Housing and climate take centre stage
Since an end to the beginning of Brexit is now in sight, the focus of attention now turns to the likely Irish general election in early 2020.
The economy is performing very strongly, we at or are close to full employment and working hours and wages are rising, albeit with differences in the rate of increase across sectors.
This will be the Government’s key message in the election, though they will be wary of repeating the mistakes of 2016 with promises to keep the recovery going.
Opposition parties will claim again that the recovery is uneven and inequality persists.
While many elections are described as critical for the long-term future, for two particular issues this is true of the election.
It must be fought on two key issues and a failure to address them in the life of the next administration will undermine our long-term prosperity.
The first is housing, which includes the homelessness crisis but is also a much wider issue.
The current lack of houses, exorbitant rents and our sprawled development highlight the multi-faceted nature of the housing problem.
There is a substantial human cost to the current dysfunctional property market.
Families and individuals find themselves marginalised and unable to plan for the future without the basic security of a roof over their heads.
Many young people at the start of their careers and family lives face rising and excessive rents, preventing them from saving to buy a house of their own.
The Central Bank mortgage rules are necessary and are working to dampen residential property prices, though the measures have the potential to reduce the return for developers and hinder the private provision of more housing stock.
Fixing this market is difficult because it has so many moving parts.
So far, the Government has largely relied on the private sector to fix the problem but it is clear this will not work, or will not work quickly enough.
Part of the solution must be to build substantially more social housing and to cap rents, at least for the next few years.
The remedy is likely to bring us back to the future when many people could access social housing to provide the security and space to plan for their children’s futures.
An even more important and complex problem, which is affected by our pattern of housing development, isclimate change.
Ireland’s performance in meeting its climate targets has been woeful and we can no longer afford to continue to deal with this problem incrementally.
The population in the Republic is projected to increase by 20% to 5.7m people by 2050. There are of course implications for housing people in a sustainable way.
We can make the necessary investments to achieve our climate goals when there is a wide acceptance of the scale of the challenge and financial resources to do it.
The difficulty up to now has been the reluctance to challenge vested interests and to change the ways we have lived, worked and commuted.
A new administration needs to face down the agricultural sector because a substantial reduction in the livestock herd must be part of the solution.
A substantial carbon tax imposed at a faster rate than already set out is also required.
This will have implications for our car dependency and will increase costs on rural households.
This is part of the costs we have chosen to avoid so far from sprawled development.
We cannot afford more platitudes and now need commitments to a realistic plan to deal with the climate emergency.
