South Tipp TD Mattie McGrath made a curious contribution during a Dáíl housing debate last week, video of which he shared on his Facebook page. Here’s the relevant portion, quoted from the Dáíl record:
“It is a mammoth task. We have to get real. The idea of the left here is that we cannot have private contractors or developers. If we do not have private developers involved, we will not build the houses, full stop. I would love to be back in the 1940s and 1950s when the county council had manpower and built the houses, but those days are gone. We have to get over these ideologies, stop objecting to housing being built and encourage the voluntary sector. I am a member of Caislean Nua Voluntary Housing Association. It is the proudest thing I was ever involved in. We built 17 houses. That is not many but it was a voluntary committee. If every village and hamlet built ten, we would halve the housing crisis.”
What’s curious about it is that I was under the impression that Mattie McGrath regarded the gutting of local authorities, their resources and manpower, as a bad thing that should be reversed. Once upon a time, he joined a High Court action to challenge the constitutionality of the abolition and merger of various local authorities under the Fine Gael / Labour austerity coalition, and hardly a day goes by he does not bemoan the abolition of Clonmel Borough Council in particular. That the loss of that council has been disastrous for services and development in Clonmel is something on which Deputy McGrath and I agree.
But apparently, the idea that councils should be resourced, staffed and empowered to build public housing at scale is a suggestion to be dismissed out of hand as unrealistic, and more than that, ideological. Deputy McGrath starts by attacking the strawman idea that “the left” want to abolish all private housing development, but what he actually attacks is the notion of public housing itself. This is at odds not only with his professed views on councils, but his professed views on housing.
In a 2020 debate on the Homeless Prevention Bill, he said:
“County councils must get back to building houses. They have lost the wherewithal to do so. They built them in the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s.”
On Primetime, shortly before last year’s election, he said:
“Let the councils build the houses again.”
So I imagine I’m not the only person surprised to hear him dismiss the idea of councils building housing as ideological.
In 2022, he said that Tipperary County Council’s housing targets were too low to adequately addressing the ballooning social housing list, and once again, I agree, so I find this notion we should not bother investing in public housing provision quite baffling. I am a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, but I am first and foremost a person who doesn’t want anyone to be homeless, so as unjust as I may find the profit motive, I’m not in a rush to wholesale abolish the private housing sector as long as it actually functions to house some people. It is genuinely surprising to me that Deputy McGrath is seemingly happy to write off an entire pillar of housing provision and instead insist the voluntary sector can make up the difference.
The idea that a voluntary housing association in “every village and hamlet” is a more effective and efficient way to build housing than for the state to do it is both absurd on its face and detached from reality. While approved housing bodies (AHBs), as they’re officially termed, have certainly played a significant role in building houses in Ireland for the last several years, they are in fact a remarkably inefficient way to build housing at scale. They deliver thousands of homes a year, but it takes over 500 of them to do it and some are not only doing it poorly, they’re failing to do it at all.
Deputy McGrath made his contribution in a debate on the Housing Commission Report, which recommended the amalgamation of many of these underperforming AHBs with local authority housing sections to create larger inter-county housing bodies with the ability to plan and deliver public housing at scale where they currently cannot. This is hardly a radical idea, but it seems much more efficient than doubling down on already insufficient solutions.
Except it’s not just that AHBs are inefficient. Continuing to rely on them, let alone investing further in them, is a serious economic risk.
These bodies don’t raise the money to build houses by shaking a bucket on the street, they do it by taking on debt, and the level of debt the sector is taking on is dangerous and could be catastrophic if, say, AHBs weren’t able to service their debts because, say, the bottom fell out of the housing market. The AHBs themselves say so, as does the secretary general of the Department of Finance.
I feel kind of insane having to say this in the Year of Our Lord 2025, but Irish housing developers accumulating more and more debt as house prices continuously rise is not something anyone should be encouraging, let alone prioritising over investing in the state’s ability to deliver public housing itself.
We need to reduce our reliance on the voluntary sector, not ramp it up. We need the state to take charge of housing people, instead of outsourcing that responsibility through an ad hoc system of tax incentives and baroque funding schemes meant to encourage new builds. We need local authorities resourced, staffed and empowered to build public housing at scale.
And I can’t help but wonder if Deputy McGrath’s issue with public housing and his emphasis on the voluntary sector has less to do with any alleged left ideology, or even his own ideology, than with the fact he owns a plant hire firm that might make less money if more construction was undertaken directly by the state. Especially if the government funded local authorities in Ireland to employ their own tradesmen and field their own fleets of machinery, or even, God forbid, established a state construction company.
On the other hand, if every village and hamlet in Tipperary and Waterford – the two counties where his firm primarily operates – had a voluntary housing association, there would be far more potential clients for E&M McGrath Plant Hire to contract with, all of them in a worse negotiating position on price than a large housing agency would be.
Deputy McGrath would no doubt be outraged by this suggestion, just as he was outraged when, on the only occasion I’ve spoken with him over the last year, I asked if his firm had been a subcontractor on a public works job of some local controversy. He told me that I had no right to ask questions about his business affairs, because all his public contracts were tendered for through the procurement system.
I disagree, obviously.
I think if business owners insist on entering politics, they should expect to be put under a microscope and have the potential influence of their financial interests on their work as a public representative ruthlessly scrutinised.
I think it’s bizarre that every year we get a slew of articles about all the landlords on the Dáil register of interests, but comparatively little examination of TDs’ other business interests, even those who have contracts with the state.
I think that every public inefficiency is a private opportunity.
And I think Deputy McGrath’s distaste for public housing is politically incoherent, but makes perfect business sense.
Left in the Lurch 