TO BE FAIR, as solutions to the housing crisis go, sending the housing minister on a trip to the French Riviera is a pretty innovative one. 

And hey, as long as you’re not taking the housing budget and heading for the shiniest roulette table in Monte Carlo, what’s the harm?

That’s the question Minister for Housing James Browne sought to answer this week when he gave a speech at the Marché International des Professionels de l’Immoblier (MIPIM) conference in the south of France, with a view to beckoning international investors into the Irish housing market. 

While that might sound a little ‘cap in hand’, it was actually much more high-powered than that. The minister’s speech was part of the Ireland Pavilion showcase at the conference, which also included other panels and whatnot explaining how foreign investors could make some sweet bank off of Ireland’s utterly catastrophic housing market. Just ask the good people of Swords. There’s no way that anything called a pavilion could ever be pathetic. 

The timing of the speech has proved inauspicious, coming as it has during the same week that a new study by housing activist group Threshold found that Airbnb short-term lets outnumber rental opportunities in Ireland four to one. In case the significance of that imbalance is lost on you, imagine if you had to fight all of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at once with no backup. I know I bring them up a lot in this column but it’s a less powerful metaphor if I make you imagine trying to fight off The Beatles or Weezer. 

Thankfully, it seems we have a plan to address the malign influence of massive international funds and corporations on our housing market. That plan? More international funds and corporations. You know, sort of like when you’ve had eight pints and you feel sick and you want to go home and you realise that the answer is actually a ninth, tenth and possibly even eleventh pint.

The government has responded bitterly to the suggestion that this courting of further foreign investment is dispiriting for Irish people who’d rather see the government invest more directly in housing, not for the purpose of skimming a profit, but instead for the much more boring purpose of, you know, providing places for people to live.

“It is a lazy narrative from the opposition to suggest that investment is a dirty word, which is essentially what they are saying,” was the justification put forward by a spokesperson for the Minister. 

This response is far from surprising. Whenever the housing crisis is raised directly with the government, there is usually an acknowledgement of some kind that not enough has been done on housing. However, it appears that they mean this in the sense of a cosmic abstraction. It’s not that they’re not doing enough on housing; it is simply that not enough is being done.

For example, one of the reasons that the Minister has given to justify this jaunt is that €20 billion is needed to deliver 300,000 homes by 2030. We can all agree that €20 billion is a pretty tall order. Quick question: how did we fall so far behind? Quick follow-up: who was in charge when we fell so far behind? Whenever the government suggests that what they are doing is in some way designed to address the housing crisis, it does seem prudent to ask: hey, wait a minute, if you guys have such good ideas about addressing the housing crisis, why do we have a housing crisis then?

The answer, apparently, is that we simply haven’t been spending enough time on the French Riviera. That we simply haven’t done enough to appeal to overseas investors, despite foreign finance making up no less than 70% of all property investment in Ireland last year, according to a new report by Sherry Fitzgerald. 

Alas, there is a problem inherent to the private, foreign investment solution, and you wouldn’t think it needs spelling out, but here goes. Investors only invest so they can eventually extract. They don’t do it because they love the smell of concrete, timber and affordably housed families or because they love seeing money leave their bank account.

The whole point of investing is to generate a profit, which is exactly what James Browne went to France to promise these fine people. The whole point of houses, on the other hand, is so that people have shelter, and warmth, and privacy, and security, and the kind of stability that is so conducive to that little ol’ nuisance called quality of life. 

There is nobody who is confused about why the government is doing this, or the idea that there is some place for private investment in the housing market. Sure there is!

What’s a little bit more confusing is the Irish government’s attitude towards housing itself, which seems to conceptualise housing first and foremost as a store of wealth for investors and those who already own their homes. What’s confusing is leaning further into a strategy that has failed to solve the problem for ten years straight, and then acting as if anyone who critiques that approach is some kind of moron. 

As it turns out, MIPIM also happen to have a Data Centres Summit. Someone call Cupid and tell him he’s a month too late to be firing arrows at our government like this! All we need now is to find out that they have a summit for condescending responses to valid questions and we’ll know that it’s true love. 

The good news is that this week there was some justice to be found for Irish people in the English courts. First of all, a judge awarded a woman over £20,000 after it was found her boss had been racially abusing her in the office by mimicking her accent and throwing lazy Irish tropes in her face. 

“If we had a disagreement, he would shout ‘potato’ in a strong Irish accent over and over again… He would shout ‘potato’ as soon as he walked in the office without me having even spoken to him,” the complainant told the court before it found in her favour.

While the potato insult is both offensive and uncreative, it’s also just plain outdated. If you really wanted to go for the jugular these days, you might say something like “15% of total spend on Irish property came from UK investment companies last year and you’re still no closer to ending your housing crisis, ha ha ha”. 

The second such victory was won by rapper Mo Chara of Kneecap, who saw off an appeal from the Metropolitan Police after a court had already thrown out terrorism charges against him several months ago.

Despite Mo Chara’s vindication in a court of law for the second time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has maintained his position that Kneecap are ‘completely intolerable’. The most recent YouGov poll, from the end of February, found that 73% of Britons think that Keir Starmer is doing a bad job compared to 18% who think he’s doing well, and that was before he started lending help to Donald Trump as the US and Israel embark on one of the least popular wars in history. One imagines that it won’t be long before Keir Starmer finds out what ‘completely intolerable’ looks like at the hands of a British public that evidently can’t wait to turf him out of office. 

After all, 18 times four is 72, giving us a nice, clean ratio of… That’s right, folks. Heroes in a half shell. Turtle power!

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