The Kettle's Boyled: Get out of bed, and go to work

We’ve started into another year, not that you’d know it if you were anywhere around Dáil Éireann these days. Unlike the rest of us who take a few days away from our work at Christmas, our TDs like to take something of a lie-in until the middle of January, a situation made all the worse since they disappeared to do their shopping in mid-December and didn’t bother coming back. If we didn’t know better, we might think they had everything under control and there were no outstanding issues of concern to the people who elected them.

But of course there are issues, and right now it appears the biggest of these is the fact that this government is asleep at the wheel and not moving forward. They have been in power for more than a year but the big-ticket items are more or less where they were this time last year. Sometimes, you’d just love if somebody would gather them all together and give them a good shake, to wake them up generally and to make them realise that problems don’t solve themselves.

Maybe if they took a business-like approach to things, they might lose this ‘stoned hippy’ look and liven themselves up. Any business, small or large, operates on the basis of having targets and deploying resources in an efficient way in order to meet those targets. That is poles away from the approach of government, where the principal motivator seems to be the need to get re-elected next time around. That involves being careful to upset nobody, itself a recipe for stagnation. To make omelettes, a few eggs have to be broken.

Health and housing are the two big ones, but they can be sorted out if there is a will to do it. To be fair, the Health Minister is making progress, but she needs to crank it up still further. On housing though, we are where we were five years ago, more or less.

We are building about half enough houses each year. The industry can’t recruit staff, despite there being around 50,000 people on jobseekers allowance for more than six months. Our defence forces are also below strength, although they were always noted for giving people skills that were sought after in civilian life. But nobody seems willing to join all those dots, in case they offend somebody. House building used to involve lots of skilled trades, but modular homes can be built in factories using factory production systems where staff are quickly trained to make one component part.

The government needs to rezone land nationally in a strategic manner, not next year, but now. They need to have this land serviced, not starting next year, but starting now. They need to allow co-living and student housing projects to be built now, not next year. And they need to get back to work right away, not in mid-January.