Many people in the city cannot afford to live within decent radius of the city centre where we are now. And that has social consequences. That has social consequences for what we want for our city. Do we just want the city evacuated of all different types of people? Or do we just want it as a kind of playground for super wealthy people like it's happening in London right now?
That's Eoin O'Mahony, a teaching fellow at the School of Geography in UCD and a man committed to positive urban change. I'm Helen Shaw and you're listening to This is Where We Live. A podcast series of housing and homelessness of cities and planning and how we shape and create great places to live. Now Eoin's a city cyclist. So I caught up with him on his commute home from UCD at Smithfield, Dublin's old horse market, which has now transformed into a busy plaza of private apartment towers and art cinema, pubs and cafes. What I'm interested in Eoin is, first of all, a little bit about yourself, because this podcast. This is where we live. I'm kind of interested in cities and housing how we shape and create great places to live, the space and belonging. And maybe before we talk about the general research. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? But in a sense. Where is your home?
Sure. Well, home is rather contested thing for me, actually, because when I was 14 years of age, my family moved from Cork to Dublin and we moved from a relatively working-class area in Cork City to an upper middle class area in Dublin and quite aware where in cable TV. So we moved from a political talker on the court on the sides of a cork, and we moved to Cabinteely Foxrock. And that was a really big jump for us
You kind of muttered Foxrock there, is it a kind of a shame.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, no, no. I think it is. And I think it's shame for maybe reasons we'll go into and it's
it is where Sam Beckett's from
Yeah, that's right. And .. many more people come from there. I never quite settled into the area in the same way as my younger brother did, partly because I was just kind of mid-teens and I was kind of settling into a new school and trying to come to grips at teenagehood and blablabla. So home for me is quite a contested thing. And I moved outta there a little later and then moved around the city in various places, like down around the canal area on the south side, the Grand Canal area. And I lived in dundrum for a bit and that was terrible. And I hated the suburbs. So I committed myself to kind of living within a certain radius of the city centre. So that was always my my aim.
And so where do you live now?
I'm living in Glasnevin just off Botanic Avenue. So I'm living very close to the what you call the woodener, which is the wooden church. And that's just down the road from the Botanic Gardens. So Botanic Gardens are effectively our front garden and the backyard and then it's Griffith Park, so
I know it well. I went to school in St Mary's, so our back garden when we mitched and sadly we did Mitch a bit - it was Glasnevin cemetery or the Botanic Gardens.
OK. and now of course they're connected up. So it kind of makes a sense of sense in a new way in terms of having a heritage site rather than just being a place where dead people get buried. So
so we're standing in Smithfield's now, which in a sense, for those of us who remember it - was the horse market. This used to be a place where literally all human life happened and very much heartland of Dublin City, also very much part of Viking Dublin like under us. It has to be all there, a part of the city that's been regenerified in the sense we saw this whole building of apartments where beside Brown Bag here, the Lighthouse Cinema, it's changed a lot. It kind of has that sense of, you know, part of the story of the city developing. Failed a bit. Succeeding a bit. What's your take on Dublin as it evolves? Now, I suppose, like all of us who've lived here, there's its warts and all the things we love, the things we hate. But from where we are now. And because you're an urban geographer, what does Dublin mean to you as a plant or even an unplanned city?
Well, I think Dublin's quite haphazard. But I don't think you can really understand the way the city is developing right now without talking about tax and finance and without getting too boring about it. Urban geographers often look at places where money lands on the landscape. So, in other words, this area here is very much linked with tax breaks given in the 1990s and early 2000s. And we can't really divorce what we see around us here in terms of apartments and amenities without thinking about who got those tax breaks. Now, I'm not saying necessarily that the urban form, in other words, where the buildings are in relation to each other follows the money. But there's certainly a sense in which each individual block could be constituted as an individual tax break given to a developer, the developer moves in, makes the money out of the financial transaction and moves on. So what we're seeing around us here, are not really flats and apartments. They're mortgages and mortgages as loans. These are instruments by which our city is developing and changing. So I don't think we can divorce the buildings from the actual money itself. So that's that's definitely the way I'm thinking about it right now.
Kind of interesting where we are now looking at these apartments, which in a sense suffered a lot during the recession because this area kind of went down and became quite derelict in parts in Smithfield, despite all the, as you say, the tax break buildings. But if we look across the street, you're looking at social housing, which was done pretty much similar time and which some city council invested in social housing. On the other side. But it's quite separate. I mean, kind of tells a lot when we're in Smithfield. But how we think as a city about places to live and also about how people belong.
Yes, absolutely. I think one of the things we're looking at down the street here is not just a kind of a sense of segregation with the roads, but also about how people living in these places see themselves as separate from the next development over. And I think that has implications for the way we think about the city and in particular how we think about the city as a political space in the same way as I was saying earlier that we can't really see the city as outside tax and finance. We can't see the city without people and the people live in neighbourhoods and communities. And I think oftentimes we forget that especially. But the city centre. We forget that the city is made up of quite distinctive neighbourhoods, sometimes with their own very strong identities. But those identities are uncreated or submerged within the way the city changes over time, especially over the last 25 years. So cities , or neighbourhoods like across the way would have been made but remade from another part of the city. You know, people who live in those apartments, in those flats across the road are moving in from other areas. And they may well have moved in from some of the houses and flats that were here across the way. On the other side of the square and were de tenanted as the council likes to call and put over here on the other side. So we have to think about communities, their creation and their recreation.
Because it brings up this idea of mixed communities. And as you say, you talk about tax and tax breaks, but what with a legacy of what we're still doing is facilitating private buildings where they can opt out of their social responsibilities. I mean, there's that big building, a huge tower going up down at the Docklands where I heard the developer quite happily saying yesterday, because they also did the Clancy buildings there. Some that there they put together all the part five social housing elements and put them all into Rialto. So no more than here then. Never the twain shall meet. You know, you've actually facilitated the idea that really the idea of having mixed housing is a bit of a fallacy.
It is a fallacy. And people talk about social mix and we have to get the social mix right. But I mentioned Fox Rock earlier very quickly. But I think nobody's talking about social mix in areas like Fox Rock or Dalkey or Killiney. So we're not really thinking about putting public housing in areas where there are lots of rich people. And that's a problem for the city. It's a problem for our politics and a problem how we actually do the city. So one of the ways in which developers have power in the city is to be able to do things like they did with the part Five in Clancy quay and Rialto
and maybe just for the listener. Explain what the part five is, because in some ways people keep using it as a word to me in the beginning and had to look it up. So what does it mean
Well my understanding is. Is that part 5? It's part 5 of particular Housing Act. And that Housing Act obliged developers to put a certain percentage of the build aside for social / affordable housing, no affordable housing. And it came on later because there was a sense in which affordable housing language changed quite a bit. But those obligations were negotiated on a development by development basis. And that's often problematic for the council because it can't really have an oversight over the city as a whole. It's only looking at each individual development. And of course, what happens is developers play the council off itself, in effect and against city politics and get out of their obligations. In many ways, they can buy themselves out of those obligations. And that's a really big problem. I mean, that's a big problem for all of us. But I don't want to drag it too far into the whole social class thing. But that's a class issue. That is an issue of who gets to live in the city and who doesn't get to live in the city or who gets to live in Fox Rock and who doesn't get to live in Fox Rock.
and as you say, you start and you end with money and how money is flowing around development and probably secondary. If not, what's driving that is how we think about the city and how we think about who is responsible for the city. So whether it's still a city council or any local authority. What is their obligation in this? And I guess what's been interesting about this is actually that's changed because once we did have an environment where the council in this regard, Dublin City Council or the local authorities did have a much clearer idea and remit and mission around social housing.
You know, I think that that's certainly changed but over a much longer timeframe than we might think. It's happened over three or four decades. I know people like Connor McCabe and Michele Norris have traced this well. Michelle and Connor would say that this is a long term process whereby councils divested themselves of the responsibility of being the landlord. And whatever we think of the politics of landlordism in Ireland, you know, the idea of a public authority as a landlord was quite acceptable up until about the mid 1970s, and local authorities are now really no longer interested in being the people who own and run and manage on behalf of everybody else. Housing for everybody and I mean for everybody. In other words, people who are working in universities should also be on the housing list. People who are working in the cinema across the road should be on the housing list and we should have a right to that housing. The council has for good. Well, certainly for ill has divested itself of that responsibility. And that's a that's a that's a long term process. And that's that's a kind of a a process that's got lots of forebears. You know, it's not just one thing. It's not just one act or one person. It's a series of complex decisions taken over a 35 to 40 year period.
Could we unpack that a little bit because we just had figures the other day which the government is really happy about. And it shows an increase at the ground 25 percent year on year from 2017, 2018 in terms of new dwelling bills. But really, beyond that, what you're looking at is that a significant chunk of that build is student accommodation, where in an area where there's been a lot of that on the street and around and there's plenty more for festooning better and then equally apartments, private bills. And when I looked at it, only 11000 were what they were calling a scheme houses where you might think that's a three bedroom semi that the first time buyer gets one kid might move into. Actually, it wasn't that dramatic an increase.
No. And this is part of the problem. And it goes back to what I was saying about tax and finance at the moment. Tax breaks are being given to developing student housing. So developers follow wherever they can get the best value in the marketplace at that particular time. And at the moment, it's student accommodation is where the money is going. That has a particular problem for the city. So the number of actual flats and apartments and houses we're building is low, but those that are being put out onto the market are unaffordable for much of the city. So many people in the city cannot afford to live within decent radius of the city centre where we are now. And that has social consequences. That has social consequences for what we want for our city. Do we just want the city evacuated of all different types of people or do we just want it as a kind of a playground for superwealthy people like is happening in London right now?
So when people are fed up with me talking about Vienna, because obviously I was at a conference there in housing in December. One of the things that the mayor said, which really struck with me because the mayor is coming from a conservative political background, but one what he announced during that event in december was that every development which uses public land from here on in in Vienna is required to deliver 70 percent public affordable social housing in order to go ahead and get planning. But his remit for that were beyond the fact that it's for all classes. He said it was very much when the class he said like, look, I don't want to be in a city where the fire man or woman and the nurses can't afford to live in the city because I need them.
Yeah, well, that's what we need here, too. And we're seeing with the nurses strike rate right now, nurses and midwives are on strike because they can't afford to live in the city effectively and their wages are poor relative to rent and other things that they need to buy to live in the city. What's happened in Vienna is that they've retained control of the land and they'll control the land is crucial and there are plans. The NERI Institute, for example, have been putting together plans around building public housing on public land. And there is a reasonable way in which this can be done. And part of that is actually about lifting the cap on the income threshold. So if you earn over a certain amount, you're going to be not allowed to be put on the housing list. And what the mayor of Vienna is actually saying is that this is a housing scheme for all. This is a way in which we think about the city as everybody can hopefully live within the city in reasonable means. Now, there are problems with the Vienna model too one or two things we might have quibbles with, but they built on public land, and that's the difference.
And in some ways, we all recognize that Vienna is 100 years in its model. It's very specific to it. Nobody is saying that something like that can be translated into Dublin, but there's things that are inspiring about it. I mean, one of the things that the CEO of their housing agency said quite quietly, but it's true, was that no one in Vienna can be described by their address in terms of the socio economic status or class. I mean, you've just talked about Fox Rock. So I'm a northside dubliner, grew up in Whitehall beside Ballymun. We're in a city where people are so defined by their address. We'd a man shot in Darndale the other morning and the moment it was Darndale -Everybody just assumes what's going on. Our address in Dublin, probably in Cork as well. Says exactly who you are
Yeah and i think Limerick has suffered from that unduly as well. Now, I'm not going to say here as a geographer and say, look, the environment determines who we are because that's an outdated kind of way of thinking about it. But certainly we have a highly segregated city and that is mostly down to the fact that we've made poor choices around housing provision, particularly the last thirty five to forty years. And so those poor choices mean that places get more and more and more segregated over time and that it's increasingly difficult for people to recognise the commonality we have living in the city. And that's one of the reasons why it's hard to get things going in this town. It's because everybody tends to live in their own ghetto. So we talk about working class housing ghettos. There are also middle and upper class housing ghettos. And that matters in terms of the interaction we have between groups of people. And that's why it's hard to get social movements going in the city.
Interesting. So in looking at some of the problems that are there and some of the warts and all in Dublin housing. Have you a sense if you had the ear of Eoghan Murphy, the current minister or Dublin City Council, any decision make around this? What would you be saying to them?
I don't think Eoghan Murphy is going to necessarily listen to what I have to say as a Marxist. But I think we've got to firstly conceive that we can build on public land viably and that public housing can be built by borrowing off the books. One of the one of the things is we have to build public housing on public land and that public housing has to be for everyone. It can be done feasibly by borrowing off the books, if that's the big concern about breaking new rules.
Just describe what you mean by borrowing off the book.
OK, borrowing off the books as effectively saying we don't put it onto the capital expenditure of the government. We take a loan from the European Investment Bank. We pay it out over a 30 year period, not a five year period. So that means the rent that everybody is paying in that public housing, when it gets built in two or three years time, goes to pay off the loan eventually. And that's at a very low interest rate at the moment, just as interest rates have never been lower. So we can feasibly do this, Minister, but I would be more inclined to want to lobby the council to do this. And I think we have a unique opportunity now in the local elections coming up to be able to change the formation of the council in the city. And the other three local authorities around dublin. And to make the councils believe and understand that they can actually build decent public housing for everyone in this town.
And I know you're saying that as a Marxist, you wouldn't listen to you again. That's what's striking with me about Vienna is that politically conservative people on both the right and the left were saying the same thing to me, which is that if you don't invest in housing, you better be prepared to pick up the bill for prisons, for crime, for anti-social behaviour, for, in a sense, civil unrest. And I'm not saying that what's happening in France and in terms of the gilets jaunes is solely about that. But we all know that Paris is a pretty divided city in terms of social belonging, class and housing.
Yeah. And we have similar problems here. It's just that the way the politics is unfolding is not exactly the same. We don't have the same history of militancy on the streets. They do. I think we're lucky in that respect, but we're not far off it. We see little micro protests happening across the city about housing to take back the city initiative, for example. We see people desperate to make sure that we can do something to make people live adequately in the city.
One of the things that Leilani Farha was saying to me, the U.N. special rapporteur on housing, was that the key to this is actually having a legislative approach where we recognize the right to housing as a human right. That in some ways that that is the key that turns policy and political direction, because then that starts to turn off the commodification of housing in a city.
Yeah, I think the the deco modification of housing as as a right is key. I think we've got a bit to go there before we get there in Dublin. I think one of the things I'm not particularly convinced about is this notion that we place the right to housing in the Constitution. We've taken things out and put things in the constitution to great error over the years and over the decades. I think we need to base our fundamental rights in something other in an instrument other than the constitution,
like a parliament approved legislation
or a council willing to take seriously the notion that they can feasibly build public housing. That takes it onto a scale and a level that people can actually identify with. There's a certain pressure on those who see the market as being the decider of where we put her housing and who gets to live in that kind of housing. There's greater pressure on them. It's not a radical position to say build public housing on public lands anymore. And we can't go round saying to ourselves, well, that'll never work. That's a pipe dream. You know, we actually have to begin to believe that it can happen and it will happen if we bring it about. And and is testament to that, of course, is of much longer term process. But they also do that in certain boroughs in London and they do it in initiatives, for example, in in St Michael's estate have done great political work on the ground to make sure that they get the housing that they need for that neighbourhood. And that's how it starts. We've got to think long term and we've got to start believing that we can live in the city well and safely and with health, you know, because that's what it is. Housing is also about health. And the more we begin to talk about public housing as a right, certainly in the Constitution, as a right, then I think the easier it's going to become to make the housing possible. And so with dusk settling over Smithfield, I let Eoin O'Mahony get back on his bike and head home to Glasnevin. You've been listening to the podcast. This is where we live. With me, Helen Shell. And if you're interested in OWN's work, please do check out a conference he organised last year around Herbert Sims, that phenomenal Dublin city planner of the 1930s and 40s, the man who helped shape and define Dublin. It's where I met great people like Joe Brady and Ruth McManus, who featured in this series. And we live in a lovely video about Sims made by Endor O'Dowd of the Irish Times under the resources button on our Web site. This is where we live. So if you want to contact us about the project to go to the Web site, too, we're keen to hear from you. We'd love if you share this podcast with your friends and colleagues and spread the story. And if you value what we're trying to do here, please do consider becoming a patron of the series through the supporters button for Patreon on the website. Thanks again for listening and talk to you soon.
