Last week, there was another indication of how the new normal might be like the old normal. Fingal Council voted on Wednesday night to allow the disposal of public land to the developer Glenveagh which will lead to the building of 1,200 homes in North County Dublin. 

There are, it seems, two sides – and two sides only –  in any housing issue, at least on social media. Sinn Fein and Social Democrat councillors had been among the nine councillors who voted against the deal, something that was used against Sinn Fein in particular.

As Fine Gael and Fianna Fail politicians including Leo Varadakar and Darragh O’Brien lined up to criticise the Sinn Fein councillors, another glimpse was provided of the future and how polarising it might be. In the middle of this culture war, a few might have been tempted to wonder, where was the Labour Party?

Ireland is breaking down along right/left lines, but it can be hard to find the once leading party of the centre left in this new configuration. If all parties are being squeezed by the Fine Gael vs Sinn Fein battle, then Labour are being marginalized too, but also viewed warily by those who remember past errors.

Sinn Fein and the Social Democrats in particular seem like the parties to appeal to a new generation. Labour, Rebecca Moynihan says, are suffering for a few reasons, one of which is the make up of the party that was returned in 2016, with only seven seats and a party that couldn’t seize the moment, even if it had been allowed to.

Moynihan is a Labour senator and the party’s housing spokesperson who might be part of a shift in the perception of the party. As politics realigns, it is needed if Labour isn’t to appear irrelevant.

The election wipe out in 2016 has had many consequences, Moynihan believes.

“I think that who came back in 2016 means that we were missing and lacking a generational shift and a generational change. And I think you have a generational change that’s happening in Irish politics and the Labour Party has somewhat lagged behind that.  I think it’s a multitude of issues.”

Pic: Bryan Meade

There may be one big issue the party has to deal with, which can’t be helped by the fact that they haven’t been able to make that generational change. Labour’s part in the austerity government has left it in a position where it is more difficult to advocate for the underdog when recent history can be thrown back at them. Few believe in austerity as a solution anymore, but Labour were part of a government that enforced it.

“There are a lot of legacy issues and the sense that Labour let people down and didn’t fight for its politics,” Moynihan says.

Labour needs to face up to it, she says.

“There needs to be a bit of honesty about the mistakes that were made in government. I think a decision was probably taken -you can’t prove a negative about what didn’t happen – but I think a decision was probably taken that as coalition partners, we were going to argue things out in private and put on a united front. And I definitely do think that Fine Gael’s politics and ideological positioning at that time overwhelmed us.”

There were other problems too. Labour’s popularity attracted people who saw success but when things started going wrong, they weren’t committed to Labour policies.

“There were people that came to us around that period that ended up being involved, and some people being elected, that maybe didn’t have Labour values. They were coming over to Labour because we were doing very, very well. That happens to every party that increases very, very quickly. Some Labour candidates at the time were going around arguing about tax cuts. I’m a classic tax and spend social democrat and I could never believe that. So that kind of stuff, I think we made big mistakes because we had no sense of identity and that hard politics that needs to come through on the Labour side didn’t come through.”

Moynihan, in the full interview which can be listened to on the podcast that accompanies this article, talks about the need to change how Ireland values housing, as well as Bord Pleanala’s decision to reject Johnny Ronan’s plan for a 40-storey building in the docklands, why high density and high rise aren’t necessarily the same thing and if anyone should be concerned that there might be an element of nativism creeping into the housing debate. There is also a consideration of the Dublin Bay South byelection where Labour’s Ivana Bacik may be the closest challenger to Fine Gael’s James Geoghegan.

Labour voted for the development in Donabate at Fingal Council this week. It wasn’t ideal but Moynihan says houses have to be built.

“When we go back to the kind of the construction of both the Affordable Housing Bill and the Land Development Agency, I think there is a fundamental problem in public land being used, partially privatised, and used for developers, But you also can’t let perfection, or what you would like to see as being a piece of perfection, stopping units being developed,” she says.

She says that Labour worked hard to get important elements of the deal.

“Labour councillors got very important concessions. First of all, that it wouldn’t be sold on to an investor and that it would be used to provide housing for people and owner-occupiers. Secondly, that half of the apartments that were going to be built would be done for cost rental. So I think they drove a hard bargain in trying to get the best possible deal out of that. It is not a perfect deal by any stretch of the imagination. But you can’t talk about building more houses all the time in the middle of the housing crisis and say no to absolutely everything. Sometimes you end up saying yes for the sake of trying to progress something that you’re not 100 per cent happy with.”

But in a debate that is very loud, that position intent on compromise can be lost.

“Sometimes that nuance can get lost in the debate. I think when it comes to housing, I think people are more concerned about delivery than anything else. I think we can stand over our record in terms of that.”

As the party’s housing spokesperson, Moynihan has made some crucial intervention in the housing debate in recent weeks, wondering why apartments were being excluded from the government plans to prevent investment funds buying up developments. The attitude revealed much, she said, about the government’s attitude to those who live in apartments, told us something about what many of us lazily consider a home to be and also said a lot about the approach to city living. “I grew up in the inner city and I grew up in a house in the inner city, but I have always liked the idea of living in an apartment. And particularly because I think security and apartments are really important.”

“You can’t fix the housing crisis overnight,” Moynihan says but the speed at which it is fixed has to be part of the conversation unless Ireland is to aspire to an abstract ideal housing plan where no houses get built because the reality doesn’t conform to the vision.

Moynihan believes that housing has become so important that it cannot be left to the private sector to set the cost. It wouldn’t happen in health or in education, she says.

“I’d love to see a situation where the Land Development Agency -and the housing that they develop on those sites –  are public housing and they’re open to all people. But the costs of them will be linked to affordability for people based on income, because I think both construction costs, and also the market cost of housing have become completely detached from what people are earning. And where you have situations like that happen, you have to have state intervention. For example, we would never consider to link healthcare costs or the cost of providing a Covid response in the healthcare setting to what the market will end up deciding or wait for the private market to fill those roles.

“I think the fundamental point is that both the cost of construction and the cost of housing have become very detached from people’s wages and what is affordable for an awful lot of people. As long as we are dependent on people being able to make a profit to build houses, we are going to get stuck in situations, where we did in the 2010s where when money went from that system, we basically didn’t build anything at all.”

Because housing has consequences for so many other areas of an individual and family’s life, Moynihan says. “Housing affects people’s employment, it affects people’s security, it impacts affects people’s health, it has a lot of knock on effects.”

“If you look at some of the more successful European countries, I’m thinking about cases like Austria and Germany, for example, they have continuously had state intervention in the housing crisis, because if anything interferes with the market, and you suddenly have houses not being built, and then there’s always the time lag to the type of crisis that we’re seeing now at the moment.”

For Moynihan, the state intervention is necessary to stop the country swinging wildly from one form of housing crisis to another.

The Land Development Agency could be a “game-changer”, she believes, but not as constituted. “I suppose that’s where I think something like the Land Development Agency potentially has the power to be a game changer in that they could build up capacity to be able to build houses. Remember, what developers do is they pull together land banks, they put together tenders, they pull contractors and contractors are the ones that actually build the houses. So we either have a state capacity to do that, or we don’t. We don’t at the moment and it doesn’t seem as if, in developing the Land Development Agency, that’s the way that they’re looking at doing it as well, because they’re also talking about having public private partnerships that are available on the land.”

Moynihan wants to talk to the generation which doesn’t see the Labour party as being a solution to its problems but she says her party wants to break the cycle.

“I think for too long in Ireland, on housing, we’ve gone from boom to bust to boom to bust to boom to bust.”