Comments by a top civil servant that a Government-appointed “housing tsar” was not needed underlines the “utter shambles” of the response to the housing crisis, Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin has said.
Mr Ó Broin, the party’s housing spokesman, suggested that in making his comment, secretary general at the Department of Housing, Graham Doyle, was speaking for his equivalents in a number of other departments.
Mr Doyle made his comments at the Property Industry Ireland (PII) conference in Dublin on Thursday.
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Referring to a poll of attendees on whether a housing tsar was necessary, Mr Doyle said: “I like that poll; I voted no.
“We do not need a housing tsar – can I just clear this one up please, once and for all.”
His department subsequently issued a statement saying Mr Doyle was referring to his opposition to the term “tsar”, rather than to the role of the head of the Government’s new Housing Activation Office (HAO).
Asked on RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne show if he thought Mr Doyle was only objecting to the word rather than the position Mr Ó Broin said: “It’s much more significant than that. First of all, it shows the utter shambles that the new administration is making of what was already a very, very bad housing crisis.
“When you go back to the first interview the Minister for Housing James Browne did in February he talked – and this was the Minister’s language – about wanting a maverick to knock heads and kick down doors.
“If you have not only the secretary general of the Department of Housing – but I suspect Graham [Doyle] is also speaking for the secretary generals of the Departments of Public Expenditure and Reform, and Finance – absolutely and very publicly and deliberately opposing the proposition, it tells me you have got a problem.”
He described the HAO as a “dead duck, before it has even started” and questioned how the Government would deal with “resistance” from the Civil Service in implementing the body.
On the same programme, Minister of State for Public Procurement Emer Higgins addressed the situation saying: “I think we all agree that there needs to be a strategic housing delivery office, and ultimately, you need somebody to lead that.”
She denied that the Government had used the term “tsar”. It was her “interpretation”, she said, that Mr Doyle was opposed to the use of the term but was “on board with the strategic Housing Activation Office which obviously needs a leader”.
She said there was a “recognition” in the Department of Housing that the HAO was necessary and said “we don’t need to get bogged down in terminology the Government has never used”.
