Darragh O'Brien is the latest Minister in the Department of Housing to fail to appreciate that the department itself is a problem. Photograph: Gráinne Ní Aodha/PA, namely the establishment of a Housing Delivery Oversight Executive . That body would, for a limited period, mobilise and oversee what Ireland needs so badly – an emergency five-to-seven year programme for delivering new housing.
There were many substandard bedsits; but the total abolition of bedsits was unfair, unwise and ill thought-out, even if naively well intentioned. Then, the same department turned what passes for its mind to the private rented dwellings market. They apparently forgot the disaster that rent control in the form of the Rent Restrictions Acts had been for the nearly half of the 20th century. They effectively froze the private rented dwellings market, introducing a period where lessors were effectively dispossessed by an unconstitutional statutory regime of rent freeze and eviction bans.
Some people naively state that lessors leaving the private rental market means that the houses will become available for purchase and the market for homes to buy will improve. Theoretically that is true. But there will always be a private rented dwellings demand by people who are not in a position to buy their homes.
We have got to be prepared to use reformed and much simplified compulsory purchase powers to deliver supply.