A CALL has been made for the Green Party in Government to look at social housing as the model for housing development in Ireland.
Fr Patrick Cogan, chief executive of Respond! Housing Association, said “we in Respond! have been dealing with social housing as a last resort housing. Nobody wants to go into social housing. Private housing has been the norm in Ireland, but not to the benefit of the population.”
During a discussion forum on ecology and equality at the party’s convention he said the response to problems in so-called “sink” estates was to put in more capital, “when we shouldn’t have built them in the first place”.
He told the party’s leaders “you have a huge handle on power with your Minister for Environment and Minister of State”.
He said: “I challenge you to look at social housing not as last-resort housing but as a first-resort housing for rich and poor.”
Fr Cogan asked the Greens to “consider moving towards the kind of model that’s all over Europe, of integrated housing of such a kind that if properly managed and properly resourced” with all facilities, people would live in it.
Former chief executive of the Equality Authority Niall Crowley called for a “new ambition for an equal Ireland”. He said that as well as an economic crisis there was an equality crisis and that had deepened, but it was “there before the recession and was a product of the boom”.
Mr Crowley highlighted Ireland’s “serious difficulty with difference and diversity” where to be deemed different was to risk verbal and physical abuse.
He called for a “renewed, not a repaired” equality infrastructure. A new statutory body was needed that combined the Combat Poverty Agency and the existing Equality Authority, as well as renewed equality legislation.
Juan Behrand, a German Green and former secretary general of the European Greens, said while the Greens in Ireland had a “difficult life” and had “eternal trouble being in Government”, the Green movement elsewhere is doing well.
The Greens were now the fourth-largest grouping in the European Parliament. The greens were expected to go into government in Sweden later this year, they had done extremely well in French regional elections and were at 40 per cent in German opinion polls. Jamie Drummond, executive director of the advocacy organisation One, called for Ireland to act as partner with African countries to develop new, renewable energy technologies.
