Bill Badbody Breaks Down Sinn Féin’s New Housing Plan
WHEN I was initially asked to break down Sinn Féin’s new housing plan I asked my unpaid intern Fiachra to find me the biggest hammer possible but when I was told it was not a literal ‘breaking down’ in which I destroy Republican Communism I was more deflated than my tenants when I tell them the mold comes with the apartment.
Unlike my tenants I won’t complain, and will have to make do with using words instead, again unlike my tenants who threw eggs at me. Let’s see what this ‘plan’ is made of.
‘A Home of Your Own’:
As a title for the plan needs some work. ‘Dole Gaffs For Free’ has a better ring to it.
‘Sinn Féin say they will give local authorities more autonomy in delivery of houses’:
As someone who has pleaded with the council to give me the money they repeatedly refuse to spend on accommodation for the travelling community, this is music to my bank account.
‘Strengthen tenants’ rights and freeze rents for all existing and new tenancies for three years’:
This won’t affect me as I tend to rent to tenants who have next to know English and I have led them to believe I’m the de facto Tribal Elder Of Ireland.
‘A publicly owned construction company’:
What’s the angle here? Will one of their mates head it up? Will it be sold to an investment fund? This isn’t making sense to me, any which way I view it.
‘Root-and-branch transformation in planning, approval and tendering processes’:
If this means the cost of bribing planning officials, along with the cost of paying residents to drop their bogus planning objections, goes down well then hand me a balaclava and call me Gerry Adams Jr!
‘Phasing out of the Help-To-Buy scheme’:
Or ‘Help To Inflate Housing Prices’ as myself and the current Min for Gaffs call it. Right, okay, fine scrap it but zero mention anywhere of how developers will now artificially add €30,000 onto the price of a unit?
‘175,000 new homes to be delivered by the private sector over the next five years’:
I’m just going to go ahead and assume these numbers are similar to the government’s current ones on housing commencements, as in they are a strange branch of hypothetical numeracy only PR spin teams can understand and therefore have no real world meaning.
Ultimately even in this nightmare scenario whereby €39 billion is spent on housing over the next five years to deliver 300,000 homes by a Sinn Fein government, my kind just have to bide our time until Fine Gael are back in government and allow all these social homes to be sold off to the private sector so rent levels can return to their rightful place above the peaks of the Himalayas.