FORMER ENVIRONMENT minister Eamon Ryan’s new grace-and-favour gig as EU “housing tsar” kicks off in earnest this month in apparently straight-faced celebration of the resounding success of Irish housing policy. According to EU statistics, Ireland’s housing costs are a neat 101% higher than the EU average, while 16,058 people are currently homeless – of whom 5,014 are children.
Appointed in June as chair of the European Commission’s Housing Advisory Board, this is Ryan’s first post-ministerial position. He is compensated for expenses only for his expert input as the former climate minister, whose own housing emissions target was undershot by almost 50% since his return to high office in 2020. The mere fact that Ryan was chosen to chair the committee that will feed in policy recommendations to the European Affordable Housing Plan in 2026 indicates the toothless tiger this entity is destined to become.
By comparison with the strident former UN special rapporteur for housing, Leilani Farha, whose advocacy pointed directly at the social and economic problems caused by the commodification of housing, Ryan cuts the figure of a compliant lieutenant of the status quo of maintaining the gross inequality of housing policy across Europe. He served as minister in a government that lifted the eviction ban at the earliest possible juncture during the pandemic but has had practically nothing to do with housing policy beyond his own failed housing emissions targets.
Why this august position did not confer itself upon Ciarán Cuffe – whose dilution last year of the EU’s utterly impotent Buildings Performance Directive was sheepishly and ill-deservedly paraded as a success for the European Greens – is an open question.
Quite how the commission squares its entrustment of this position to a senior member of the government it wrote to in 2023 to decry severe underinvestment in housing as a public infrastructure is, at its kindest, a moot point.
