Stories
This conversation begins and ends talking about Busáras, the much loved (and much unloved) central bus station squatting beside the IFSC, almost a protestor at door of the physical representation of financial globalisation.
The conversation also begins 13 years ago.
Sinn Féin had just been hammered electorally. In 2007 the party got 6.9 per cent of the general vote, bringing in just four TDs. The local elections were two years away. The party would not fare much better. Eoin Ó Broin rightly saw this performance as an electoral failure, and the future housing spokesperson of Sinn Fein wrote down his thoughts on where the party had come from, the causes of its failure, and its chances of fixing its problems, in his 2009 book Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism.
The book is an attempt to tie together the threads of political thought animating the Sinn Féin movement. This was something well worth doing over a decade ago. Given the party’s electoral success since, where the likely ruling party of the state gets its ideas matters far more. Ó Broin does us a service, because much of the thinking about the movement, when it was coherently described at all, came from bits of political biography and snatches of seminal policy document. Synthesizing this for us and pulling it into a historical narrative gives the reader a chance to get their head around the party as an abstract entity, evolving all the time.
The book ends by stating eight theses the writer hopes to revisit in the centenary year. Given the passage of time, it struck me as a good idea to put them back to Eoin and see how well the theses stood up. Most of them did. The key one for me was the tension between centralisation and decentralisation.
I very much wanted to talk about the tension between the past of the party, which much of its new support base either doesn’t remember or may want to forget, and its future. Recent polls show the Sinn Féin voter, more than anything, wants change, an end to the hegemony of the civil war parties. The personalities and policies are of course related to the party’s rise, but as the party moves into the centre, the tension between the past and the future will only intensify. Here Ó Broin’s answer might surprise many readers.
We end talking about institutional funds and the broader housing debate, with Ó Broin giving pointers towards a suite of policy offerings coming in the new year. I’m of the opinion that the housing ‘debate’ has ceased to be one, for all intents and purposes. You have camps contesting an increasingly arid ground, impugning each other’s motives and generally producing more heat than light. Ó Broin wants to change that debate with a range of policy proposals aimed at de-risking the private sector’s investment in housing and providing a solid floor for landlords. Concrete policy proposals would certainly move us on from the current contest.
Ó Broin in conversation is widely read, earnest, and honest about the party’s history and its future. I deeply enjoyed the conversation and hope we can speak again in the new year.
In this interview, Ó Broin discusses:
“The slow decline of neoliberalism”
Left Republicanism and Liam Mellows
The change agenda: Understanding Sinn Fein’s surge
Command, control and party structure
Learning from the mistakes of the left
The tension between Sinn Féin’s past and present
Institutional investors and the housing market
The role of the private sector in a leftist state
*****
Stephen Kinsella (SK): Congratulations on the publication of two recent books, Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger and the beautiful book about Busáras. To read a book that is a love letter to a building is a very interesting… it’s an interesting thing to do. While also, at the same time, being part of the largest and most popular party in the country.
Eoin Ó Broin (EOB): Yeah, I mean the book, it’s kind of interesting because it started off as a book about the building and about the history of the building and the design and the architecture. But of course, because I’m a politician and I can’t help myself, it also ended up being a book about politics in a very general sense. And without spending too much time talking about it, what is really important about that building isn’t just that it is our outstanding example of mid-century modernist architecture and a wonderful building when you get to know it properly despite the very ambivalent nature many of us Dubliners have had with it.
There was also a really important set of ideas, philosophical ideas about public service, about public space, about how industry and governmental culture should work together in the service of the nation and the people. And while that wasn’t something I fully appreciated at the start; it was a real pleasure to come to understand that building at the end. So, it is a book of history, it’s a book of architectural and design critique, but it is also a book about philosophy and a set of ideas that weren’t just valuable and important back in the ‘40s and ‘50s when that building was being built. But particularly, given our current conjecture in Irish society today, where we might go in the future. So, it’ll be no surprise that it ends with a political message, and I suppose that adds to the book in some way in my view.
“The slow decline of neoliberalism”
“We are anti a dysfunctional private rental sector.”
SK: I want to take us to another book that you write in 2009, which is Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism. And I read this book after I read Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer, which is I guess your most celebrated book to date. And at the end of this book, particularly on page 302, there are eight theses on the future of Sinn Féin. Now I think it’s really worth us going through them relatively quickly. So, I might put one to you and then, and sort of give a bit of context here. So, the idea here is you’re writing in 2008/2009, this is what you think will happen to the party in some sense by 2016. So, you have that kind of centenarian, century-long kind of focus. But of course, we can just update it to 2021.
Eight theses on the future of Sinn Féin. Thesis One; Context. And so, you say ‘one of the contemporary Sinn Féin’s great strengths has been our ability to adapt to the changing political context within which we find ourselves. Unlike previous generations of Republicans or much the European left, the party’s ability to reflect critically on the limitations of current policies, strategies and developed new and innovative processes has ensured that the party has been able to develop and grow, irrespective of the obstacles presented’. And then you go on to say ‘Sinn Féin needs to develop a deeper and more critical understanding of the domestic European and global context in which we find ourselves in order to develop our long-term strategies’. So, reflecting on that, you know, what the younger Eoin if you like wrote, how do you think that sort of thesis holds up today?
EOB: Maybe one just preface remark before we get into each of the theses. As somebody who writes a lot, for me, writing is about learning and coming to understand something. So, I don’t start with a conclusion, I start with a set of questions. And the purpose of this particular book was – I was kind of 11 years into my activism in Sinn Féin as a full-time party activist and I’d spent a lot of time reading all of the different source material around that broader left Republican tradition. But nobody had ever put it in one place. So, part of the idea of writing this book was to try and make my life easier if somebody else had written this book before I had read all those other books. To kind of say look, first of all, can we explore this political and ideological tradition which I call Left Republicanism? At the time, most of the books in circulation would have been about individuals or they would have been primarily books about the IRA or the conflict. So this really is an attempt, from within the Republican tradition, to write that ideological and political history.
But also, as I was learning that history, I was realising it was a history of failure and this is really the central argument to the book which is relevant to the thesis which is – there is no point celebrating your own historical past if that past is one of failure to achieve the objective you set yourself. Wouldn’t it be much better to critically ask yourself, why haven’t you succeeded? Because if you ask those questions, you might then be able to make the future more successful. And I suppose that led me to ending the book with these theses.
So these theses are more kind of teasing out the potential points of failure into the future and the choices that we have. And the last thing is – the moment I concluded the book is very important because again I started the research probably really the decade before in terms of my activism and learning. But we just had a really, really bad general election result in the South if you remember in 2007. It was perceived by many people as a real setback for the party. So, it was a nice moment to end the book which is – and here we have another failure. As somebody who hopes to participate in overcoming that, what are the challenges? So, that’s a bit of a preface.
The crucial point about context in this thesis was we were entering the era of the slow decline of neoliberalism. That that hegemonic social political and economic project in Ireland, Europe and globally was entering its first faltering footsteps. And I suppose what I was urging the party to do is get to grips with that as quickly as possible. We were also emerging, not out of conflict and the peace process, but the peace process was stabilising and I say that very carefully because of course, these things are never so stable. But really, it was a demand on the party to get to grips with that changing situation. In a funny sense, the events that unfolded forced us to do this thing anyway because the gravity of the economic collapse, the gravity of the Eurozone crisis some years later forced us all to become experts in or at least think we were experts in that crisis.
So, I actually think the party has done very well in getting to grips with this. Not because they read my book, just because political events surrounding us all, forced us all to do that. And in that sense, I think we have adapted and evolved very well in that changing context. And we’ve gone one step further because in 2012/13/14 we emerged out of the crisis into a recovery. And I do think one of the keys to Sinn Féin’s success electorally at the moment is the way from responding to opposition to austerity, arguing the case for a fair recovery and then trying to position ourselves in terms of what kind of a society, economy and nation do we want on the other side of all of that I think is really underlining and underpinning a lot of the party’s success. So, certainly, that’s one, as I re-read this this morning for the first time in over a decade you know, for a whole set of reasons I think that’s certainly one of the theses that I do think the party has learned their lessons from and adapted pretty well. And I think if nothing else, the last general election, the party’s polling numbers in the North and the South kind of reflect that in my view.
Left Republicanism and Liam Mellows
SK: Moving on to thesis two; Sinn Féin needs to abandon the key ideological formulation that has underpinned Left Republicanism since Mellows. Why don’t you just, why don’t I stop there and you can just give us a quick summary on what that actually is?
EOB: The central debate in the book which is there are two fundamental elements to the Left Republican project which one is the ending of partition and the achievement of national independence and the second is a democratic socialist republic. An Ireland of equals, an egalitarian economy and society, whatever language you use. And that you know, if you look at the evolution of modern Sinn Féin from that period of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, really the ideological underpinning of the party’s current project really rests with Liam Mellows. And the idea is that those two things are important, but the national independence is more important, and the socioeconomic dimension is at the service of the national. I think that becomes a little bit more integrated during the history of the party in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. That both are important, but we talk about a primary and a secondary, that you have to achieve national reunification to be able to achieve the ultimate objective of the party which is democratic socialism, that’s in the party’s constitution. Whichever way you cut that; you’re still not integrating the two fully. Either one is more important than the other or one comes first and the other after.
My strong view is, if you want to achieve both you have to do it at the same time. You have to integrate fully at all times the national objectives and the social economic objectives. And I suppose, what I was challenging the party to think about is really to move away from the Mellows formulation, which is one more important than the other, one before the other and integrate the two at all aspects and all moments of the party’s political advance.
One is the model of capitalism that exists right now right, which is you know, it is not state-led, it is private sector led. It’s definitely not egalitarian, although it delivers some measure of quality of course. But you know, the idea of the reunification as the primal element and then we’ll sort the rest afterwards.
SK: It is interesting that… do you think the current party has that inter-grid of structure all the way through?
EOB: So, the first thing is just to say my point is slightly different one which is the vast majority of people are concerned about their day-to-day wellbeing; them, their families, their communities. They don’t think about constitutional issues. It is very rare that constitutional change in that profound way becomes a matter of day-to-day conversation. And if you look at history, both our own history and the history of other jurisdictions, it is only when the existing constitutional institutional framework cannot deliver social and economic goods for people, and I don’t mean goods in the economy sense, I mean public goods, that people start to question the constitutional and institutional underpinnings of our social economic system. So, first of all, I’m a democratic socialist, so I want to see more egalitarian society.
But separately to that, I don’t think you can convince people to support actively profound constitutional change anywhere unless it’s liked to their social economic wellbeing. So, that’s the crucial point. And again, I would argue that I think the real driver of Sinn Féin’s success, but also the driver of an ever-increasing debate about Irish unity has been the consequence of the party’s improved integrating of the national and the social economic dimensions of the party’s project.
And again, we have been assisted by external events. Brexit of course has been one of those external events. But also, the outworkings of and the constant concentric circle ripples of the years of austerity in terms of you know, we talk about long-Covid, but how about talking about long-austerity and its impact on rents and house prices and you know, something that the folks in The Currency have written about quite a lot. So, I think it’s integration of those two things that are really important. So, it’s not that people are voting for Sinn Féin more because they like our housing policy in and of itself. People are beginning to see and think about and talk about an agenda of change that is social, economic, politic, cultural and constitutional. Individually, individual voters may prefer one bit of that change agenda over others, but the change agenda is increasingly integrated in a way that I think is really healthy and something that I’ve been arguing for inside the party you know, when I was writing this book and since.
The change agenda: Understanding Sinn Fein’s surge
SK: It’s interesting when you talk about policies, there was a poll that asked Sinn Féin voter what the reason for the vote was. Is it a personality thing, do you like Mary Lou, do you like Eoin Ó Broin? Or is it a policy thing, or is it just change? Because I think 50 per cent of the respondents if I’m correct, said change. So, it’s interesting that they are picking up on that. But I think it was, the policy number I believe was 15 per cent.
So, the signal that’s coming from you know, we’ll build you more houses, we’ll do this, or we’ll do that, we’ll change income tax rates. That’s not necessarily ringing through. It’s just we want a change.
EOB: Although, what I would say is because there was another question which is a question around the kind of the front bench, and it mentioned Pearse and Louise O’Reilly and myself and others and that was at about 25 per cent. But I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive because…
SK: No, they’re deeply correlated, of course.
EOB: It’s not the case that people think Eoin Ó Broin is a nice guy so they’re going to vote for Sinn Féin. I think whether it’s myself or Louise or David Cullinane or Pearse, in our respective portfolios and on those issues that really matter to people, people are increasingly convinced that we’re certainly worth a punt in terms of a turn in government to try and deliver that change. And if you go back to the RTÉ exit poll from the last general election, housing was the single biggest factor in the reason for many people voting for the party. So, I think the change agenda and that over-arching sense, you’re absolutely right, is key. But I also think the 25 per cent and the 15 per cent are all wrapped up in that and for me, that’s a healthy thing.
Command, control and party structure
SK: Thesis Three; Organisation. So, Sinn Féin’s ideological organisational history, the experience of 70 years of state repression, 30 years conflict have combined to create an organisation which is both highly centralised in its distribution of power and vertical in its structure of command. Loyalty is often more valued than critical debate and internal democracy. You go on to talk about how we’re going to need to go towards a more decentralised and horizontal party structure to succeed. Equipping activists with the ability and space for constructive critical reflection, you know, and just realising that the party is too small to you know, no party would be the right size to carry out the task you set yourselves. And as an organisation we need to grow in terms of activist support as in voters. So, it’s a really interesting tension you’re calling out there between the kind of centralised model command and control you know, the party decides the line, and everything moves and you kind of totally decentralise control which as a democratic socialist of course, you want to decentralise control, right. How do you feel that this thesis has held up between 2009 and today?
EOB: Of course, to be honest, traditionally the democratic socialists preferred that vertical command and control. Or as Michael McDowell keeps accusing us of that democratic centralism which is part of both the Republican traditional as well as the Left tradition in Europe and globally. Whereas it’s the more anarchist type of approaches that had that much more kind of vertical and grassroots. And it’s always a tension because while I think the party again has made really significant progress, not just in its size and its level of activism and I think all of those things are actually true. But also in terms of the space for internal discussion and debate. I mean it is significant that we still make policy decisions on the really important matters at a public Ard Fheis.
And I think we’re of the three large parties in the Southern State, we’re the only party that does that. And there is in my view plenty of scope, despite what some detractors say for lots of internal discussion and debate. What marks us out as different from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of course is we have that debate internally. And I always compare us to the Dublin football team which similarly was very unlikely to talk out of school and give this kind of you know, very cohesive version of itself. But internally of course, there was always discussion and debate, and you know, good teams and strong teams and teams that have their debates internally and then go out and play on the pitch as a united front.
No organisation’s perfect and no organisation gets that balance between the horizontal and the vertical right at any one time. And in the era of ever shortening news cycles, and media saturation through social media and the desire of a party to manage its message while encouraging open debate and dissention is always tricky. But as somebody who has a long history of promoting and actively engaging in democratic critical dissent in the party, that’s never caused me any difficulty and certainly isn’t causing me any difficulty now.
So, you know, again I think we’re in a healthy place. Do we get it right all the time? No. Will we get it right all the time in the future? No. But I think again the party wouldn’t be growing organisationally, electorally the way we’re doing, if we weren’t getting that mix right. One thing I’ll add is when I compare us to many of our European counterparts, one of the great difficulties they have as well of the larger traditional parties here, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, is they’ve lost their activism. And I think one of the things we’ve really done well as a party and I know this is at the core of our success for example in Dublin Mid-West, when we were not only able to elect one TD, but then elect Mark Ward in the by-election and then elect the two TDs, is activism is key to everything we do.
And therefore, we don’t see ourselves as a parliamentary party of politicians, we see ourselves as grassroots community activists and I do as much of that activism today as I do parliamentary activity here in the Dáil. And I think that’s been a real key to our success and something that needs to continue into the future.
Potential coalition partners
SK: Thesis Five; Alliances. At the centre of these challenges is the question of securing State power. Obviously, things have moved along since 2009. Sinn Féin’s political strategy rests on securing power in both parliaments on the island of Ireland in conjunction with popular movements with socioeconomics, political change in order to deliver far-reaching transformation. You talk about getting a limited power in the North which is fair and then you’re saying look, at present, Sinn Féin like all the smaller parties in the State – it does not advocate any pre-electoral pact or political social coalition but campaigns on the basis of manifesto.
But it does not expect to secure an overall majority in the future, the only option is via coalition and so therefore you’re saying well look you know, we need to start thinking about you know, what kind of coalition partners are there. You know, you can say something like you know, the combined electoral strength of Sinn Féin, Labour and the Greens can be as much as 30 per cent of the electorate. So if they were to build a social electorate coalition and with trade unions, NGOs you know, we’d be grand. So, basically, you’re saying look wouldn’t it be great if there was essentially a vote left/transfer left pact that got us all together and delivered a Sinn Féin led, Green, Labour coalition that you know, could produce the required number of seats to get a majority Dáil Éireann. Where do you think you stand on this now?
EOB: I’ve always been a strong opponent of the idea of participation in coalition as a minority player. But for somebody who wants Sinn Féin to be in government, that then begs the question – so what’s your route to State power? Some of the left who don’t want State power, they see their political function in parliament as different. I’m oldder fashioned Gramscianand therefore I see parliamentary politics as one of a number of sites of struggle alongside workplace struggle and community struggle and popular mobilisation as a route to acquiring State power and then using the institutions of the State as well as other mechanisms to deliver profound transformation to the social, economic, political, cultural and constitutional order. And therefore, for a number of years, I was the one tabling the motions at the Ard Fheis as opposing minority participation in coalition. Wanting that to be our pre-election position and roundly being defeated every year by the Ard Chomhairle. Eventually, the mood in the party shifted and I think it was in advance of the 2016 election that, in fact, that proposition was endorsed by the Ard Fheis and we went into 2016 with that position very clearly. And I think I was the first elected Sinn Féin TD to do any media afterwards. I mean the first question was you know, so will you talk to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and I made it very clear, absolutely not, in no circumstances. That is not our job, our job is to build the alternative. I think we were vindicated in that because I think what it has showed is people do want an alternative beyond Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, they do want a sense that change is possible.
And I’m a close studier of long-term electoral trends. So, while the high point of kind of centre-right electoral activity was kind of that last election in the ‘80s, it’s been a slow and steady decline since with a little bump in 2007. But the trends have been a kind of a more fragmentation and also, a more distinct left-right divide and some of the empirical research has confirmed that more recently. So, I think that has stood us well and I think we have as a party continued to argue some of the core strategic points I made there which is how do we build those alliances inside and outside of the Oireachtas? And you can point to some pretty important examples.
So, the Right to Water campaign was a really good example of a part of the party political left and a part of the trade union movement organising and mobilising. Then complemented by increased electoral strength inside parliament in 2016. And the impact was, albeit on a very narrow policy objective, achieving 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the objectives of that. Likewise, I think in other ways and involving an even broader coalition on things like marriage equality or reproductive rights, you’ve been able to see how that coalition, albeit involving actually elements of social liberal and centre-right political perspectives. And in some senses what the Raise the Roof movement was trying to do when it was established in and around housing policy was to do something similar. Open door, involve everybody and in fact, from a party political point of view, it had the largest party political alliance that I’ve seen in recent times. It involved the entire trade union movement, not just the anti-austerity trade union movement as well as a lot of civil society organisations. And the value of those kind of movements is they don’t just help deliver electoral change which I think they really did in the 2016, or sorry, 2020 general election.
But if for example on the other side of such an election, like the next general election, they help put in place a government of change, a coalition of change. Those social movements then have another job which is to ensure that coalition of change or government of change does the things it said it would do. So, while they may have played a role in assisting political parties get elected, their role should then shift, post the formation of the pro-change government to being the guarantor. They’ve this great phrase in Spanish, a kind of a you know, a social guarantor that the party should then take off and do the things that they said.
So, I do think that underlines, that strategy I think has been broadly successful. Part of the difficulty, parties of the left are also electoral competitors and if Sinn Féin grows exponentially, could that be at the expense not of Fianna Fáil, but of the smaller progressive parties and there’s some evidence that suggests that would be the case. Ultimately, what we would like is a government without Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Mary Lou made this very clear in that series of public rallies we did after the last general election, that we wanted at that stage a Republican, Left, Green coalition and I think that’s still the kind of the aspiration of the vast majority of members of the party. Ultimately, that’ll come down to the election campaigns of all the individual parties and the numbers on the other side of that. But I do think if the objective of progressives, of those of us who define ourselves in different ways as on the left. Whether it’s Social Democratic left, whether it’s Labour left, whether it’s Republican left or Green left because there’s still a good chunk of people inside the Green Party who don’t believe the kind of liberal Green agenda of Eamon Ryan is going to deliver on that party’s objectives.
You know, I still think there is either an opportunity for a government without Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael or at least to maximise that block to such an extent that the type of government that will emerge on the other side of the next general election would be profoundly different from any option that we’ve had up until this point in the history of the State.
Learning from the mistakes of the left
SK:. I want to jump forward to the Thesis Seven which is Democratic Socialism. And so, you say the harsh reality of Sinn Féin socialism is that it’s never been much more than a rhetorical expression of a demand for a more equal society. Either in a Christian-Socialism formulation, in a command economy formulation. It’s basically been, we want a more equal society, let’s strap a label on that and that’s very good. And you said look, you jump down and you say whether the left is a credible alternative programme to put in place is not yet certain. But Sinn Féin needs to be part of the global movement seeking to develop and define that alternative. So, you have a kind of an international political, an internationalist if you like. Political perspective that you want to bring here that says look, we’ll let the neoliberal thing just die slowly, we’ll build up an alternative which is essentially around a socialist principle of the generation and distribution of wealth right.
EOB: I’m somebody who pays a lot of attention to what’s going on in the world around me. And at the time of writing the book, the global left and our sister organisations in many parts of the world were in a similar space. So, I suppose battered by the defeat of latter stage kind of social democratic Keynesianism and then decades of defence of anti-neoliberal policies where you’re simply trying to defend the erosion of the welfare state or workers’ rights etc.
There had yet to emerge a kind of a credible alternate project and I don’t even mean that in terms of a manifesto, I almost just mean in terms of a kind of an everyday common sense. So, if you think about it, what was significant about that post-war golden era wasn’t just that you had Keynes or Harold Wilson or whoever, but those ideas permeated into the common sense of everyday thinking and they just became the norm. Likewise, in the era of neoliberalism, most people never read Hayek, let alone knew who he was. But it became the common sense of the day.
So, I suppose 2007/8/9, the global left and the domestic left still haven’t worked out, so what’s our common sense for the post-neoliberal era? How do we convince people that we have, not just an economic project but a hegemonic project that can meet people’s everyday needs in this era of political and economic crisis? I think the kind of the positive news is that in a whole variety of countries, the rise of progressive alternative movements to the left of mainstream social democracy has transformed itself into mainstream social liberalism; shows that there’s a much greater appetite for that.
The challenge however, has been if you look at Corban or Sanders, they haven’t been able to go to the distance in terms of acquisition of State power. Or in the case of Syriza in Greece, when they were able to acquire state power for a whole variety of reasons we don’t have time to get into, they weren’t able to achieve the kinds of transformations they were looking for. All of that is very helpful for us in Sinn Féin because it’s always great when your friends make mistakes before you do because you can try and learn from those and see where you want to go. But I do think again, and look I’ll talk about housing because it is the areas where I’m most comfortable talking about because I know the detail. But I think what the party has articulated in housing policy and what I tried to do with the book Home, is not just say there’s a few little policies that we can tinker around the edges.
There’s a fundamental profound transformational agenda for a housing system that you can’t do overnight, you can’t do in five years, but you can start to turn the ship of a housing system with short, medium and long-term wins that will really start to carve back out in the space of the housing system non-market, public and what I would believe ultimately are democratic socialist objectives. They don’t replace the markets, they don’t replace the capitalist dynamics, but they start to push them back into a space where they’re no longer as prevalent, as dominant and ultimately as aggressive and undermining of our housing system as we’d experienced over the last number of years and we’re still experiencing. And I think likewise, my colleague Kathleen Funchion is doing the same in childcare. David Cullinane is doing the same in healthcare. Louise O’Reilly is doing the same in workers’ rights and employment. Pearse Doherty has been doing for quite a long time in terms of fiscal policy and those things. And look you know, the party is still in transition so we’ve a lot of other work to do.
Like climate is an area where clearly the party has a policy deficiency in and I think anybody being honest about it, you can say that. But I do think Darren O’Rourke in energy and transport and Lynn in biodiversity and climate, are trying to fill that gap. And as the party grows, I think you’ll start to see all of that emerge. And again, paying attention to what’s going on elsewhere in the world. So, you know, we used to have these mad debates in the left about were you a reformist, a revolutionary and you know, did you want to tame capitalism or smash capitalism? My sense is this really is about on the street, in the workplace, in the community, in the institutions of democratic governance; local, national and you know, international at European Union level. How can you start to carve back out the public space?
The tension between Sinn Féin’s past and present
SK: I am very interested to get on and talk about two major issues…The first is thinking a little bit about the tension between the past and the future okay. So, all of the policies that you or any minister would enact as a seal-holder of Dáil Éireann are about the future. We will build X houses, they’re all about the future. And yet, unlike many other parties with perhaps the exception of the Labour Party, Sinn Féin is constantly dealing with this tension of the past. So, you’ve got the past and you have the if you like, the politics of the past and the politics of the future. The voters clearly want to understand what the politics of the future looks like. And yet, every week or every month something comes back that gives us this tension with the past. I don’t want to get into the current stuff, but just how do you reflect on that tension because I think it’s relatively unique in our system?
EOB: First of all, I think it’s a really good thing. So, I don’t see it as a bad thing at all. One of the problems with contemporary politics all over the world is its horizon and its timeframe has become increasingly narrowed. The politics of the next election to get yourself elected. The politics of the next tweet or the next news cycle. And therefore, politics has become increasingly short-term. It’s not an Irish phenomenon, it’s a global phenomenon and it’s been well discussed and well documented. One of the advantages of being a party that takes its past seriously, in all sorts of ways right, and part of the question of the past is the legacy of the conflict. But part of the question of the past for you and I in this conversation in the context of both the politics and Left Republicanism is the failure of Left Republicans to achieve our stated objectives.
Is that if we want to be much more long-term about the future, if we’re serious in the sense of being ideologically driven politicians with a vision for the future where we’d like this nation to be and I use nation in terms of the island as a whole. But also, where we’d like the future of that nation to be in terms of the future of Europe and the world. Then the better you understand that past, the better you can chart I think a more successful course to the future. And the crucial challenge is not to be bound by the past, not to be constrained by it, but to understand it. And that’s why for me the past isn’t something to be celebrated, it’s something to be understood.
And that’s not to say that there aren’t bits of it that are worth celebrating. But my interest is you know, maybe it’s a reflection of the fact that while my academic training has been primarily theoretical and political, it’s always been grounded in history. It’s just the way we think. And therefore, you know, again one of the things I tried to do with the book, Home, is not just attack and criticise this government’s failures but ask a more profound question which is when did these failures start, how did they come about, how embedded are they in our policy system and our political and institutions of governance? And then if we properly understand the extent of the problem in the system, what kinds of policies are then required to transform that system?
And I think if you have that longer-term, deeper understanding of the past, whether it’s on housing policy, whether it’s on economics, whether it’s in terms of conflict and peace building, I think you’re better able to at least try and navigate your way into the future. But it is always about the future. So, sometimes people accuse us of being too obsessed with the past. I don’t agree, our faces are firmly forward-looking. But you ignore the past at your peril and I think that’s in any profession, but absolutely in politics.
Institutional investors and the housing market
SK: I’ll move now to ask you a bit about the future. But I’d like to, obviously given that you’re the housing spokesperson, I’d like to just get your thoughts on the emerging debate or lack thereof around institutional funds, institutional investment, the need for some kind of external investment in housing. You know, I’m of the view that the debate has become not irretrievably stale but the debate around the funds has become calcified to the point that it’s almost impossible to make any progress. I wonder what your views are and how you maybe think about breaking down some of that debate?
EOB: Yeah, and in fact, both myself and my team here in the office have actually been doing a lot of work and we’ll be launching some policy propositions early in the new year which is our contribution to how to move that debate on. But I’ll say two things first. First of all, one of the reasons why the housing debate has got so angry is because people are living in intolerable positions and it’s really important that we remember that.
I was speaking at an event recently, and a very mainstream economist whose views I don’t support, and we were having this discussion. He talked about how the language in the debate had become disgusting which was a kind of a problem because he himself was using language similar to the language he was castigating. But the reason why the debate is so angry is because an ever-growing number of people cannot put an appropriate or affordable roof over their heads.
I understand the fury and the anger that people have out there and you know, again this morning we’ve seen house prices rise you know, over the last 12 months by another incredible margin. We had the KPMG reports for Dublin City Council and Cork City Council as part of their development plan review, showing that even if the government meets all of their targets and the private sector targets built in, we could still be looking at very significant house price and rental increases over the next five to six years. And also, I understand that there are people in the debate who have skin in the game. And I don’t just mean skin in the game in terms of they can’t buy or rent or they’re paying high mortgages or… but people’s jobs are on the line in terms of advisors for investment companies and architects and lawyers, okay. So,
I think the debate has reached a deadlock and it is no longer a debate, it’s a contest, it’s become very apparent. And I say that despite the fact that there are people in that debate who I agree with and support. So, I think we need to break through that and change the conversation.
And to give you a kind of a sense of where I would change the conversation to. In the first instance, we all have to accept that our central problem in terms of the dysfunction of our housing system and the growing inequality in our housing system over the last 30 years is because successive governments have over-relied on private developers and private investors of various kinds to meet all types of housing need. And that hasn’t worked, right. So, let’s accept that as a basic premise. And therefore, there are two pathways in parallel to fixing the dysfunctions of our housing system and ensuring the maximum number of people can access secure and affordable accommodation. The first, and these two pathways are mutually compatible. The first is the State and non-market operators have to become much more involved as developers in delivering high-quality, secure and affordable accommodation. So, in my estimation, I think we need about 40,000 new home completions a year.
I think 33,000 is too shy because it ignores a level of social and affordable need that the government hasn’t built into their plans.
SK: I agree.
EOB: And therefore, in my view, this isn’t about who builds, this isn’t about the architects, it isn’t about the quantity surveyors, it’s who is the developer. And about half of all new home completions have to be delivered by non-market developers primarily funded through the State; exchequer funding, State borrowing in a variety of ways, local authorities, approved housing bodies, community housing trusts. I don’t think the LDA should be involved, but other people think it should. But whatever the mechanism is. So, if Sinn Féin is leading a Left Republican Green government of the future and Eoin Ó Broin is the minister and I’m busy trying to get those 20,000 homes being delivered through non-market operators. What are we doing with the other half, right, what is the policy of that government to activate the private sector to delivering good quality and more modest priced homes on private land? That’s really for me the big question. So, here’s my view. First of all, private investors and private developers are going to have to fund and deliver those homes. There’s no other way of doing it. And this argument that Sinn Féin is saying the State has to do it all is a nonsense. We’ve never argued it. It’s not in our manifesto, it’s not in my book.
SK: It’s not possible. I think you’d argue it’s not possible, right?
EOB: It’s not possible, but nor is it desirable right because we still need those other 20,000 homes to be delivered. But what I would argue is the policy tools that successive governments have used to try and activate private sector delivery on private sector land have fed into, I think a very damaging speculative development model for residential development. It was like that before the financial crash, albeit funded in different ways and it has accelerated, particularly through the introduction of certain types of tax reliefs, of certain retrograde planning reforms by Eoghan Murphy and certain types of institutional investment which is global in its nature.
So, if we’re saying we don’t want that, what are we saying we do want? So, here’s what we want. What we want is to try and disincentivise short-term, high-yield, speculative investment in residential development because that pushes up your development costs and therefore pushes up the cost to rent or buy private homes delivered on private land. And for example, Johnny Ronan and Lioncor’s high-cost purchase and high-cost development of the Poolbeg site is going to be a really significant case in point. Because of the way they are financed, funded and structured, their delivery cost per unit of accommodation is going to be between €500,000 and €600,000 for a standard two-bed. So, if we want less of that, what do we want? We have to find a way of incentivising low-yield, long-term investment to come in at the very beginning of the development process right. And in a way…
SK: Like pension funds?
EOB: Sure, but in a way that is lower risk for them. Because what’s happening at the minute is that the shorter-term, higher-yield speculative investors are coming in, they’re building a lot of the stuff. Then the longer-term, low-yield investors are buying that, but the problem is they’re buying it at a very high price. So, I would replace the tax incentives introduced by Michael Noonan for example, that underpin the REIT’s and ICAVs and others. I would replace the kind of retrograde planning changes that Eoghan Murphy made with a different set of policy instruments to try and de-risk private sector development on private land at the earliest possible stage in the development process. And I won’t go into the detail now because we don’t have time, but it’s about using zoning, it’s about using master planning and collaboration between local authorities and private sector developers on private land. And site servicing instruments to say to investors who want to come into the Irish market or who are in the Irish market, there is a better way of building really good quality, private homes to rent or buy. And the trade-off in this new relationship between state activation and private sector delivery is if we de-risk you at the earlier stages of the development through bespoke zoning, master planning and site servicing.
In exchange for this, what we want is better quality design, better quality place-making and more moderated private prices. This isn’t affordable housing; we’ll deliver that on the public sector side right. And I talk to a lot of developers, I meet with all of the big developers, I’ve been on site with Hynes, I’ve been on site recently with the Johnny Ronan Group and Lioncor. I meet some of the largest pension fund investors in the European market who won’t come into the Irish market because it’s so damned dysfunctional. And when I put that proposition to them as a general proposition, they go okay, that might be interesting. But the point we have to accept is the speculative international investment driven model that is currently in place doesn’t work. And all you have to look at is the last Society of Chartered Surveyors of Ireland, the real cost of apartment delivery, to see that model is broken. It doesn’t deliver affordability and viability. And if our policy, and when I say ours, I mean the policy of anybody who’s serious about tackling climate change, is compact urban growth. Is allowing people to live in good quality homes, whether they rent them or buy them, in our urban centres where they can walk or cycle to their places of work and education and leisure. Then they have to be affordable. And everything this government is doing, shared equity loans, increased help-to-buy, a crazy thing that people are going to learn more about in the coming period, is all about fuelling a very badly designed speculative residential development model.
I think we have to find a better way of doing that. And the good news, is not all countries have as volatile and speculative residential development models as we have. And some have found ways of using zoning, site servicing and master planning in conjunction with public authorities as a way of tackling that. And therefore, we now need to find ways of doing that in an Irish context that allows good quality builders, good quality private sector developers on private land to build good homes at more moderated prices. And I actually think a progressive left-wing government could actually do that much better. Same on the private rental, like I talk to a lot of land owners and this mantra of you know, Sinn Féin will destroy the private rental sector.
Well actually, the private rental sector is currently being destroyed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We have lost over 20,000 private rental tenancy properties from our private rental sector in the last four years. That’s up to 2020, we’re going to lose more this year when we get the RTB figures. You couldn’t design policies for a more dysfunctional private rental sector than Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the last number of years. So, contrary to the rhetoric that’s out there that Sinn Féin’s anti-landlord. We are anti a dysfunctional private rental sector. And what we need is a set of policy instruments which allow for the stabilisation of our private rental sector where good quality landlords providing a good service can make a fair return on their investment.
And on the other hand, tenants can get security, appropriate accommodation at more affordable prices. And in fact, again when we launch the finer detail of some of the next year, people will see irony of ironies, the party that is perceived today as being the most anti-landlords by some sections of the government and the media would actually be the party to stabilise the private rental sector so long as the bargain works on both sides.
And therefore, I actually think there is a space for a progressive left government alternative housing policy on the private rental sector and on private sector supply which can find better ways of activating that supply. So, the issue isn’t are you for or against Irish or international institutional investment in the residential sector. The issue is what kind of institutional investment delivering what kind of homes with what kind of policy supports by government.
And I think we have a whole series of policy propositions, far, far more intelligent than anything that’s on offer in the current government’s plan. And I think the more people hear and see that, the more our housing agenda will continue to be at the driving force of the party’s electoral growth.
The role of the private sector in a leftist state
SK: I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that the current debate is one side going we need more supply, you guys, which is obvious. And then everyone saying yes, but – insert a huge amount of noise. It feels like getting down to that level of detail is almost certainly going to be a huge step forward, particularly if as part of that you can outline the specific policy instruments you’re interested in. So, for example, if you’re talking about, you’re master planning a site and actually producing services up to some square that says inside the square you do what you want, you build you know, maximise your profits, do whatever you want to do but you know, we’ll get you to this stage. That is a lot to me like the development model that Perry Square went through in Limerick where they had one design, they planned the sites, they found everything and the only thing you built was the Georgian block to the highest spec you could. It sounds like back to the future in a certain sense.
EOB: Just to give you a practical example right, and for me the issue is, because how I would characterise the debate that’s currently going at the moment is it’s slightly different. Which is on the one side there’s a group of people saying supply in and of itself would solve the problem. And on the other side, you’ve a group of people saying institutional investment is bad. And it’s almost become reduced to those two sentences.
SK: I think that’s a completely fair characterisation.
EOB: So, let’s take an example. So Eoin Ó Broin is housing minister, we’re ploughing ahead, we’re trying to meet out 20,000 public homes on public land annually through a mix of schemes and agents and it’s all non-market operators. And at the same time, we’re looking at the private sector supply. And we need developers to buy sites in urban areas and to develop those sites to have, in my view, high-density, mid-rise mixed-use developments. So, what do we do? We offer a package whereby Stephen Kinsella PLCl wants to acquire a brown field site or a light commercial and retail site. And we say okay, you can buy the site and come to us as the local authority and negotiate and here’s the package that you negotiate. We will work with you to masterplan the site which gives you a far greater degree of planning certainty for when you finally pop in your ultimate planning applications because the site is master-planned. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small corner in-field site or a big strategic urban development zoned site. We masterplan it with you, it gives you planning certainty, great news for your funders and for your timeline.
Secondly, we say to you those sites are complicated to service, it’s expensive for you to raise the finance and service it in advance of construction. We’ll do the servicing for you. You’re not getting it for free, you will have to pay for it afterwards at a very low commercial return funded through an SPV, finances by ISIF and Dublin City Council. One of those companies already operates in Cork with ICAV and it’s doing a nice job with the private sector. And the third is what we were asking for you in return is moderate the price. We’ve de-risked you on the zoning right, because as part of this package you’re going to get your mixed-use residential zoning. We’ve de-risked you on the planning. We’ve made life easier on the site servicing which can be quite complicated, albeit on a commercial low-return basis. All we’re asking in return is for you to sign an agreement with us whereby the product that you’re then going to sell, either to rent or to purchase, is moderated. And how you work that out will be site specific.
The biggest complaint I hear from developers is the enormous risks at the early stage of development. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small or big. So, if you de-risk them in that way, and if you ask for the quid-pro-quo of working with the master-planning and work with the moderation of price, I think you could start to get something very interesting. There are multiple models of that package, but that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. So, instead of the conversation that other policy makers are having which is Stephen Kinsella buys the brown field site, seeks to get it rezoned and we tax him 50 per cent of the uplift in the value of the land. That’s no use to the city, right? Yeah, I get the 50 per cent uplift in the value of the land and the tax. But we don’t get to collaborate on place-making, on master-planning and we don’t get any affordability dividend in terms of moderation of price. I would much prefer the public good to benefit from the uplift through actually that collaboration. So, in some senses, it’s the left-wing version of the old public/private partnerships. You know, but it’s on the private side and it’s about the public activation of private sector development and private land in a way that works for everybody. Because what does a builder want? They want 4 per cent/5 per cent/6 per cent margin on the build. What does a long-term, low-yield pension fund investor want? 3 per cent okay, Hynes want 5 per cent at the minute, in my view they’re being too greedy. But 3 per cent will satisfy.
So, I think there’s a credible conversation to be had there and in some senses, and we started with Busaras, so let’s end with Busaras. This is why that building is so important and that moment in public transportation policy is so important. You had Sean Lemass, who was one of the almost social democratic ministers we had in the first half of the history of the state, right. You had Percy Reynolds, Civil War and War of Independence veteran, private businessman and first chair of CIE, right. And you have this incredibly talented group of architects and designers and they collaborated on a project which was public, right. A project whose objective was to serve the public good in the widest possible sense. It was one of the few examples we have of that kind of post-Second World War, kind of new-deal type thinking, albeit in a small instance and one instance that never got up and running for all sorts of reasons that you and I know as well as many of your listeners.
Where do I want the State to do today? I want it to return to those values but in the context of the 21st Century, tackling the legacy of austerity and neoliberalism and rising to the challenge of climate change. And that’s why I think those kinds of policies are another example of how the public sector, the private sector and because I’m really interested in architectural design and public placemaking and planning, can start to collaborate. But in the era of dramatic reducing emission reductions and ensuring that we have a planet to live on into the future. And therefore…
For me, that’s the route out of the rather arid debate that we’re having at the minute and I think the sooner we get onto that road and have that debate I think the better for all of us.
