Education used to be the path to owning a home. Now it’s all about assets

As Margaret Thatcher’s funeral cortege wound its way through London on the day of her state funeral, a woman stood holding a home-made placard: “Thank you for my house, Maggie!” Mrs Thatcher’s “Right to Buy Scheme”, allowing council tenants to buy their houses, won over a whole new cohort of former Labour voters to the Conservative cause. It contributed to her three terms in government. In housing she had found an issue which crossed the class barrier.
Could housing play the same role in this election? There is a whole generation of young people who have been shut out of house ownership by high prices, and out of rental accommodation by high rents. It is stunting their ability to get on with their adult lives, to take up jobs. It’s creating intergenerational resentment and tension. The biggest opposition party, Sinn Féin, has offered an alternative housing plan and there’s no doubt that housing was one of the issues which accounted for the sizeable increase in its support in the last general election. Will it offer the party the breakthrough into increased support, some of it middle class, that it needs to gain the number of seats for government? We won’t have to wait long to know.
But first let’s look at how we got here. After the bust – and that, remember, was caused largely by Fianna Fáil and Bertie Ahern’s determination to make the boom boomer and to win three terms in office in a row – we thought we’d seen the end of soaring house prices. But older ones like me sat with a sense of dread as we saw prices slowly rising again. Economists who knew the housing market warned early in those dark years that there was a growing supply problem in Dublin and then warned that there was a similar problem in cities like Cork and Galway and Limerick. They were told by politicians and officials that there were lots of excess houses in Monaghan and Leitrim. Those in government couldn’t see past the ghost estates.
Anyway, as house prices rose, the problem of negative equity was being reduced – one less political difficulty to deal with. It would be cynical to suggest that was why no action was taken. But it was convenient anyway, and there was a reluctance on the part of those builders and developers who survived to take chances again. Fear froze ambition and the building which should have happened from 2015 to 2020 didn’t materialise. Fine Gael did not cause the boom and bust but it does have to take some responsibility for that lack of ambition.
There is another responsibility: the State’s responsibility to provide housing for those who cannot afford to provide it for themselves. Local authority housing decreased massively from the late 1980s when councils started having to apply to central government for the funding to build. From then on, new houses had to be funded in full up front. Take the contrast with the mid 1970s, when councils were directly building up to 8,500 homes a year. In 2023, councils directly built 1,317 houses. And then we have to remember that the policy of allowing council houses to be sold off has reduced the social housing stock in the lifetime of this Government. Some 16,948 new social houses have been “delivered” through various sources, but just 9,096 added to council social housing stock.
A massive shift to move the job of providing social housing over to the private sector happened under the Fine Gael/Labour government in 2014 when the Housing Assistance Payment (Hap) was given to people on the housing list to let them find accommodation in the private sector. So there were even more people competing for private rental provision. As rents rose, many of those on Hap were left floundering.
A string of mistakes made over decades has left a whole generation of people out in the cold. All the parties have detailed housing policies. But let’s look at Sinn Féin’s, which is pretty ambitious but also the most contentious. Households earning up to €90,000 a year would be eligible to buy affordable homes starting at €300,000, but the State would retain ownership of the land the homes are built on with ongoing conditions on the sale and rent of the home. The plan also promises rents at or below €1,000 a month, aimed at renters and purchasers who earn too much to qualify for council housing but who cannot purchase a home.
There is lots more in the document but it was these affordability figures which immediately caught the eye. However, there’s a problem: the banks have not given it the green light from the point of view of offering mortgages. There is a question mark as to how they could securitise something when they don’t totally own it. Brian Hayes of the Banking Federation told RTÉ’s Claire Byrne in September that the banks would sit down with any government and see what could be worked out. And that was still the banks’ position this week
This is a crucial bundle of votes. According to the Housing Commission report, households earning between €50,000 and €100,000 (whether it’s a single person, or a single income couple, or two people working) cannot afford to buy a home. There was a time when increased access to education in this country (and a bow to Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour governments) had created a more meritocratic society. Education was your path to social mobility and owning a modest home of your own. Now it’s all about assets again, having enough money to chase that increasingly elusive dream. Will this shutout cohort trust Sinn Féin to deliver for them? Or are there just too many question marks over its plan?
Talking in recent years to a well-educated professional young woman in her 30s, she told me that she couldn’t afford to buy, so she shared a rented house with three other people. Her father was getting older and she was worried about him. He lived down the country and she wanted to have him come to live with her in the city where she worked. Was she ever, she said, going to able to be the good daughter she wanted to be?
It didn’t seem too much to ask.
Olivia O’Leary is a journalist, writer and current affairs presenter