction workers and skilled tradespeople we need to build houses live?
Do you know how many apprentice tradespeople are currently working in all the State’s local authorities? Thirty seven. If we don’t get the average rent down by 50 per cent, we will not be able to sufficiently staff shops, hospitality businesses, healthcare and construction.
There are broadly two sets of people living in Ireland: those who are suffering the housing crisis and those who aren’t affected by it. Unfortunately, when it comes to addressing the housing crisis in a serious way, as the emergency that it is, it appears the majority of people in power in the political, property and media establishments, and the majority of economists who are platformed on the issue, are not impacted by the crisis in an urgent, everyday way.
This distance from the problem seems to be warping people’s version of reality, and is causing a delusion that the crisis can somehow be “solved” incrementally and gradually by using the same authors and tools that caused it, as we wait for the impact of this administration’s plans to maybe trickle down in a few years time, or just backfire again. This is a complete abdication of responsibility.
The narrative for some time has been that since the crisis started hurting middle-class people, and the children of the professional classes, something will be done about it, as those demographics command political attention. This narrative cynically and painfully exposes a deeply entrenched class bias, that those who are poorer or on lower incomes, somehow deserve their lot when it comes to being unable to access affordable – or any – shelter.
And yet even now, when wealthy people are suffering the housing crisis too and the Government is being punished in the polls and in the most recent byelection, the neoliberalism of this Government remains entrenched. The Government will sacrifice the basics of smart politicking for the pursuit of failed housing policies, so that land speculation, profit and the ugliness of a broken “market” trumping government on a societal need, can keep coming out on top.
When will the Government change tack? Aren’t they meant to be “pro-business” (whatever that means)?
When you have Dermot Desmond telling you that investment funds are laughing at the Government, and that allowing the private market to dictate the price of social housing is a shocking mismanagement of funds, how long will you keep prioritising the profits of global investment funds over everything else?
We’re witnessing another form of the stupor politicians fell into during the Celtic Tiger, as they keep telling us the broken things are working. The question is, who at Cabinet is smart enough and brave enough to shout stop, and to begin advocating for a smart emergency policy that ends the suffering of people, and now businesses?