Election 2024Analysis

Where will FF/FG find common ground with Labour and Social Democrats? Housing

All the parties have acknowledged the need to deliver a higher number of homes and the greater involvement by the State in doing so

Labour and the Social Democrats have both indicated the Help to Buy and First Home schemes would be phased out
Labour and the Social Democrats have both indicated the Help to Buy and First Home schemes would be phased out
Jack Horgan-Jones's picture
Jack Horgan-Jones
Tue Dec 03 2024 - 06:00

Some 28 per cent of people identified housing and homelessness as the most important issue to them when casting their vote, according to Irish Times exit poll data.

If parties are to come together and form a government, common ground must be identified on this most intractable of issues. Is there a landing zone for housing between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the centre-left parties of Labour and the Social Democrats?

On a very basic level, all the parties have a broadly similar starting point: they acknowledge the existence of a major deficit, the need to deliver a higher number of homes and the greater involvement by the State in doing so.

“From a pure policy perspective, there’s quite a lot of room for compromise,” said Dr Michael Byrne, lecturer in the school of social policy, social work and social justice in University College Dublin. “It depends a lot on how invested the parties are in their different policies,” he added.

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For Byrne, who has written an extensive post on Substack comparing the party manifestos and examining where they diverge and converge, the policy gap can be closed in many instances through compromise.

He said there were clear similarities in areas such as “non-market” – or state driven – housing, which is a main plank of most centre-left approaches in other countries, but which both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have embraced to a significant extent.

“If you were to describe Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael housing manifestos to most European academics they would be amazed that these are manifestos of centre-right parties,” he said. “That’s a huge political shift in the underlying structure of Irish housing policy and politics.”

Fianna Fáil sources, however, have particular concerns about the Social Democrats moving further to the left on housing, while describing Labour as being “very constructive” on housing in opposition. However, the party is not enthused by Labour’s plans to convert the Land Development Agency into a State construction company, including the direct employment of workers and a direct building capacity for the State. “That’s not going to happen,” said one senior source in Fianna Fáil.

[ Who is in government now, when does the new one start and what happens to losing TDs? ]

The major and most obvious gap is on subsidies for home buyers such as Help to Buy and the shared-equity scheme, First Home. Both the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael manifestos envisaged expanding this scheme in different ways. Fine Gael want to raise the relief under Help to Buy from €30,000 to €40,000, and Fianna Fáil wants to allow renters to bring their rent payments into consideration when assessing eligibility for the scheme – meaning more people would be eligible for the highest level of support. Labour and the Social Democrats have both indicated these schemes would be phased out, arguing they drive up the price of housing.

Richard Bruton, until recently the Fine Gael party’s TD for Dublin Bay North and a driving force in the party’s policymaking space, said the government’s basic view was that these schemes “are essential to allow first-time buyers to compete with trader-uppers”. A senior Fianna Fáil source, speaking privately, said the party didn’t want to publicly discuss red line issues in advance of talks – but signalled that campaign-trail commitments to these schemes were undimmed.

“They’re not changing, they’re things we will not change,” said one such figure, arguing they give buyers certainty and are by now well bedded in. “It is red-line territory.”

For Byrne, however, from a policy point of view there could be agreement to maintain them in their current form rather than expand them, while reforming the schemes by making them more tightly targeted through the introduction of price caps or income limits. However, the element that is missing when viewing this entirely as a policy problem is politics: given that all parties have gone to the wall on this, identifying a consensus that isn’t seen as a climbdown by one group is the hard part.

On some other areas, said Byrne, there is “clear blue water” between the centre left and current coalition partners – such as security of tenure in the private rental sector. However, again, he thinks there is room for compromise – removing no-fault evictions in the institutional landlord sector or, more meaningfully, introducing a stay on them in all tenancies for a period of years after a tenancy begins.

This, of course, would have to be balanced against the ever-present concerns of damaging landlords or driving them away, which the larger parties are traditionally more sensitive to.

It seems that if policy gaps are to be closed, the major question is whether the politics of the situation can sustain that effort.