IMPACT general secretary Shay Cody has demanded a huge public housing programme on the scale of the one that delivered tens of thousands of homes in the 1970s. Speaking at the ICTU biennial delegate conference in Belfast last week, he called for a “national plan to implement the largest housing programme in the history of the state.”

Shay said Ireland had effectively abandoned public housing provision to the private sector in the twenty-first century. And this had failed.

The union has demanded capital investment for 10,000 social and affordable homes to be built each year, together with a commercial funding agency to underpin the initiative and a municipal housing authority “with powers to compulsorily purchase land and derelict stock, underpin housing standards, and hold local authorities to account.”

Speaking at the conference Shay said there were almost 15,000 homeless families, and 2,500 children in emergency accommodation in the fastest growing economy in Europe. “As a people, we have achieved a remarkable turnaround in employment and economic performance. Yet over 77,000 households – many of them trade unionists and their families – are in mortgage arrears.

“A short time after a catastrophic collapse, our exchequer finances are in recovery, and our debt is close to the EU average. Yet homeless families queue for food and emergency accommodation. Almost 30% of AIB is back in private hands, further boosting the exchequer, less than a decade after the citizen-funded bailout. Yet those same citizens desperately compete for a tiny stock of affordable private rented accommodation, or enter bidding wars to buy overpriced homes,” he said.

“More than 80% of the many available properties are too expensive for those on state housing benefits, as landlords take advantage of excess demand. And the landlord’s right to evict, to sell or house family members, makes security of tenure a fantasy in our private rented sector.”

IMPACT has been at the forefront of the housing and homelessness campaign, working with NGOs and campaign groups for the right to an affordable and secure home. Shay said a huge public housing programme as not a “fanciful” aspiration.

“We have done as much in more difficult times. A large-scale local authority housing programme in the 1970’s provided over 60,000 houses, peaking at almost 9,000 in 1975 under Labour minister Jimmy Tully. This on top of 180,000 private houses built in the same decade.

“But, by the early 2000’s social housing provision was contracted to an unregulated private sector and local authority house building had effectively ceased. Soon, the only housing options available to ordinary workers and citizens were private ownership or the private rental sector.

“That approach has manifestly failed – and failed magnificently. By relying almost entirely on the market, successive governments have created today’s housing crisis. And we will enter a new and frightening phase of the housing crisis as a generation of workers – many of them depending solely on the state pension for the lack of any occupational provision – enters retirement paying full and inflationary market rents for their basic housing needs. The old – and effective – model, where private mortgages were generally paid off by the time you retired, and local authority rents were income-related, has been shattered,” he said.