Mr Murphy claims he wanted a right to housing placed in the Constitution but his efforts failed when he was overruled by cabinet colleagues. Other proposals aimed at ramping up the delivery of homes and public housing were also derailed, he writes in Running From Office, extracts of which appear in today’s Sunday Independent.
These plans included turning the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), the State’s bad bank, into a developer responsible for building homes on public and private land.
Mr Murphy also wanted to take steps to tackle vacancy, improve renters’ rights, run schemes to support construction growth and oblige the government to provide specific amounts of public housing.
People didn’t agree with me on declaring a right to housing
Ultimately, the country’s earlier economic collapse meant a conservative approach was taken to prioritise financial stability. Mr Murphy suggests it was a mistake to accept this compromise.
“We couldn’t see the damage our financial conservatism, and our conservatism generally, was doing to people right in front of our eyes,” he said.
His plans were not opposed in bad faith, he added, but when he sought approval from then taoiseach Leo Varadkar, finance minister Paschal Donohoe and attorney general Séamus Woulfe, some of them and their staff talked down the proposals.
“It felt like an ambush,” Mr Murphy said.
“People didn’t agree with me on declaring a right to housing — because of the potential financial burden that it would put on the State.
“The idea of repurposing Nama into the nation’s house-builder, an idea that had come from the management of Nama themselves, was seen as too risky as there were balance sheet and other issues to consider.
“Even one smaller proposal, a tax on vacant property, was seen as too complicated to administer when Revenue was already dealing with extra responsibilities on tax collection.
“So there were solid reasons not to do what I was proposing. Sure, I could see that. None of these things were simple, and risks were involved. But not doing them, I believed, would be worse.”
Noses were out of joint. People were determined to protect their work and protect their reputations
Mr Murphy succeeded Simon Coveney as housing minister in 2017 after spearheading Mr Varadkar’s campaign to become taoiseach and Fine Gael leader.
His early days in the job involved reviewing the Rebuilding Ireland housing plan Mr Coveney launched in 2016, but Mr Murphy said this exercise was seen in government as a criticism.
“Noses were out of joint. People were determined to protect their work and protect their reputations. I still don’t know if it was a co-ordinated thing, or if such sensitivities were simply over-interpreted by the Taoiseach’s Office, but as I scaled up preparations for a big reset of the government’s approach to housing — a revamped plan, my plan — others scaled them back,” Mr Murphy said.
He said he wanted to support an opposition proposal to legally enshrine a right to housing but “had lost that internal battle” at cabinet, so spoke out publicly against the idea.
“Even though supporting such a right wouldn’t itself build any new houses, and might be seen as simple virtue signalling, I believed it was an important virtue for the government to signal, to show cause.
“Making sure people had a place to call their home was on us: if the public didn’t have faith in its leaders on this very basic issue, what else might they then lose faith in?”
