A perfect storm for FFG

David McWilliams podcast had a fascinating point – noting that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had privatised housing in Ireland the last thirty years by putting the onus on the private sector. He suggested that following the SF rise in the polls whether or not they are in government we will see a return to something closer to a council housing of a type familiar to many of us from the 1970s and earlier.

The state owns land, or it buys it, it then zones that land. It then gets a developer to build council houses. It buys the houses off the developer and rents them to tenants.

He also extolled the Austrian model – no less. And he considered this change positive since Irish approaches to housing has been stagnant with extravagant rents and so on going to a ‘drone class’ of landlords.

He also addressed the issue of SF and the IRA. He considered the ‘anti-SF visceral hatred’ and he argued that most people who aren’t in that camp are prepared to understand that parties may start almost as secret societies but over time they become more and more democratic. And there is a check on SF which is the democratic process. He also argued that demographics may be king in this – with a pattern of youth support for SF that outweighs the combined vote in that cohort for FF/FG. Of course this depends on whether that is transitory, but… certainly if one was looking at what parties put forward a youthful and dynamic image one wouldn’t be thinking of FF. From this his suggestion is that one can make a case SF will be the dominant party – perhaps, for the next few decades. And the other parties, the smaller ones, just aren’t able to own issues in the way SF does – as with housing.

Interestingly he thought that the RIC issue served to give SF a legitimacy during the campaign which it might not have had, and that Brexit has so annoyed Irish people due to Britsplaining etc, that there’s an effect there too. Which if one thinks about it adds up to a perfect storm for both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.