Housing crisis in Meath caused by a ‘perfect storm’

The inexorable rise in the price of rental accommodation in Meath – up by 43 per cent in the last five years – has been put down to a shortage of accommodation and the abandonment by government of any meaningful social or affordable house building programme, housing campaigners were told at a public meeting in Navan.

The Raise the Roof campaign, an alliance of trade unionists, civil society bodies and political parties working for a radical change in housing policy to ensure the delivery of secure affordable homes for all, organised the meeting at the Siptu Dan Shaw centre in the town. TDs Johnny Guirke (Sinn Fein) and Peadar Toibin (Aontu) along with Cllr Eddie Fennessy (Sinn Fein) were present in addition to housing activists, trade unionists and people in housing need. The meeting was chaired by Siptu Meath District Council chairperson Anton McCabe and was addressed by the union’s sector organiser John Regan.

Siptu Head of Communications Frank Connolly presented research at the meeting. He said that in the last year alone rents in Meath had risen by 10 per cent. "In the first quarter of this year, average asking rents in Meath on Daft.ie were €1,551. The rate of increase in the last three years had been growing".

He said that in the same period average wage rises were "only two per cent". Such a situation was unsustainable and it is directly leading to an increase in the numbers of people homeless or dependent on rent subsidy payments with all the hardship and stresses that that entailed.

Frank Connolly said that in his view the country was facing the very real possibility in the next five years of up to 100,000 young people leaving the country. This was suppressed as a possibility during the Covid pandemic but it was raising its head again because young people could not get homes. The campaign organisers were in the process of moving the campaign from being a national one, which was very successful, to a local campaign involving political organisations, community groups, housing activists, tenants’ organisations, the women’s movement and the Traveller movement.

"To me, the housing crisis is not something that came out of thin air. It has been growing and growing ever since the State stopped building publicly-built houses. From 2008 to 2019 you can see that the rent crisis is now as severe as it ever has been in history. To me, the crunch point is that people can’t afford rent. Average earnings have moved down and down and back up again and through the crisis years of 2010 and 2011". House prices in Dublin for 2019 (the latest statistics available) showed that prices were hitting "the madness years" of the Celtic Tiger.

Spending on public housing hit a "high" in 2007-2008 but then completely dropped. "In effect, the State stopped building public housing". The root of the problem lay in the State’s "handing over" the supply of housing to the private sector. The country was walking into a disaster in pursuing this policy because the private sector could not provide the homes that are needed. Added to the problems were the rising cost of materials and the shortage of skilled labour.