Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer

Description

Thousands are homeless, tens of thousands are languishing on social housing waiting lists, even more are unable to afford to rent or buy. Why is our housing system so dysfunctional? Why can it not meet social and affordable housing needs?

Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer examines the structural causes of our housing emergency, provides a detailed critique of government housing policy from the 1980s to the present and outlines a comprehensive, practical and radical alternative that would meet the housing needs of the many, not just the few.

For three decades Government policy has been marked by an undersupply of social housing and an over-reliance on the private market to meet housing needs. Housing has become a commodity, not a public good. The result is a dysfunctional housing system that is leaving more and more people unable to access appropriate, secure and affordable homes.

The answer, as argued in this transformative new book, lies in establishing a Constitutional right to housing, large scale investment in a new model of public housing to meet social and affordable housing need, real reform of the private rental sector and regulation of private finance, development and land.

Table of Contents

Overture: human interest stories of the impact of housing crisis
Movement 1: Brief history of first phase of development of Irish housing system from land
league in 1880s to high point of public housing provision during early 1980s
Movement 2: Dedicated critique of Government housing policy from 1987 to 2019
Movement 3: Detailed outline of alternative housing policies that can address the housing
crisis
Coda: Colour piece of growing protest movement around housing

About the Author

Eoin Ó Broin is a TD for Dublin Mid-West and Sinn Féin’s spokesperson on Housing, Planning and Local Government. He is author of Matxinada, Basque Nationalism and Radical Basque Youth Movements (LRB 2003) and Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism (Pluto 2009). He is a regular contributor to the Sunday Business Post and An Phoblacht.

Praise for Home

‘It is hard to imagine that there is another politician in Ireland who has grappled with the minutiae of housing policy in such painstaking detail as Ó Broin…’
Tony Fahey, The Irish Times

‘Ó Broin unveils a radical blueprint to bring our housing crisis to an end … A major contribution to a critical national debate – and should be read by every policy-maker in the sector’
Andrew Lynch, Sunday Business Post

‘lucid prose … a provocative read … succeeds in laying out a plan of action for those looking to work towards an alternative system’
Joe Joyce, Totally Dublin

‘Ó Broin does something that Ireland has needed for two and a half decades…he offers a practical -and yes radical- alternative to address the needs of the many, not just the fortunate few’
Cahir O’Doherty, IrishCentral.Com

‘The best contribution the book will make will be to show that the housing crisis can be solved and good quality homes can be provided for all our people’
Mícheál Mac Donncha, An Phoblacht

‘’An articulate, insightful and accessible analysis of public housing policy in Ireland’
Nick Garbutt, Scope NI