Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien
Biggest housing plan in the history of the State. Fully funded (€20bn+) & will deliver thousands of affordable & social homes. Commitment to end homelessness, tackling vacancy.€4bn pa real money, much more than his party. And this is the best he & SF can come with! Ridiculous! https://t.co/2xXkgqMGly
— Darragh O’Brien (@DarraghOBrienTD) September 3, 2021
This morning.
FIGHT!
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Listened to him on Morning Ireland. Nothing about planning – will all this construction be ribbon developent, one-offs, suburban sprawl, built on flood plains, be served by public transpost infrastructure? What about building standards, or will we be paying bills in a few years for houses that fall apart or turn out to be bulilt with melting cyanide bricks or other such construction industry corner-cutting? Anything about inner and city-centre development that isn’t hostels or hotels or financial investment for international billionaire funds that require prices and rents to remain massively high or their yearly returns will be slightly down and that would be a towering injustice? I think he said something about idle properties, but it all blurred together in that fecking PR trained delivery I HATE SO MUCH. There was some desperately unilluminating back-and-forth about how they’ve learned unspecified lessons from all the previous failed schemes. HATE. Why do people think a debate on all this will be anything other than tedious nail-on-a-blackboard scraping?
yeah
twas like a wedding speech
Martin will be forced by his own party to get him outt’ve housing
maybe give it over to McGrath
and in fairness all the public housing and local authority builds should be with him in Public Expenditure anyway
Not to mention the embodied carbon. No way of reaching green targets with how we build and how much we need.
The amount of climate change-combating measures that could be acheived through environmentally-conscious housing construction is head-wreckingly tragic, in the sense that they will all be ignored by the government and the construction industry. Better planning alone would balance out so much of the carbon generated by the building process.
Problem is you can build
– fast
– cheap (relatively)
– environmentally
but you can only choose one.
As an example, if I am building an estate of houses the cheapest/fastest option is all the houses are identical. Environmentally speaking the aspect is really important (small north-facing windows; large south-facing windows; the function of the north/south rooms should be considered) and I’d need, say, 4 different designs’ more cost, and slower/costlier as each unit is different.
Every single lesson we’ve learned about building is that fast and cheap house-building leads to short-term profits and price-and-rent-rises and long term economic disaster and houses falling apart and needing to be rebuilt and rising house-and-rent prices. It’s the stupidest, most backward and counter-productive solution to every problem associated with housing.
at a certain point in my life I got involved in a couple of building projects, semi-professionally
I wanted to use the latest greatest build systems available – fast, affordable, sustainable (and approved for use across the EU) and had even just received Irish “Agrement” lol
well the warzone was something else, I had all sorts of authority noise that I had to battle with…it wasn’t lack of knowledge about new technologies on their part, it was a blatant resistance to it, the large hint I kept getting was “concrete built is better built”
I persisted and got it done but it almost broke my heart doing it and from talking to some old friends involved in the building materials world recently it’s still very much the mantra
I’m of the belief that until a time comes that certain lobbyists and brown envelope feeders are out of the picture we will never move forward on build speed, quality and sustainability
Yeah, been there. Everything about building in Ireland is hostile as hell to any sort of innovation.
Maybe sit this one out?
Go on Nigel please
Wrt to urban blight and vacancy, I see that The Heritage Council are exploring if greater cost-effectiveness can be achieved in adaptive reuse by balancing the direct financial costs of redevelopment/refurbishment with wider social, environmental and cultural values.
A few years ago it was SF are deluded with their magic money tree – now they deride SF for not having access to the very money tree they complained about years earlier!
It was SF who had to coach abacus-wielding Michael Noonan about economics (fiscal space). Likewise it was SF who had to point out flaws in legislation to Coveney, and to Donohue.
they won’t let shouty sausagefingers sit opposite O’Broin
FF need a new pandemic:natural disaster/act of war to take the heat off….
They have Merriongate, it’s doing the trick nicely.
With this kind of answer, not at all surprising.
“Speaking on Morning Ireland today, O’Brien said the Government is working with local authorities and housing bodies to ensure they are equipped to deliver the units.
When asked who specifically is building the houses, the minister replied “builders”.
He even looks like a builder. The big head on him.