The Robert Troy spectacle is not a passing political furore. It’s a national scandal.
His downfall should be a wake-up call to anyone – which is most of us – affected by the housing crisis.
Why does it matter? For starters, it proved our ruling politicians are elites out of touch with the public.
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They don’t get the struggle for home ownership while paying extortionate rents. In fact, about half of them are landlords.
To hear Fianna Fail TD Troy rattle on about the workings of his property empire was evidence he doesn’t get the reality.
It was a level of political cognitive dissonance not seen since Pee Flynn told Gaybo about the struggle to pay for his three houses with the line: “You try it sometime.”
Troy’s words of resignation, with the defence: “I’ve worked for all I have” were most revealing. But that’s precisely the point, Robert. We all have.
Yet the rest of us still can’t buy one home, let alone a portfolio of 11 properties.
Here was a politician landlord personally profiting from the housing crisis and lobbying for more profit and yet both the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste backed him.
This political scandal matters because, for the first time in eight years, the truth behind the biggest social issue of our time was revealed.
This should be a tipping point for all of us in what has been called Ireland’s own humanitarian crisis.
The curtain was pulled back on Oz and we saw who was at the controls – our own leaders, operating the
profit-driven system they have
engineered and maintained.
This is simply state policy in action – the result of prioritising the needs of the wealthy over the worker.
It’s why you can’t buy a house and are stuck paying half your hard-earned income to a landlord.
Ireland topped a recent world table for percentage of income spent on rent, at 40% - with some paying 75%.
It’s why you’ve nothing left, after handing that over, to save for a deposit to buy your own home – the mortgage on which would be nearly half of what you’d pay as a renter.
The average Dublin rent is more than €2,000 and elsewhere it’s nearly €1,600.
There are as few as 800 rentals nationwide for a country of 5million people. It’s wiping out the middle class, as home ownership is the main marker of social mobility.
It’s created a class divide. It’s arrested the development of a whole generation.
Nearly half of those under 30 still live with their parents. It’s causing a new Flight of the Earls.
It’s not such a block for the children of wealthy parents. They can climb up the property ladder through what wealth inequality economist Thomas Piketty calls: “the funnel of privilege.”
Some can get their 10% deposit from Leo Varadkar’s Bank of Mum and Dad and live comfortably in bigger family homes while saving. The rich get richer and the striving hard-worker is punished and locked out.
On the sharp end, it’s why some children are growing up sleeping on couches, in overcrowded, unfit
dwellings. We have more than 3,000 homeless children today, with most there after their families were evicted from their HAP tenancy.
Our rental system is a money-go-round that is rooted in an ideological opposition to social housing and relies on renters to shoulder the financial burden.
It’s a nice, mutually-beneficial set-up between Government and landlord – the private renter pays.
It can be a difficult thing to explain, given that it involves dull details about State housing policy and welfare supports that tend to make people switch off. But the Troy controversy illuminated what exactly is going on – and now everyone knows it’s rotten.
It’s a set-up that has been in place since 2014 and every year since, it has been allowed to worsen, only checked when rents reached their peak.
In his book Home: Why Public Housing Is The Answer, Sinn Fein’s Eoin O Broin details how then Fine Gael Finance Minister Michael Noonan flipped the ratio from a system where the majority of social housing was provided by the State, to one where mist was provided by private landlords.
Then, rents were low – half what they are now. It meant those who had bought properties to rent out during the Tiger would have a steady stream of tenants and guaranteed rent from the State in RAS and HAP.
The Government got a chunk of tax back from the landlord – happy days.
Outsourcing social housing to the private rental sector had the intended effect of increasing rents.
Rents shot up and more people needed supports – today, more than half of renters need assistance.
The outsourcing to landlords costs the taxpayer €1billion a year. We’re all paying that bill.
The vast majority of punished private renters want to get out of the rent trap and buy – which has caused a rush for houses and driven up the price of property.
With house prices now at their Celtic Tiger peak, many canny landlords have realised this is the time to sell, further depleting supply.
As ever, the vulnerable suffer most. Dublin mother Natasha White and her son Andre - who has Down Syndrome, autism and chronic health conditions – are currently battling homelessness.
If social housing in Ireland is not there for a boy like Andre, then who is it for?
The answer to all of it is build more social housing.
Stop outsourcing at multiple costs to landlords. The ESRI and the National Treasury Management Agency has called on the Government to increase capital spending on building our own housing. It makes sense for society, the State and the taxpayer.
A social home is a secure property at manageable rates for those on lower incomes – not the “free house” for the unemployed, as is so commonly and conveniently misconstrued. Lots of us grew up in one. Give renters who aspire to home ownership a hand up and not a kick down.
But a rent freeze and a tax break for tenants have been refused by this Government.
It could have been what Robert Troy called for on his way out the door.
Instead, he said he was bowing out because the controversy around how he did not declare properties was a distraction.
He said: “I’m sorry it has distracted from the serious issues at hand.”
But he was wrong there. Instead of distracting from it, he focused the much-needed attention of the nation on the truth of it.
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