To help you make an informed choice at the polling station on November 29th, 92.5 Phoenix FM will be speaking to many of the candidates from Dublin West to hear what their priorities are for the next Dáil. This series is adapted from our ‘General Election 2024’ podcast series as broadcasted on D15 Today, where you will find full-length interviews with the candidates.
Ellen Murphy first became involved in politics at the age of 19 as the marriage referendum campaign was just beginning (“It’s something I felt very personally about, and I decided to get involved”). She later became a member of the Repeal campaign and worked as trade union organiser in Dublin and London. Murphy says the Social Democrats “were a party whose politics just sat right with me” and was a “natural home” for her when deciding to contest the local elections, where she just missed out on a seat in Ongar. She now makes her first bid for the Dáil.
We have highlighted some of the main points raised in the interview. This article is part of an ongoing series with all of our interviewed candidates so check back daily for more.
On housing
Housing is without a doubt the main factor influencing how people vote in this election, and Murphy personally identifies with this: “For me, one of the driving factors behind me putting my name forward for the local elections and now again for the general was housing. I’m one of the half a million people in our 20s and 30s now back living at home in our family homes.”
Murphy says she “[doesn’t] subscribe” to the idea that it was “easy” to buy a home but that it was at least “doable”: “I grew up in Dublin 15 30 years ago when developments like the one I grew up in in Clonsilla were built. They were private developments, but they were affordable.” To make this a reality again, the Social Democrats have a housing policy “that would aim to deliver houses within Dublin city and county for just under €300,000 and €260,000 around the country, because we need to get back to those kind of homes that are affordable on middle incomes.”
Here in Dublin 15, new housing developments are often selling on the market for anything from €500,000 to €600,000, which Murphy says is “absolutely crazy”. “As someone who’s buying by herself, and I would hope to buy in an ideal world where I grew up in Clonsilla, the newest developments there in the village are now going for €500,000. The houses that I grew up in, in Porter’s Gate, for example, were [far less].”
How parties like Social Democrats who are proposing radical changes to housing policy can achieve this is the big question however. Murphy says that “the state needs to be accept that, at this point, we have to be a primary actor in the development of housing. We can’t simply just facilitate or incentivise private development. We also need to roll up our sleeves and do the work in terms of direct development.”
“We just sort of seem to be abdicating ourselves from responsibility to house people. And I know the current government like to tell us, well, we’ve seen more houses built than ever before. But what it ultimately is, is private developments that have affordability, you know, a little fraction of affordability over here on the side, maybe five, ten percent. Our plan puts affordability at the heart, and it should be the aim of every development.”
The other issue concerning affordable housing is that these are selling for half the price of those on the private market, and there runs a risk of the owner later selling on for its true market price. The Social Democrats aim to counter this through “affordable house zoning”: “What we would do is, on the land that we would build these public houses, they would be rezoned in a new category of affordability, and that zoning wouldn’t change. Therefore, those houses would not be able to be sold into the private sector for three or four times the value.”
Murphy says that “we have a wonderful cooperative housing movement here in Ireland right now. And actually, cooperative housing companies […] started out by building houses for cost. And most people who are taking up those options are people like me, people who grew up in private development, but now can’t afford it, but also fall outside the remit for public housing.” She says that “it’s about not just ensuring that this generation and my generation can afford housing, but that we change our approach to housing. […] Housing is not a commodity. It’s a basic human right, and it’s a basic human need.”
Murphy says that the Social Democrats’ plan has been built “with the figures that have been given to us by the Construction Federation of Ireland. So the project, the numbers that we’re projecting now are based on what we have, what we can build right now. […] We also know that the biggest challenge for people coming home here to work as builders is that they can’t live anywhere themselves. So we are being very practical about this.”
On health
Health is the other major issue for voters this election. Murphy says the difficulty and cost in getting a GP appointment are common problems for people, and “we in the party believe that the big problem is that when a young doctor is qualified and wants to become a GP in their community, they have to be prepared basically to become a business owner and […] run their own GP practice. […] We believe in directly employing GPs through the HSE, through the Sláintecare plan […] and providing GP community services through the HSE, which would help incentivise people to stay here and become GPs because they wouldn’t have to take on the running of a GP clinic.”
Private involvement in the health sector is also exacerbating problems according to Murphy and calls for a “public alternative”: “It’s the same as it is in health and housing. Those private companies can expand because there’s nobody who is competing with them. And when it comes to primary health care provision, that’s a state responsibility to deliver. So we should be competing. And therefore, the only way to do that is to directly employ and provide services.”
In primary care centres, there are “long waiting lists” due to staff vacancies “and a lot of that comes down to terms and conditions, but it’s also nothing happens in a silo connected to things like the cost of living.” Murphy says it is the pay conditions for “auxiliary workers, the staff workers on the boards, and the nurses and the trainee nurses and doctors” that are the biggest issues at the moment. “If you go to Scotland, which have a similar situation where people are training in college to become nurses and doctors and midwives, they’re provided a £10,000 stipend every year to cover the costs of them having to do that work. It’s not absolutely everything, but it helps. So it’s about our approach to how we treat the people who are currently there in the system, because so many people are graduating and then departing because they have no hope of being able to make enough money.”
On hospital waiting lists and record-high trolley numbers, Murphy says it would be “an awfully long-term solution that we’re going to have to work on. But again, it does come back to staffing levels. And if you look, for example, at something that really impacts waiting lists and hospitals, and that’s things like the radiography department, they’re auxiliary workers. There are currently only 30 places to train in Trinity College. Their union, SIPTU, have been running a campaign around their pay terms and conditions because at the moment, they’re paid less than people who are doing equivalent work to them within the hospitals. So a lot of people are either leaving the Irish system to go into private hospitals or they’re leaving the Irish system to go abroad. It’s about making sure that we can compete at a level in which people are willing to stay here by meeting the terms, conditions, and needs that they want and working with staff, groups, and unions in order to facilitate that.”
Murphy says efficiency is ideal but cannot be achieved with such high staff vacancy rates, and “while private hospitals can provide efficiency, a lot of them are elective and it’s a lot easier to manage what efficiency looks like in an elective private system as opposed to a public system. With the public system, it’s always going to take more money and more people and more time because you have to take everybody in, as you rightly should, as they are at the door. And for me, the provision of care, making sure people get the care that they need, needs to be the priority.
On an aging population which further increased demand for hospital beds, Murphy believes “everything is connected because so many people are presenting for hospital appointments or looking for access to A&E for what ideally some of them could have had taken care of by decent primary care in their communities. Having those kind of the equivalent of the VHI SwiftCare clinics and stuff like that, but within the public system provided for people, that would take some pressure.”
On public spending
The coalition parties are going into an election rocked by a number of controversies about spiralling and at times completely unnecessary, even agreed on by government TDs themselves, spending from the public purse. The National Children’s Hospital is being delivered long past its due date and well over-budget, and the now-infamous procurement of a bicycle shed at the Dáil costing over €330,000 raised serious questions about how careful the government is about finding value for its money.
Murphy says these two examples are “economies of scale, obviously, but they are two examples of where a contract was tendered by the state and under usually the guise of the argument that private is always better when it comes to building or constructing, and both of them have led to massive overspends. I think with the Children’s Hospital, I mean, I know everybody in Dublin 15 would probably agree with me when we thought that it really should have been built out here in Dublin West, alongside Connolly Hospital, it was a natural home for it. But they didn’t do that. BAM, the construction company, have overspent and have consistently come back again and again, asking for more and more money. And a big part of it is due as well to the lack of competition, because they were the only people who were basically equipped to provide the service.”
How do the Social Democrats plan on getting to grips with our public spending and procurement practices? Murphy says: “I think if this is an issue where in Ireland we haven’t been able to get to grips with best procurement practice, we need to find international examples and as in government, go to international best practice areas or other governments, get their advice and take that advice on board. You know, we often like to say, oh, it’s an Irish solution to an Irish problem, but we don’t always have to keep going back to the same solutions. We have to be open to taking criticism, to learning how to do this better from experts. I think the procurement system definitely has to be changed. And I think the work that Catherine Murphy has done as a TD on calling that out on PAC shows that we’re very willing to do.”
On climate change
Much of outgoing coalition leader and Dublin West TD Roderic O’Gorman’s public comments this week have centred around the importance of the Green Party being in government to deliver on policies relating to the environment. Despite this, and after nearly half a decade in power, Murphy points out that “we’re going to miss our 2030 [climate emission] targets […] and that’s going to cost between €3 to €8 million in fines. Again, more money going to waste.”
Murphy says that “one of the biggest things we can do in terms of climate and biodiversity is getting control of our natural resources, such as wind energy. A lot of the work that goes into laying the foundations and preparatory work is done by the public sector, and then they’re tendered out to private and they go to private companies. We need to set up a national company for wind and solar energy in Ireland and keep those resources. Take it back in house.
Murphy also believes spending is necessary on these measures: “We’re being told to keep money to one side for a rainy day. But, well, metaphorically only, it is buffeting down right now. […] How much worse does it have to get before we prepare to spend on a rainy day?”
You can listen to our full interview with Ellen Murphy on our ‘General Election 2024’ podcast series.
