Last week I had dinner with a writer who was visiting Dublin for a story he was working on for an American magazine. He was attempting to get to grips with Ireland’s political culture, and with the country’s strange sclerotic incapacity, despite the great windfalls of corporation tax continually gusting into a supposedly overflowing treasury, to deal with the problems affecting public life. Not least among these is an increasingly grave housing situation.
At points during the conversation, I found myself struggling to articulate what exactly I felt was going on with Ireland, with the continuous failure of the Coalition parties to – as the popular saying goes – “tackle the housing crisis”. And with the electorate’s apparently unshakeable insistence on voting them back in regardless. The best I could offer was a somewhat lame diagnosis of a national malaise, characterised by a toxic admixture of complacency and fatalism. We seem, if not quite incapable of imagining a politics that might deliver better results for the country, then disinclined to pursue it for fear that it might make things worse. (The exception to this, of course, is the great national tradition of periodic referendums, which does wonders for our esprit de corps. It allows us to believe that ours is a culture of vital democratic energies and political dynamism.)
All that, as I say, was last week. If the conversation had happened a week later, I’d simply have pointed him towards a report by Olivia Kelly in Wednesday’s The Irish Times headlined “Council urges Johnny Ronan lobbyist Coveney to honour Glass Bottle site affordable housing plan” as a kind of scale miniature of this country’s systemic dysfunction.
At the former Irish Glass Bottle site in the Dublin neighbourhood of Ringsend, a consortium led by the property developer Johnny Ronan is building up to 3,800 apartments. In 2017, when the development was being planned, a deal was struck between Dublin City Council, Nama and the Department of Housing – then led by Simon Coveney, in which the council agreed to fast-track the development. The deal stipulated that 25 per cent of the homes, amounting to some 900 apartments, would be allocated for social and affordable housing. At the time, councillors and locals understood that, after the 10 per cent requirement for social housing, the remaining 15 per cent of the development would be used for an affordable purchase scheme, offering homes for sale at a State-subsidised discount.
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Four years later, in 2021, a cost-rental scheme was introduced by a subsequent government. The council has now obtained legal advice that such cost-rental units could satisfy the “affordable” requirement, despite the fact that such a category didn’t exist at the time of the initial agreement. Councillors and residents argue that this is not in keeping with the original understanding.
Here’s how Dermot Lacey, Labour councillor for Dublin Bay South, put it: “The affordable element was always understood to be affordable purchase. The concept of cost-rental didn’t exist at the time. We always saw the affordable housing as being housing local people could afford to buy. Genuinely, I had no doubt about that.”
Patsy Doolin, the chairwoman of the Irish Glass Bottle Housing Action Group, pointed out that cost-rental was not what was promised to the community at the time of the deal. “People,” she said, “want to be able to buy them and own them.” Of Coveney – who, to repeat, was minister for housing at the time the deal was made – and his new private-sector proximity to the site of actual power, she said this: “I’d love to just talk to him, have a cup of coffee with him and ask him to help us.”
The attempt by the councillors and other local representatives to prevail on Coveney to appeal to the decency of his new property-developer client, Johnny Ronan, is the most absurd and dispiriting aspect of the whole situation. It is also its most irreducibly Irish aspect. Coveney retired from politics in 2024; a 12-month “cooling-off” period, during which he was not allowed to lobby for clients, elapsed last November. After that, he began working as a lobbyist for Ronan.
The former tánaiste is, of course, perfectly entitled to do whatever he wishes with his career now that he has left politics (and accountability to the public) behind. Within the logic of the system we have, with its revolving doors between government and the private sector, it makes perfect sense that he would pivot to this new role. Who better to lobby the government for the interests of a property developer, after all, than a man who was not so long ago minister for housing?
The site itself, 37-odd acres of prime Dublin 4 real estate between Ringsend and South Wall, is charged with a certain historical symbolism. As the name suggests, it was originally the Irish Glass Bottle plant; when that factory closed in 2002, it lay vacant for years, some of the most valuable land in Europe. The site was purchased in 2006 for €412 million by a consortium of developers that included the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, which, as a State body, had the authority to fast-track the planning.
Anglo-Irish Bank backed the deal with a loan for €288 million. The docklands authority’s chairman, Lar Bradshaw, was at the time on the board of Anglo, and the bank’s chairman Sean Fitzpatrick was on the authority’s board. Before any building actually got done, however, the global economy crashed, bringing down with it the Jenga tower of Ireland’s property market. The whole enterprise wound up in Nama, and the site remained derelict until Ronan’s group came along in 2020 and bought a controlling interest in it for some €200 million.
And so it has progressed from being a symbol of the Celtic Tiger era to a symbol of our intractably absurd housing crisis.
Property prices in the State have more than doubled since 2015. Dublin is tied with Stockholm as the most expensive capital city in the EU, with the average monthly rent for a two-bed flat now just under €2,700. And yet here is how the business and politics of housing is conducted: public representative and community groups reduced to pleading with a housing minister-turned-lobbyist to intercede with his property-developer client, in the hope that a deal made while he was minister might be delivered on, and in the hope that the property developer might see fit to deliver affordable housing for the public. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder what a government is even for. Though this is not, presumably, a question Johnny Ronan or Simon Coveney need to waste much time considering.
