Housing crisis 'totally out of control' says Midlands Socialist
A MIDLANDS member of the Socialist Party has said the housing crisis is totally out of control and the lives of workers are getting harder and harder.
Manus Lenihan, a native of Galway who lives in Athlone and is a public sector worker in Kilbeggan, has been working to promote the Socialist Party (whose TD is Cork-based Mick Barry) message in Tullamore. He spoke to Cagdas Gokbel, a Turkish journalist and refugee who lives in Tullamore.
Gokbel: Some foreign companies operating in Ireland under the name of education create an imaginary paradise with their strong advertising campaigns. Can you tell us about the life struggle of the Irish workers and the real problems of the real people of this country?
Lenihan: Ireland has always been my home, and I know people from every corner of the world who are proud to call it home. But it’s disturbing to think of people being lied to about the very serious problems that exist. The housing situation is completely out of control. Big investors have driven up rents and house prices. Aid from the state? More like handouts to landlords, €893 million in 2021 alone. Social housing? You could be waiting 10 years. Public transport is desperate. In most parts of the country you are forced to own a car with all the expense and carbon footprint that comes with that.
The average rent is €1400 per month. No wonder 10,000 people are in emergency accommodation. Even someone on €60,000 per year can’t buy a house in Dublin. Someone coming from another country faces obvious problems on top of those: no support network, language difficulties, racism, etc.
Gokbel: The war is having a devastating effect on inflation and the cost of living. How are the people living in Offaly affected by this fragile situation?
Lenihan: Workers are now seeing their money evaporating before their eyes within days of them getting paid. Whether in Offaly or across Leinster or the whole country, the situation is the same: the landlord or the bank comes in to take their cut; the energy company takes another; most of what's left goes into the fuel tank of the car. Prices of diesel and petrol have more than doubled since 2020. The average price of home heating oil, meanwhile, has risen fourfold since 2020. Meanwhile Centrica and SSE, who own the energy companies operating in Ireland, both made huge profits. Helping the climate now obviously goes hand-in-hand with improving our standard of living. We need free and expanded public transport, and a huge public investment in green energy, to save money in the long term and to save the planet.
The energy companies need to be under public ownership. That way, they could simply take a hit to their profits instead of gouging their customers. We should have price controls. We should be able to say to supermarkets: you made big money during the pandemic. Now give something back.
We need massive building of social housing. Social housing should be the norm instead of being just for the most urgent cases.
Obviously this would provoke fury from the wealthy and all their hangers-on. Policies like these would run right up against capitalism. To win this would take a real struggle of trade unions, working-class communities and young people. We saw elements of this in 2014-16 with the water charges movement. Such a struggle would pose fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in.
Gokbel: Global warming, wars and famine cause people to migrate from their countries en masse. All these destructive causes are increasing rather than disappearing. What would you like to say about Ireland's refugee policies and their future?
Lenihan: In the short and medium term, there will be more wars and natural disasters. Naturally more refugees will come to Ireland in the future. There needs to be a complete overhaul of refugee policies: dignified conditions for all - good food, no overcrowding; the right to work and language supports. We need to stop enriching the private contractors who in many cases provide a bad service. There were some good points in the White Paper on Ending Direct Provision but this has not been implemented.
The demands of refugees are really moderate: basic dignity and equal treatment for all, regardless of where they come from. Instead the powers-that-be are dragging things in the opposite direction: delaying the White Paper, building tent towns, treating people horribly based on the colour of their skin as we saw in Kinnegad.
Of course, treating everyone equally, and matching good intentions with resources, once again runs up against the logic of the capitalist system. The rich get what they want right away, the working class have to wait for the leftovers, and refugees get even less. We need to break with this rotten system if we want justice.