Ireland suffered effective bankruptcy in 2007-08 through a property boom funded by a massive expansion of credit and crisis of overproduction, illustrated by employment in construction falling from 232,600 in in the last quarter of 2007 to 133,200 in the last quarter of 2017, a fall of 42.7%.  Yet the drop was even more precipitous than this: from 236,800 in 2007 to 83,400 in 2012, that is, by 65 per cent.  Almost one in every two workers who lost their jobs in the Irish state in the five years from 2007 to 2012 had previously been employed in construction.

The sector went from10.7 % of GDP in 2006 to 1.1% in 2011; going from the sixth largest share to the lowest in a group of around 50 countries during this period. The index of the value of residential construction fell from 751.7 In 2006 to 57.9 in 2012 while the index of non-residential construction fell from 115 to 73.59.  The growth in the stock of housing plummeted:

From an unsustainable boom to a collapse and again rapid growth, the boom-slump-boom Irish economy now has capacity constraints only partly made up by immigration, leading to a new housing crisis in which not enough houses are being built, house prices have become extortionate again, and not enough properties are available for rental.  To rub it in in, some of the partly finished houses from the boom were left to rot or demolished while the quality of much of what was built has become, or is becoming, uninhabitable because of poor materials or dangerous construction.  The banks that workers bailed out in the 2008 crisis are back in profit, having involved themselves in new rip-off scandals, and now criticised for pitiful savings rates while borrowing costs for its customers increase.  Despite their profits today their massive losses carried forward are set off against taxes, not a facility available to the working class.

The housing crisis dovetails with other aspects of the malfunctioning of Irish society including health and education.  More than 830,000 patients are on hospital waiting lists while staff vacancies are unfiled, including senior medical staff, while there are hundreds of teaching vacancies in schools.  Doctors, who in their career development will work for a year or two in Australia, aren’t coming back because they can’t afford houses in the areas they want to live.  Executives in US multinationals complain that housing is an issue for their recruitment of staff, thus raising the potential of lost foreign direct investment.

It is tempting to say that only Ireland could go from bankruptcy to growth of 26% in 2015 (and over 12% in 2022), and in some ways this is not just another example of the contradictions of capitalism in general but does speak to the particular character of the Irish variety.  Infamously, the Irish GDP figure is often ridiculed, and no longer accurately reflects real domestic economic activity; so although it has been boosted massively by US multinationals’ direct investment, it also reflects the massive impact of transfer of assets and production from elsewhere so that they can be taxed in the Irish State.  This has resulted in a massive growth in corporation tax receipts and its concentration in a few multinational companies, with around 60% of receipts come from only ten companies.

What the Celtic Tiger boom shows, and the vertiginous climb out of the following slump, is that even in good times capitalism is a problem and does not discard its contradictions.  The traditional Left alternative of spending more money by taxing the rich is not cutting to the root of the problems exposed, which arise from the contradiction of the development of productive forces coming up against the relations of production, which produce crises of overproduction and credit booms and slumps.

The unplanned and uneven development of these forces produces shiny new multinational offices beside small terraced houses that cost a fortune because not enough new housing has been built–in a city like Dublin that has witnessed an abundance of high cranes over its skyline for years.

The Government of the Irish State thus has a housing crisis and a surfeit of revenue.  Calls by opposition parties to solve the problem by spending more money and taxing the rich doesn’t recognise that this is not the problem.  The Irish state finds it both difficult and easy to spend money.  In the first three months of 2023 spending on housing was €80m behind budget, while spending on the new national children’s hospital has ballooned from a budget of €650m to an estimate of over €2bn, although nobody knows how much it will eventually actually cost or when it will be finished, being already years behind schedule.

The ability of capitalist states to waste money, which goes inevitably into the pockets of private capitalists, is not confined to Ireland, but the Irish state does seem to be good at it.  However, spending money to build houses requires workers to build them, land to build them on, and raw materials with which to build them.

Many workers and their skills have been lost following the Celtic Tiger collapse, as we have seen, and unemployment is low, falling from over 16% in 2012 to just over 4% now.  Land is privately owned and hoarded, and raw material costs have increased worldwide due to general inflation caused by monetary policies to protect the asset values of the world’s ruling class and the dislocation of supply caused by Covid lockdowns and sanctions arising from the war in Ukraine.  The Left, or some of it, thinks printing money is a solution, supported even stricter lockdowns, and supports western powers sanctions–so is in no position to parade its solutions.

In so far as it does, it calls upon the state to take direct action to build houses and acquire land.  The capacity constraints mentioned remain as does the record of failure of the Irish state.  The state itself is aware of this and the government in office has taken a host of initiatives to boost the housing market, mostly with the effect of increasing prices and relying on the private sector.  In turn, many private capitalists have suffered, as is the norm, from the workings of their own market.

Out of all this the governing parties decided that they wanted a Housing Commission to advise it on what it should do, including proposals for a constitutional referendum on housing, so that it to be some sort of right that people could refer to.   Not surprisingly, this has proven a problem.

It appears that there can be two approaches to putting such a right into the constitution.  First, it could be a statement of aspiration, which would involve more perspiration in writing it than any effective action arising out of it.  The second is the establishment of some legally enforceable obligation on the state, which the state fears will open it up to multiple legal challenges with all the horrific costs that this would entail.  Less money to spend on housing would result, they claim.

And here we come to the Karl Marx bit.  Famously, he said that ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.’  In other words, if there aren’t the resources to build more houses the establishment of some ‘right’ to one will make no difference.  As one right-wing commentator rightly said, a referendum ‘won’t lay a single brick.’

As Marx also said: 

‘Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only . . . one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. . . . To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’

So, to whom would a right to housing apply?  Everyone 18 and over, asylum seekers and refugees?  What sort of housing would a right entail – apartment, detached, terraced; where would it be sited and of what size?  And at what cost? Who would decide all this and what effective remedies would there be for non-compliance with any determined right?

It can be no surprise that Sinn Fein (paywall) fully supports a referendum, and no surprise what its reasons are.  Its housing spokesperson advances it because it ‘would restore trust in politics’ and would ‘put in place a basic floor of protection’, and ‘require the State, in its decisions and policies, to reasonably protect that right’; allowing ‘the courts to take the right into account where the State failed, manifestly to vindicate the right.’

However, just as a referendum will not lay a single brick, neither will any judge or judicial decision.  As if in recognition of this, the Sinn Fein author, Eoin Ó Broin, endorses the view that “its primary effect may actually be in the sphere of politics, administration and policy’, but doesn’t explain how the current forces prompting action we have noted above are less compelling now.  As for ‘restoring faith in politics’, the story of failure and ‘success’ set out above shows that faith in existing politics and the state is something to be overcome, not strengthened.

At the end of his piece the impotence of a constitutional right is acknowledged and then this acknowledgement denied–even on paper Sinn Fein can talk out of both sides of its mouth at the same time: ‘a constitutional right to housing will not, in and of itself, fix our broken housing system.  It would, however, place a firm legal obligation on the current and all future governments to realise that right through its laws, policies and budgets.’

The toothless nature of aspirations enshrined in the Irish constitution have been evidenced before: in its previous Articles 2 and 3, which stated that ‘The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.’ And that ‘Pending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the parliament and government established by this constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole territory, the laws enacted by the parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of Saorstát Éireann and the like extra-territorial effect.’  Far from advancing the claimed sacred goal of national reunification the articles became an alibi for not doing anything remotely effective, until eventually they were overturned for something else that isn’t working.

A more recent example illustrates the feebleness of expecting economic and social ‘rights’ to mean anything. A few weeks ago the Ombudsman for Children criticised the state for “profound violation of children’s rights”, so that the Health Service Executive (HSE) had “seriously failed in its duty to uphold the rights of children to the best possible healthcare”.  “The examples of rights being ignored are numerous” he said, in a criticism that covered 20 years.

In reply, the HSE said that it had ‘prioritised targeted improvements and investment over recent years.”  It couldn’t even be bothered to explain or exculpate itself from the many previous years of failure, never mind guarantee future satisfaction of children’s healthcare needs.  Trusting the state or the constitution to deliver social and economic rights, that cannot even be precisely defined, is to trust the state and constitution that protects and legitimises the social and economic system that ensures that they are both needed and cannot be delivered.

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