Last night I went in search of party political manifestos. Given that we have long known an election was coming, I thought that every party would have had their manifesto prepared for their campaign launch and it would be relatively straightforward to download them from their websites. Some hope. After much hunting, I didn’t find a single one! If a party can’t even have a manifesto ready for an election campaign that they have long known was coming, what hope have we of them running the country properly?
But I digress. What I wanted to look up was each party’s housing and planning policies.
Fine Gael’s website has a ‘five point plan to recovery’ covers jobs, budget, health, public sector and politics. In its policy document section it has a piece on management companies and another on repossession of the family home. That’s it.
The Labour Party have three sections on policy – policy for jobs, policy for reform, policy for fairness. None of them contain policy documents focusing centrally on housing or planning. There is no manifesto to download as yet.
Fianna Fail state: ‘We will be launching our plan in the coming days. Please check back later to find out more.’ Cunningly it has no links to any policy document or to a manifesto!
The Green Party states: ‘Over the next four weeks, the Green Party will be outlining its plans to renew Ireland. All of our policy documents and manifesto will be published here.’ On their main site they detail policies in a number areas, including housing in outline form.
Sinn Fein have a ten point plan for jobs and outlines of policy initiatives across a number of areas. In outline form they list a number of housing policy ideas.
So beyond the fact none of them have published manifestos as yet, and in terms of what they are presnetly focusing on, why isn’t housing and planning seen as a prime election issue – or at least a second-tier issue after jobs, the economy and political reform, that is worthy of some mention?
Many people are homeless, there are more than 120,000 households on the social housing waiting list, and a large of stock of social housing needs renewal due to its poor state. Over 90,000 households are in mortgage arrears, 36,000 of which are over 90 days in arrears. There are over 78,000 households (over 200,000 people) living in the 2,846 unfinished housing estates in the country, suffering issues of health and safety, anti-social behaviour, unfinished utilities, defunct management companies, and negative equity. Given some overlap in the households facing these issues, there are upwards of 250,000 households – 700,000 people – facing serious housing problems that need redress. That’s a large constituency of voters.
And yet, no political party has set out a full and comprehensive set of policies on housing issues, beyond some basic outline statements. For anyone with a pressing housing issue, whether it’s the threat of repossession, homelessness, poor quality or inappropriate housing, or living with unfinished developments, they want to know in specific terms how any new government is going to address the various housing issues they face on a daily basis.
The catastrophic failure of the planning system helped get us into the mess we’re in. And all through the bust local authorities continued to zone unneeded and inappropriate land and award planning permissions. A good, robust planning system will help us get out the crisis by having sensible and coordinated development in the future that is mindful of the economic, social and environmental costs of laissez faire and poorly regulated planning. Bad planning affects everyone. It is vital that reform of the planning system is undertaken to provide a system fit for purpose in the 21st century.
No political party has set out a full and comprehensive set of policies on planning. To me this extremely worrying. It’s as if planning is disconnected from development, recovery and growth – that things don’t need to be planned. It certainly was disconnected during the boom, hence the bust. And it has continued to be through the bust so far.
What is extremely troubling is that all parties are heading into this election without comprehensive policies set out in relation to critical aspects economic recovery and everyday life – planning and housing. And I do mean comprehensive policies – concrete actions and programmes that will address specific issues – not soundbites. Perhaps in the coming days the parties might set these out, but I’m not holding my breath. My sense is they’re not going to be able to get beyond soundbites, if they manage those.
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
February 4, 2011 at 8:39 am
This is an excellent article.There will be no detailed manifestos in my view because no party wants to lay itself on a slab for dissection by its rivals.
It is obscene that so many people have no homes and there are thousands of empty apartment blocks in Leinster which will never be bought by anybody now that the younger generation have copped on to the long term scam that is communal block living with all the communal charges imposed by unrepresentative management outfits etc.
Too late in the day a belated bill is on the horizon to provide the Irish apartment owner with the same rights that an apartment owner in Spain has had as the norm for decades.
It is an Irish joke that we are being asked to vote for the vaguest of unsubstantiated promises once again.Shades of The Bertie Ahern years election campaigns.
at least the current favourites are not promising us the sun, the moon and the stars-reality is if they make any kind of a definitive policy statement it will offend some group of voters.
Can you imagine,for example, any party promising to benchmark public servants wages (and pensions) against their Northern Ireland counterparts? Political suicide to even mention it.
So the posturing and pretence will continue until the blind vote once again for new white sticks,which will be distributed with great fanfare by a Tweedle dee dum and Tweedle dee dee coalition government.
February 4, 2011 at 9:27 pm
Its all very frightening really Rob. Too many years either in power, or too many out. That is why they have all forgotten what it is they are supposed to be doing there. Working for the best that they can to provide for society. Ah, but then I forgot – Maggie said, there is no such thing as society.
It would also be more honest of them to admit that one day, they will have to introduce water charges, rates on houses and public health insurance charges. All to much for one day. Phew.
February 4, 2011 at 10:03 pm
An equitable Rates return based on the square footage of the “Mc Mansions” which now litter the Irish countryside, rather than on the “value” of an average three bed semi detached family home in the Dublin area will have unhappy implications for many rural property owners..
February 5, 2011 at 1:30 am
The manifesto’s are whatever they have to say to get the votes, so be it, this is the game of Irish politics. Just listen to Gilmore talking about that jumped up civil servant Jean Claude Trichet who will do what the Labour Party, Jack O’Connor and David Begg tell him to do as a result of a negotiation. You could not make this up!
There should be a moratorium on planning permissions but NAMA must justify its existence so it has asked the developers to revise their old plans so they can be vetted by the same idiots who vetted them in the first place.
NAMA will spend 41bn acquiring loans and projects for which there is no demand. There is no money in the country and there will not be for a very long time. Longer than the life span of NAMA which was supposed to be 10 years. And between and end of NAMA will be interspersed by an event of default which will shake the whole system from top to bottom.
Dublin cannot even repair or build an alternative water supply to the Vartry tunnel which is in imminent danger of collapsing, yet DCC and the city manager insanely want to plough ahead with their high rise agenda? In the last 24 hours we have seen 50ml of rainfall in many parts of the country, yet if Dublin, NAMA, the government gets its way we will have to bring water from the river Shannon so toilets can be flushed in high rise apartments in Dublin? Leaking pipes a collapsing sewage system the country on the brink of outright bankruptcy with money flowing out of what is left of our banking system and they want to play lets pretend?
This is “planning” Irish style and it will only stop when the people pushing the paper at all levels of the dysfunctional system are told sorry there is no money there and you are surplus to requirements and btw that pension you were eying up? Well, we will ask the IMF about that but I think it may be performance related. One massive change required of the planning system is you cannot build if there is oversupply.
I would love to tell NAMA sorry you cannot go ahead with 80 to 90 per cent of your projects for ten years. When Sean Dunne “needed” a a 37 storey tower in the middle of Ballsbridge the Dublin City Architect Jim Barrett told Henning Larsen, his architects, it would be “the most elegant solution”. Then NAMA became the “only game in town” solution. The Irish madness has not gone away the best thing that could happen is that NAMA is found to be unconstitutional next wednesday but that won’t happen because the attack dogs will back off McKillen now that they know the whole shooting gallery could be declared unconstitutional. That same “unconstitutionality” would plunge the courts into chaos and they know the script so they will not bring the house of cards down but it is coming down anyway whether they like it or not.