If there's one trope on the conservative right that really irritates - well, actually there's many, but this one is particularly so, it is the one where there's an effort to pitch generations against one another.
And who is giving the trope a renewed airing? Why none other than Gerard Howlin in The Irish Times.
The younger generation are screwed, and the system is stacked against them. The brouhaha in the Dáil about housing may be potent politics but there is little at stake in terms of serious policy changes. Generation rent may be the preferred political football, but with friends like Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, Labour, Social Democrats, Greens and PBP, younger people don't need enemies.
Uh-huh. Says a man who was a Fianna Fáil advisor. From which he goes on to argue the following remarkable line:
As the monolith of Irish politics of the 20th century dissipates into ever more factions and the noise of political debate surges, there is ever less at stake. At the core of a grand alliance of nearly all Dáil parties is a soggy social democratic consensus of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
Think about that. 'Ever less at stake'. A housing crisis. A crisis over the manner in which asylum seekers have been accommodated. A crisis over energy and cost of living costs. 'Ever less at stake'.
And then on to:
The political potency of housing and the tactical mishandling by the Government of the eviction ban issue means Sinn Féin is currently strapped into the driving seat. They have a mortgage on key words including "eviction", "cruel" and importantly "change". It may end in Government for them. For now, and the life of this Government, they are setting the pace on policy. A conspicuous exception is climate change, on which the Greens retain clear ownership and Sinn Féin's footprint is negligible.
But the parties of the grand alliance are, by conviction or expediency, committed to structures and systems that actually undermine the larger State they promise.
Now contemplate what he says there. Supposedly a soggy social democratic consensus that cannot even provide social and state built housing. That's a pretty wretched consensus, were it social democratic. But it's not. In the aversion to state measures the reality is that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party (and other parties who were in government prior to that) have eschewed social democracy entirely. Why he throws SF into that mix escapes me.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Social democracy isn't the be all and end all, but even that would offer something of an improvement on the partial and patchwork approach taken in this state across the decades.
What's telling is that he then avoids the economic aspects of this - the key one being the willingness to use the state or municipal and semi-state approaches. And as we know, and as is exemplified in the housing crisis there is indeed a consensus on that amongst some of the above parties - and it is anything but soggy social democratic. The idea FF/FG seek a larger State is a nonsense.
Next up is rhetoric:
The irony is clear in housing policy. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says we need an extra 250,000 homes. Last weekend Labour leader Ivana Bacik promised to build 1 million. In a country struggling to meet Government targets of 29,000 new homes this year, these levels of blather show a withering contempt for the facts. But it is not the extravagance of the language that matters most. It is the insidiousness with which resources to fund what is promised are squandered that is the cruellest blow for the young.
And so we are treated to a "don't look here, look over there" paragraph. Now few of us would feel any great need to defend the Labour Party, but…
Labour's only significant impact on economic policy since it left Government in 2016 was to jump start the Stop67 campaign in the 2020 general election campaign. It could have made Ireland fairer for the fewer younger workers who must bear an ever-greater burden, by increasing the qualifying age for an old-age pension to 67, but now it won't. Houseless, pension poor and precarious, the young are pack animals and voting fodder.
Except in a genuine social democratic approach there would be the ability to do more than one thing at the same time. For example, one could build houses and support those who are older. This almost childish effort to reduce this to simple exclusive binaries is purely diversionary.
Then it's on to Right2Water and water charges. And on to property taxes or wealth taxes and the failure to implement them as he would like.
And yet his chosen political vehicle was one of those - and this encompassed Fine Gael and the PDs and the Labour Party in 2007 too come to think of it, that was happy to see income taxes cut down and down. He talks about the 'lamentable state of public administration at the heart of policy failure' but given his proximity to a party that was predominant in Irish politics and pushed that anti-taxation line itself as and when it suited it (and while he references 1977 he doesn't appear all that exercised by later examples) perhaps he could consider the destruction of a discourse where taxation of all forms, but particularly income tax, was regarded with hostility. How does he think that worked in terms of delegitimising taxation?
The problems this state faces are multiple but one key element was the broader deconstruction of a post-war consensus on the centrality of income tax as an element in the taxation mix. This impacted here, despite the reality that our social democratic compact was largely conspicuous by its absence. So given decades, arguably a century, of no social democratic state whatsoever it seems perverse to suggest that somehow soggy social democracy is the problem. If only some might say. At least it would offer a different approach.
And as always to dismiss the resources the state, semi-state and municipal and other areas still harbour is to compound the error.
No serious social democrat, let alone anyone left of there, would envisage lifting an evictions ban in the middle of a housing crisis with no measures able to be utilised immediately put in place to assist those who were facing eviction. We know this, he knows this. Everyone knows this. So why pretend otherwise?
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