Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, famously once described a house as a machine for living in. The machine metaphor and the capitalist undertones embedded within it provide a clue to what can happen when the machine itself becomes the perceived source of financial power, speculation, and class status. When this happens, a clear disjuncture emerges between the house as a machine and the notion of the house as a place in which we engage in the art of living.

Since the foundation of the Irish State, successive Governments, through policies and financial inducements, have fostered, and supported private home ownership. That this would be the case was not however a foregone conclusion. The new State, in choosing the so-called free market as the dominant reference point for housing rejected the Sinn Féin Democratic Programme, which was the socially progressive blueprint of the independence project. Instead, the State's approach to housing is characterised in economic terms by austerity and fiscal rectitude and in ideological terms by a conservative nationalism that was both elitist and anti-urban. Thus from the 1930s on we see a series of Government policies and initiatives which give primacy to home ownership.

The State reaffirmed this commitment when, in Article 42 of the Constitution, it copper-fastened into law the special place of private property. In this sense the early work of building the nation is deeply entwined with the values associated with private ownership. Put another way, possession or ownership becomes equated with citizenship or at the very least in the State's eyes with the good or model citizen.

In this vision, the urban and rural working class are relegated to second class status and deliberately excluded through Government policy from the material benefits of the State, by the State. Thus, from the 1930s on we see a process whereby successive Governments subsidise private builders with public money in order to make private housing affordable for the new middle classes. In this scenario private home ownership becomes synonymous with status, respectability and moral character.

Conversely, public housing is associated with social inferiority, low socioeconomic status and the working classes. In terms of employment, education, status and life chances, consignment to the local authority sector was the gateway out of society and not the passport in. Right across urban Ireland we see the spatial manifestation of this inferiority in the post-war public housing estates of Dublin, Limerick and Cork. The State's decision to sell off a significant portion of the public housing stock in the early 1970s has its origins in this State-centred middle class bias. As a direct result of this policy the public housing stock is seriously depleted and public housing is now seen as the cause of poor quality of life for its tenants, rather than as a guarantor of their security from it.

Thus, during the so-called boom years when a house became a commodity to be traded with the aim of making a profit, private housing wealth, housing poverty and affluence existed side by side and we had, to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, the existence of public squalor amid private affluence.

Today, there are almost 100,000 people on housing waiting lists and another 94,000 who are in receipt in rent supplement at a cost to the State of almost €500 million. Thousands more are condemned to a life in hostels, shelters and B&Bs. To add to this, household financial stress is at unprecedented levels as seen in the extraordinary rate of arrears in owner occupied mortgages. These figures, taken together are shocking.

However, if we just cast our eyes in the doorways and laneways within minutes of this House we see the homeless women and men, most of them young, who are testament to the failed policies of this and previous Governments. A state that cannot house its own people is a failed state. Even worse, a state that refuses to recognise that housing is a social utility and not a commodity, that it is a fundamental part of the socialisation process, is also a failed state.

Unlike the parties of the right, however, Sinn Féin believes now, as we did back in the days of the Democratic Programme, that the State has a responsibility to house all of its people. We believe that all housing, be it public or private, is essentially social and that housing should never be viewed or used as a commodity for profit.

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