TG4′s 100 Years of Housing: Crisis Without End moves beyond documentary-making into advocacy. Photograph: TG4
The film is billed as a “decade-by-decade look at how Irish housing issues have been tackled since the birth of the Irish State”. But it skews unapologetically to the left with key interviewees, including campaigner Rory Hearne and housing activistTheir views are well-articulated and passionately held. However, the documentary cries out for alternative perspectives – though, of course, that would risk undermining its central thesis – that only the State can solve the housing crisis.
It’s great that these are wonderful places to live. Yet, the documentary doesn’t seem open to the possibility that other forms of housing might also have a sense of community. The film addresses the 1970s bungalow boom, though with a weird sniffiness. In Donegal, architect Tarla MacGabhann decries the popular Bungalow Bliss design as inappropriate to Ireland . He talks about alternatives that speak to the “vernacular” native style.
The documentary’s biases are laid bare when Rory Hearne arrives and blames the slowdown in public housing construction in the 1980s partly on “neoliberalism”. He goes on to suggest the election of Margaret Thatcher in London impacted on housing policy in Ireland.