Over the years I’ve wondered here how many people fully understood what was happening in the housing market. Who were they listening to for guidance?
In a 2023 column, I wondered how they interpreted the new residential start figures for 2021 – supposedly exceeding those of the boom years according to some, a notion laughed at by others. Why did some numbers differ by as much as 10,000?
Contrary to the narrative about greedy old fossils interested only in keeping house prices soaring (I have yet to meet one), I was writing as a highly invested parent and citizen and as a widow recovering from a few thought-provoking medical episodes, actively trying to make decent moral choices about my final move and the unpredictability of the remaining years. And while ageing friends and correspondents were fretting about how to do the best by their offspring (often by advancing chunks of capital out of swiftly eroding pensions), despairing younger people were asking what the hell was going on with the housing market. Naivety hardly describes it. Not theirs; mine. Houses were being built insofar as I could tell; there seemed to be plenty of money, I told them; things were ramping up ... some day soon. No government would be foolish enough to lie about such sensitive, verifiable figures, I said.
After all the years spent divining half-truths from outright lies, searching for the nuance in realpolitik and political compromise, this Government has finally sapped my patience.
In these pages last Saturday, Cliff Taylor used the term “gaslighting” to describe the attempts of the last government – mostly reconstituted in this latest one – to persuade us that nearly 40,000 houses were being built last year. The 40,000 were never going to materialise, as a glance over his timeline confirms. The true number completed was 30,300, worse than the most pessimistic forecasts. Yet right through the campaign ministers stuck to the prediction of “about” or “heading towards” 40,000.
Gaslighting – derived from Gaslight, the 1944 film title so enduing that it became Merriam Webster’s 2022 word of the year – is when a victim is psychologically manipulated over time to a point where they question their own perceptions of reality. It meets the moment.
It’s not just about the numbers. It’s about being lied to by our leading politicians. It’s about them moving on as if they’d – oops! – left the cat mess for someone else to clear up.
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But isn’t lying and dissembling what politicians do, the cynics will respond. That’s the problem. This is too important to abandon to the cynics. Political lies blight democracy – a word that Micheál Martin uses about every five minutes. They do it by killing trust in democracy itself. We know what happens next, when whole populations come to believe that when their politicians’ lips are moving they’re lying. When the Overton window – by which politicians act freely only within a window seen as acceptable – is shifting, something is being irretrievably lost. That’s a heavy responsibility for democracy-minded politicians to carry.
Americans are so accustomed to being lied to that when Donald Trump laid out Project 2025 and said exactly what he was going to do, they simply assumed he was lying. In the UK, Brexit became possible only when lying became its promoters’ default. When Marcus J Ball attempted to sue Boris Johnson for the pivotal lie on the bus – “We send £350 million a week to the EU” – persuasive arguments against Ball’s action included the danger to freedom of speech during elections, the chilling effect on debate, that candidates would be demanding arrests if opponents got a fact wrong, that politicians debating policy are by definition making their points publicly where they are scrutinised and that the £350 million claim was refuted as often as it was made. The problem is that a simple slogan or number repeated authoritatively about a hugely complex issue – a system perfected by Johnson – is almost impossible to refute. Which is why the government’s 40,000 number stuck, and why it is so disastrous for ongoing trust and good faith politics.
Housing is an issue that was made for bad faith politics. Listen to anyone who lives outside Dublin or followed the election campaigns talk about the cynicism towards planning decisions and the real or apparent inconsistencies.
Accurate, truthful information is key. But Dáil “debates” do the opposite of promoting public understanding. The shouty performative anger, personal attacks and false dichotomies reached a tipping point long ago. As I suggested three years ago, if housing is indeed a national crisis, the Government should be prioritising information in the shape of weekly, accessible, Nphet-style televised briefings about progress or the lack of it. These could be fronted by a gimlet-eyed CMO-style housing tsar, with planners, independent experts and community leaders to tell us how the housing plan is going or not going, which public or private body, authority or utility is having problems and why, complete with up-to-date numbers – applications, approvals, rejections, commencements, completions.
This Government has serious ground to make up in terms of trust and truth. Instead of a futile apology, let it begin with an earnest, urgent mission to explain.
