Brendan Burgess
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A great article by Séamus Coffey in this weekend's Irish Times
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www.irishtimes.com
It's hard to summarise and it's all worth reading, but here is my summary of it.
When we had high unemployment and emigration, there was less demand for houses and people here to build them.
Now Ireland is a very attractive country to live in and we have full employment.
We can't import housing or health services, we need people here to provide them.
The following are direct quotes:
We have hundreds of thousands of workers producing medicines, IT services, computer chips and medical devices, but almost all of these are being produced for consumers abroad.
The forthcoming budget will likely see pronouncements that housing supply is a priority and plans for the expansion of health services. While previously a target, full employment has become a barrier to achieving these.
An alternative would be to set out how we are going to make space in the economy to accommodate our current priorities. This is not as attractive as simply offering more money. If new housing is the priority, then maybe we need to push back, at least temporarily, against pharmaceutical plants, data centres, retrofitting existing housing or other activities. We are unlikely to see such push back and will then wonder why more houses are not being built.
Seamus Coffey: Unintended consequence of full employment is that we can’t build houses or fix health
Our history as an underperforming economy means putting the brakes on is not in our psyche. But full employment makes achieving our goals difficult
It's hard to summarise and it's all worth reading, but here is my summary of it.
When we had high unemployment and emigration, there was less demand for houses and people here to build them.
Now Ireland is a very attractive country to live in and we have full employment.
We can't import housing or health services, we need people here to provide them.
The following are direct quotes:
We have hundreds of thousands of workers producing medicines, IT services, computer chips and medical devices, but almost all of these are being produced for consumers abroad.
The forthcoming budget will likely see pronouncements that housing supply is a priority and plans for the expansion of health services. While previously a target, full employment has become a barrier to achieving these.
An alternative would be to set out how we are going to make space in the economy to accommodate our current priorities. This is not as attractive as simply offering more money. If new housing is the priority, then maybe we need to push back, at least temporarily, against pharmaceutical plants, data centres, retrofitting existing housing or other activities. We are unlikely to see such push back and will then wonder why more houses are not being built.