A "get-rich-quick mentality of opportunistic overpricing" in the housing market is threatening to undermine pay restraint and social partnership, according to two leading trade unionists. The general secretary of the Civil and Public Service Union, Mr Blair Horan, said that new house prices in Dublin had risen by 135 per cent between 1987 and 1998, but a clerical officer's salary in the Civil Service had risen by only 60 per cent. Clerical workers' wages generally had gone up by 55 per cent and the average industrial wage had risen by only 45 per cent over the same period.
SIPTU's vice-president, Mr Des Geraghty, said that, "even by the standards of the neo-liberal free marketeers, we are fuelling runaway inflation, creating pressure for further pay increases, increasing the demand for Government expenditure and making more and more people dependent on the State to provide their accommodation needs."
Mr Geraghty warned that "our economic advances of the last 10 years were not built on the anarchy of the free market, or on individual greed, but on centrally bargained priorities, on planning and restraint, on shared responsibility and on social investment. Those principles must now be applied to the property market and made to work for affordable accommodation and to the long-term economic and social interest of all our people."
Both Mr Geraghty and Mr Horan were speaking at a conference on "Affordable accommodation - a trade union issue and a human right", which their respective unions were hosting in Dublin yesterday. Other speakers came from a wide range of organisations in the voluntary, statutory and academic sectors.
"The provision of `affordable accommodation' for our citizens must be treated as a major national priority just as the provision of employment, food, health care or social welfare has been in the past," Mr Geraghty said. "This need is not being adequately catered for by what is now referred to as the `property market', which is driven by blatant and unscrupulous profiteering at all levels.
"We must have a combination of Government action and self-regulation initiatives in this sector," Mr Geraghty said, calling for "direct and indirect subsidies to creating a dynamic new `social market' of affordable accommodation". Home ownership was now in danger of becoming a thing of the past for most workers.
Mr Horan said that the housing crisis was probably the biggest single social policy issue and was likely to remain so for some time. "It is 25 to 30 years since we last witnessed a housing crisis of this proportion."
Another worrying feature of the crisis was that it was affecting not only those on low incomes, but covered a wide range of social groups.
Successive governments had failed to plan for the crisis, and the 1997 budget, in abolishing residential property tax and halving capital gains tax, had "fuelled the flames". It had also sent the wrong signal to the market.
Mr Horan called for the declaration of a housing emergency and a task force to develop policy responses. Increased housing stock, special tax relief for first-time buyers and more realistic tax relief for private sector tenants on low incomes should be made available. Finally, there should be more encouragement for voluntary and public sector housing initiatives.