Home. Eoin Ó Broin
the Government had built a mere 24,000. But whereas in twentieth-century Britain public housing would predominantly be Council owned, in Ireland the State was less eager to take up the role of landlord. Rather it saw its function as assisting working people, both rural and urban, is accessing credit to own their own homes.
While funding for the provision of subsidised housing for the very poor would start to emerge before partition, in reality it was not until 1932 that public housing delivered by Local Authorities would become a significant feature of the housing system.
Even here, the dramatic expansion of tenant purchase from the 1960s meant that public housing would become a significant gateway to private homeownership for tens of thousands of families.
Private homeownership for the majority with a small supply of public housing for the very poor was to become the policy framework in which successive Governments in Dublin responded to housing need.
Michelle Norris, in her ground-breaking study Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State characterises the dramatic scale of State intervention in private homeownership as ‘asset based welfare’. She challenges the argument that the Southern Irish State, in contrast to many of its liberal and social democratic neighbours, failed to develop a comprehensive welfare regime.
Instead she contends that, rather than developing a welfare state that focuses on the redistribution of income and provision of social services that was the hallmark of the welfare regimes elsewhere, Irish Governments prioritised ownership of property.
Thus rather than a welfare state based on a grand bargain between workers and employers, a distinctively Irish system emerged from the grand bargain between landlords and tenant farmers underpinned by low interest, long-term subsidised loans for the purchase of land and housing.
Publicly owned housing was and would always remain peripheral to this system as Governments were slowly dragged into meeting the housing needs of the urban working class and rural landless labourers.
As housing policy developed throughout the first half of the twentieth century other key issues did emerge including planning, land management and value, and the relationship between industry and politicians. While each of these was to become more important from the 1970s onwards they remained peripheral to the key issue of ownership.
By the 1970s those issues that had dominated housing insecurity for the majority only decades earlier – illegal eviction, rack renting, tenement slums – were now thankfully a thing of the past. But not for everyone.
The dramatic rise in owner-occupation and the provision of public housing meant that 87 percent of people had a secure home. But for the 13 percent remaining in an unregulated private rental sector or left to fend for themselves on the roadside in illegal halting sites not much had changed since partition.
And even for those with secure homes, poor quality construction during the 1930s meant many, particularly in older public housing, could rightly complain of poor conditions. The failure of Government to ensure that Local Councils had sufficient funds to maintain their stock of social housing to adequate standards would remain a serious issue into the future.
The late 1970s was certainly the high point in housing provision of the twentieth century. That decade marked the apex of the State’s involvement in the direct funding and provision of housing whether for owner-occupiers or social rental tenants.
But there were also problems. State intervention wasn’t consistent enough, as each time Government appeared to be getting on top of housing need they would take their foot off the pedal and reduce expenditure. Not all slums were cleared and not all housing was of a good standard. And beneath the surface of the system lay significant vulnerabilities, kept out of sight by massive levels of State subsidies whether in the form of grants, loans or tax breaks.
In the following decades the structure of our dysfunctional system did not change much but the financing of it did. These changes, detailed in the next chapter, revealed the weaknesses within the system as it had been designed to date while at the same time introducing new risks and vulnerabilities which in turn would generate levels of housing insecurity and need that many thought were now a thing of the past.
Movement 2
The State Walks Away
Recession and Retrenchment
If the 1970s can be characterised as the high point of direct State intervention in the financing and provision of housing, then the 1980s marks both a turning point and significant decline. While this change did not affect the shape of our dysfunctional housing system it dramatically altered the way in which that system is financed. This in turn exposed the vulnerabilities of the existing system while simultaneously introducing new risks.
Underpinning the significant expansion of public investment in social housing and supports for owner-occupation in the 1960s and 1970s was a period of sustained economic growth. While this continued into the early 1980s, the onset of recession as the decade progressed was to provide part of the impetus of the withdrawal of the State from direct expenditure on housing.
This fiscal crisis of State gathered pace from the end of the 1970s and affected economies at both the core and the periphery of the developed world as post-war Keynesianism came up against economic stagnation, rising prices and wage demands. The stage was set for a major ideological reformation in the advanced economies as the social democratic compromise that prevailed since 1945 gave way to renewed liberalisation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981 signalled a shift in economic policy that would engulf most overdeveloped countries for the coming decades. The consequence was increased financial liberalisation coupled with reduced taxes, particularly on wealth, combined with reductions in social expenditure. The era of neoliberalism was born.
The impact on housing policy, in Ireland as elsewhere, was dramatic as a confluence of interests coincided, with profound consequences for the financing and in turn the availability of accommodation.
Concerns with the increasing cost of subsidies for private home purchase were already emerging in Southern Ireland during the latter part of the 1970s. Norris notes repeated breaches by Councils of the Local Loans Fund lending limits, due to the popularity of the scheme. There was a genuine fear in some quarters that this could lead to a significant funding crisis in the Local Government sector and so a number of changes were made.1
Limits were placed on the total value of Mortgage Interest Tax Relief that buyers could claim in 1974. Home purchase grants were restricted to first-time buyers for the first time in 1977. And the complex array of supports for would-be owner-occupiers were replaced by a single grant. Meanwhile Government simultaneously sought to encourage greater Building Society lending to offset the restrictions in direct State subsidies.2
However, during the 1980s as the recession took hold the economic situation deteriorated significantly. By 1987 unemployment was at 17 percent, Government debt stood at 150 percent of GDP and servicing this debt was absorbing 27 percent of public expenditure.
The Government response was threefold: a dramatic reduction in capital expenditure on social housing, a similar reduction in supports for private home purchasers, and a liberalisation of building society and bank lending. The impacts of these changes and a number of associated supplementary interventions were profound.
Reduction and Residualisation
The 1980s witnessed a 30 percent drop in the output of social housing with 42,893 homes delivered in that decade compared to 61,953 during the 1970s.3 However, these figures hide the more dramatic impact of the spending cuts from 1987 onwards. In 1984 Government funded 7,007 social homes. In the following years it fell significantly, to 6,523 units in 1985, 5,517 in 1986, 3,200 in 1987 and 1,450 units in 1988. It hit a historic low in 1989 with just 768 homes.4 It would be almost two decades before output would recover to the average levels of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
While the reduced expenditure may have eased the pressure on the Department of Finance it had the opposite effect on levels of housing need. In response Government sought to leverage existing stock to offset these