Alan Kelly certainly talked the talk today with his hugely ambitious plan for social housing in Ireland. The success of the plan however will be determined by whether he – and whoever succeeds him as Minister for Environment in the next 18 months – manages to walk the walk.

Kelly made all the right noises at the press conference in the Customs House. He described it as the most important day in his Ministry and his “number one priority”.

He’s 100 percent right. We have a housing crisis in this country at the moment. There are over 90,000 people on the waiting lists for social housing; it’s estimated that one family a day is becoming homeless; house prices and rents are rising at levels seen during the bubble years; and there is a chronic lack of supply of new accommodation in Dublin, despite the sharp annual rise in prices.

The reasons for that are highly complex and difficult to address but the feeling persists that the Coalition has been sluggish in seeking to do so.

But to be fair to Kelly, he has laid his political reputation on the line by promising to address the social housing issue. He has created quite a few hostages to fortune in doing so and that is no bad thing. Key commitments in the plan include the target of clearing social housing waiting lists by 2020; the building, leasing and/or refurbishing of 35,000 new units in the next six years, including 17,000 by 2017.

The reviving of the role of local authorities in building social houses and apartments is to be welcomed – Kelly said it was a “disgrace” that this had been effectively abandoned by previous governments. But living up to the numbers in the report is a massive ask.

Even allowing for the Environment Minister’s confidence that the land is there in public ownership to develop these units, we all know how slow the planning process can be for developing houses and apartments. The timeline involved is hugely challenging.
The goal of meeting the housing needs of another 75,000 households via the private rented sector – using Housing Assistance Payment and the Rental Accommodation – is also going to be tricky.

Rent allowance

The reform of the rent supplement system is to be welcomed. But if the system is going to work, the exodus of landlords to the private rented sector – attracted by the recent sharp increase in rents – will have to be addressed or there simply won’t be the supply of accommodation to meet the report’s targets.

When this was put to Alan Kelly at the press conference, he said the key issue was improving the supply of housing. He’s right of course. Virtually every problem in the housing sector at the moment can be traced back to the current shortfall in supply.

Tackling that won’t be easy. Stringent building regulations, bottlenecks in the planning process, the absence of a land tax, construction costs and a lack of funding for property developers have all been cited as reasons why the obvious demand for housing and apartments in our cities isn’t being met. There’s no magic wand to address these issues, but addressed they must be.

And in that context, the new Social Housing Strategy is to be welcomed. It provides a roadmap for accommodating 90,000 households over the next six years. It’s a good starting point and the report seems to be very much task and responsibility oriented, which should help drive progress. In the words of one minister, “it will be hard to hide from its failures”. That should focus minds.

That’s down to the Government, but there are also wider issues that we as a society need to debate. In the past, Ireland has had an extremely high rate of home ownership. But a Nesc report on home ownership, presented this week to cabinet, suggests that many families will have “little chance of buying their own home”. It says housing policy must now address current trends, most notably whether home ownership or long term rental should be promoted.

Are we ready to have that debate? We’ve rarely been good at facing up to such potential tricky questions in this country, preferring to muddle through. But if we want a coherent housing policy over the next decade, we simply have to do so.