Irish Examiner view: Housing on the right track, but still off target

Fri, 27 Oct, 2023 - 00:55

While, on one hand, the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) this week predicted that next year will see the biggest build-out of new homes in this country since the Celtic Tiger, we have also been told the Government spending on housing is well behind target.

The CIF rationale is based on the premise that costs have stabilised since the worst point of the economic “price shock”, which followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and also that additional resources given to An Bord Pleanála have hastened planning decisions.

However, it has emerged from the Department for Housing that just €1.4bn of the €4bn earmarked this year for social and affordable housing has been spent to the end of September. Agencies such as the Land Development Agency have, apparently, spent only a fraction of their budgetary allocation.

As is ever the case, figures can be juggled around to paint different figures and, in this instance, the department maintains the headline figure did not include all the other housing projects funded this year. It maintains the true figure of exchequer spending — up to October 20 — was €2.5bn.

Whatever way you paint it, the situation appears to show us that it will be hard for Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien and his department to actually spend all of the €4bn before 2024.

While the minister is fighting a rearguard action, support for him has come from the CIF, which says that housing output exceeded Government targets last year and will do so again this year. Even so, the CIF declined to say if next year’s official target of 33,450 new units will be met.

The CIF also maintained that tens of thousands of units were being held up by planning disputes, and these could be unlocked if additional resources are provided to An Bord Pleanála.

It is worth noting that the relative positives for housing in Ireland contrast sharply with those across Europe, where high costs linked to higher interest rates triggered downturns in building output. Despite all the politicking, it might just be — emphasis on might — that Ireland is on the right track when it comes to building homes.

But decades of underachievement have us on the back foot.

Johnson on a shaky tightrope

Mike Johnson from Louisiana is set to become the new speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington — the third most powerful office in the US after those of the president and vice-president — but most Americans have never heard of the 51-year-old arch-conservative.

That is not really a surprise as the ‘second tier’ congressman — signifying he is what would be known in this part of the world as a ‘backbencher’ — was never considered to be a frontrunner for the job and only really got it because the far-right Freedom Caucus were unable to get Jim Jordan elected to the post. It has been a tense three weeks on Capitol Hill
following the ousting of Kevin McCarthy from the speaker’s chair, in which a Republican party riven with in-fighting and extremism had failed to elect a replacement.

Those such as Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer were selected as candidates for the post, but hard-right factions within the party quickly went to work to deny them the votes from the floor of the House that would secure the post for either man.

Given that Jordan, the Ohioan conservative firebrand, had also failed to lock down enough support to gain the chair because ultimately he was too toxic to ascend to the top post, there had been hope the most extreme elements of the party would be silenced.

And yet, Johnson, a constitutional lawyer who wrote a brief offering a legal justification for trying to overturn the 2020 election and also served as a defender for Donald Trump when impeachment proceedings were brought against him, has got the job.

Worryingly, the Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz, who precipitated the chaos in the House when he triggered McCarthy’s ousting, claimed Johnson’s ascendancy proved Trump still dominated the Republican party and that its Maga branch was “ascendent”.

The reality for Johnson now is that he will almost certainly have to cut deals with the Democrats in order to keep the government solvent and operational.

If he is to do so then, like McCarthy, he might well find members of his own caucus turning their backs on him. The road ahead for Johnson is thoroughly pitted, and the high-wire act he has committed to will be shaky as hell.

It's time to scrap the skort

It seems ridiculous in this day and age that there is an ongoing row in this country over an item of sporting apparel.

And yet that’s just what is going on in the world of camogie, where the wearing of a “skort”, a hybrid item which is somewhere between a skirt and shorts, is a requirement of the rules, but has become a hated piece of kit.

Players describe the skort as being “archaic”, “a little bit silly”, and say the requirement to wear one in competitive matches is forcing them to wear uncomfortable clothing.

Were players in this weekend’s All-Ireland club semi-finals to wear shorts rather than the prescribed skort, their club would have been fined.

Motions to have skorts replaced by the more comfortable option failed to make the clár at the Camogie Association congress last April, and the proposals have been deferred until the 2024 gathering.

The Thomas McCurtains club in London launched a Shorts Not Skorts campaign last March and is actively seeking a change in the rules. For now, however, the players have to abide by the rules, even if they are being forced to wear a piece of kit that appears to be universally unpopular.

Irish Examiner view: Worrying times ahead for Donald Trump

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