Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House and What We Can Do About It by Rory Hearne, and: Housing in Ireland: Beyond the Markets ed. by Lorcan Sirr, and: Ways out of the European Housing Crisis ed. by Christoph U. Schmid

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House and What We Can Do About It by Rory Hearne, and: Housing in Ireland: Beyond the Markets ed. by Lorcan Sirr, and: Ways out of the European Housing Crisis ed. by Christoph U. Schmid Martina Madden (bio) Rory Hearne, Gaffs: Why No One Can Get a House and What We Can Do About It (Dublin: HarperCollins Ireland, 2022), 342 pages. Lorcan Sirr (ed.), Housing in Ireland: Beyond the Markets (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2022), 313 pages. Christoph U. Schmid (ed.), Ways out of the European Housing Crisis (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022), 416 pages. There is nobody in Ireland who can be unaware of the crisis in housing and homelessness at this point, either through first-hand experience or its prevalence in the news cycle. Unfortunately, despite the fact that almost 11,000 people are homeless and an innumerable amount are unable to find or maintain a secure affordable home, no imminent solution to the problem has been found. Three books published this year examine issues around the crisis and attempt to contribute to its resolution. Gaffs, by Maynooth University lecturer Rory Hearne, sets out ‘to inform, engage, educate and inspire real change in housing’.1 Housing in Ireland: Beyond the Markets, edited by Lorcan Sirr, a Senior Lecturer in Housing, Planning and Development at the Technological University Dublin, brings together a range of housing experts and practitioners to ‘deliberately neglect market issues, and instead focus on elements of housing that have never been examined deeply enough’.2 Ways out of the European Housing Crisis, edited by Christoph U. Schmid, Professor of European Private and Economic Law at the University of Bremen, seeks to fill the gap of the ‘scientific evaluation, categorisation and comparison aimed at exploiting the potential of tenure innovation and diversification’3 in housing. These are three very different books. They are for different audiences and reflect this in their content as well as the overall style and tone of the writing. But together they make a valuable contribution to the conversation around this often complex and seemingly intractable issue. Gaffs is an accessible book aimed at the cohort most affected by the current crisis – Generation Y, or Millennials (broadly defined as people born [End Page 120] between the years 1981 to 1996), who are also known as Generation Locked-out, Generation Rent, and Generation Emigration. Aside from Hearne’s academic credentials, he is a well-known media personality who has a strong online presence via his Twitter profile and Reboot Republic podcast, making him well-placed to reach the readers this book targets. Gaffs answers the first part of the book’s subtitle in the first four chapters. No one can get a house – primarily – because of a historical policy shift in the 1980s where the Irish state stopped building public housing and instead moved to an economic framework that promoted the market provision of housing; the repercussions of which we are now only fully experiencing. Hearne takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the many and varied failures of successive governments to act to prevent this catastrophe, in a journey that begins with state’s initial commitment to providing homes as a form of social welfare, to the pivot to free market capitalism which ultimately enabled the Celtic Tiger, and through the political decisions taken in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash that have led us to the point we are now at. For the next four chapters, Hearne delves deep into the impact of the lack of affordable housing on people’s lives. The statistics about this crisis are shocking enough – almost 11,000 people are homeless and another 250,000 are the ‘hidden homeless’, whose personal stories evoke a feeling of anger on behalf of people whose lives are on hold through no fault of their own. Relationships are affected or not possible, having children is deferred, taking on a challenge like going back to college or changing career becomes too risky when you have nowhere secure to live or are forced to move back in with aging parents. Adults stuck in their parental home comprise an astonishing 10% of...