Prime Time housing debate: Eoin O Broin vs Darragh O'Brien

He has obviously no experience in building but also completely oblivious to the well publicised facts that councils are failing miserably to refurb their own existing stock when it comes free never mind being able to purchase and rebuild another 5000 per year, hes delusional!

Honestly the government should take their billions and just buy out Cairn homes or Glenveagh, give them access to public funding, public land banks, part 8 planning via each local council and set them to work on doing what they actually know how to do, building homes!

I mean f#ck me they are the easiest things in the world to build but we keep hearing how our various council and government depts full of highly qualified, well paid architects, engineers and quantity surveys are somehow not up to that task 🤪

Just don't bring back Mick Wallace to run the thing 😄

It made for pretty poor watching. I dont think Daragh is strong when it comes to debate and I expected Eoin to be prepared. He simply wasnt.

Saying we need more houses is as obvious as it gets.

Im no expert but houses are being snapped up all over the country which tells me that plenty of people can afford to buy. There is no shortage of people being mortgage approved and having the finances ready to go.

I just dont think the housing issue will be solved anytime soon and I dont think any party is really up for the task.

I'd imagine as soon as they were bought out those at the top would leave, form a separate company and then charge the council for those services (it's what I would do).

There is a reason private enterprise doesn't get bought out by public institutions.

Why does anyone rent anything then? Budgets are finite, buying 200 properties would cost roughly €80m, that houses 200 families, if I rent instead then I can house 4000 families instead, now it's not just one or the other, but there has to be a mix if the budgets are to be sustainable (with renting, the owner also has to pay for refurbishing, as pointed out above, the council is much slower and more expensive doing it themselves).

I've been keeping an eye on O'Broin since he was a regular and favoured 'guest' on O'Eadhra's Late Debate. Always struck me as a nasty piece of work. Maybe he has the wits to make a difference but I kinda doubt it. He knows the brief, is great at swinging between sniping and promising - but will that lay any blocks? Could he lay a block himself?

I more mean that they will have their influence vastly reduced, the legal sector badly needs reform as an example it's something the EU wanted so not exactly a radical thing.

These groups have always been a priority and apart from maybe developers/builders they aren't actually wealth creators people that grow the economy.

I also think weirdly SF might be stronger on crime and reign in the judges which is a concern for a lot of their base.

Basically my point isn't that SF are very effective and can't be corrupted. It's that they don't have the generational loyalty to "official Ireland" and the same back and forth between them, republicans to some extent having been traditionally sort of shut out from them.

It's my hope anyway but as I said I don't actually expect SF to be very effective

I am literally saying it's not that SF aren't incorruptible, it's that they aren't part of the "official Ireland" style nepotism networks

I was surprised by the debate to be honest. I felt Eoin was a bit of a spoofer but I thought this debate should have been easy enough for him. Darragh came off as being more informed about what is possible. Eoin was unable to explain how we can get to 40k houses. I was trying to understand what Eoin meant by councils building or buying homes and selling them as affordable homes. Are they really going to buy on the market and sell cheaply?

I suppose it depends on your circumstances as to which party will be better. If you don't work and are waiting for the state to house you, SF are the best option. If you are working and are looking to buy, unfortunately the incumbents are probably the best option.

Eoin is the SF prodigy, the rest of the party are completely clueless. I would love to hear Mary Lou tell us that David "up the r@" Cullinane has great ideas for the health service.

That is a very good point.

We have had the usual SF types on here and elsewhere on social media parroting the line that we need the state to take a much more direct approach to building houses, as if that was a magic bullet.

Yet we know the waste that comes with that process. The same people giving out about the state not being more involved in housing are the same ones giving out about all the qangos and the HSE.....

Clearly people don't think too hard about their arguments.

Sinn Fein's election mandate reminds me a lot of Homer Simpson's when he ran for Sanitation Commissioner. "Crazy" promises with nothing substantive to back it up.

Simple solutions and soundbites to very complex problems, will not solve the issues related to housing, homelessness, healthcare, or the cost of living in this country.

Sure we had our own Diamond Joe Quimby here for years.

Sterling Bertie Ahern!

I read an article a few weeks back in the sbpost that quoted EOB complaining about the amount of SHD applications that went through planning at the end of December.

He was insistent this should have stopped earlier in the year as it allowed developers to build more units... Yes he was complaining about new supply of homes while at the same time pontificating the housing crisis was primarily due to lack of supply!!

This guy must be the greatest spoofer of a politician to exist in recent times and unfortunately is never off the TV or airwaves where he waffles on unchallenged.

There was another planning case in the docklands where a developer was refused an application to add extra floors to build more apartments, yet EOB was on twitter next day gloating saying the decision was correct and giving 2 fingers to the developer.

Unfortunately the younger generation are brainwashed by SF who have a strong social media presence and play populist politics on every issue.