Taoiseach defends 'tone deaf' housing video for young people moving back in with parents

Vivienne Clarke and Eva Osborne

The Taoiseach has defended a video shared by the Department of Housing advising young people on how to cope with moving back in with their parents.

It comes after Sinn Féin’s housing spokesperson Eoin Ó Broin admitted that he thought the video was "tone deaf" and satirical, and had been posted by Waterford Whispers.

The video features two young people offering tips such as setting house rules, paying rent, doing chores, and managing potential conflicts while living at home.

Ó Broin told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland: “The number of young people moving back home has doubled over the last decade to its highest level in some time is because the government's housing policy is pushing up house prices, pushing up rents, pushing up homelessness, while at the same time failing to deliver social affordable homes.

“So the idea that the very people who are responsible for the rising levels of young adults, not just in their 20s but into their 30s, being forced to live at home, would then give people advice about doing household chores and setting boundaries, I think is just going to anger people.

"And in fact, if you look at the responses that I received to the social media video that I posted, you had both young people and adults furious because their view is the government should get on with the job of actually delivering larger volumes of social affordable homes and not lecturing young people about how to cope with being forced to live back at home with their parents.”

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the video aims to highlight the broader challenges facing young people in the housing market.

"I think it was in respect of homelessness and general guidelines for homelessness, and sometimes we need to avoid knee jerk reactions to genuine initiatives by organisations such as the housing agency and look at it in the broader context," he said.

"The big issue is to provide more housing as fast as we possibly can, and that's what we are doing.

"We have a specific trarget in mind in terms of homelessness this year, but also more broadly in terms of getting more houses built."

Sinn Féin's Ó Broin said he was not criticising the “real young people” featured in the video.

“My criticism is of the government and of the department. The Department of Housing and the Minister for Housing is responsible for delivering homes. They have been failing in that regard for a decade. And as a consequence of that failure, more and more young people are being forced to emigrate or forced to live at home or indeed forced into homelessness.

“Let's be very clear my criticism is absolutely not of organisations like Spun Out or any youth organisation that seeks to mitigate the negative impacts of government policy.

"But when you see that video on the Department of Housing's website, it's almost like the person who sets fire to your house than hands you a bucket of water to put out that fire.

"Government are responsible for this crisis, and they need to be doing more than advising young people to do household chores and set boundaries. They need to focus on the task at hand, which is actually delivering more homes, so young people will actually have a future in this country and not be forced to live at home or emigrate."

Later on Newstalk Breakfast, Rory Hearne, the Social Democrats housing spokesperson, criticised the Department of Housing for sharing the video saying it was “normalising something that should not be normalised".

It was not appropriate for the Department to share the video, he said. “They say it in their message, their tweets sending it out in their social media, this is something to help young adults with moving back at home and it essentially it's the Department of Housing, the Minister for Housing, the government, who has caused this the fact that young people have to move.

“If I was advising young people and I would criticise Spun Out in terms of that on a certain level, what you should be saying to young people is this is not okay. This is not acceptable.

"If you are feeling angry and frustrated because you've to move back in with your parents, that is the correct feeling. We should be organising, we should be protesting as young people. Young people should be on the streets demanding …”

“Because it puts more pressure on this government to do the right policies, they are still going for example the mass 15,000 evictions going on this year, it'll be 20,000 by the end of the year.

"Where is the pressure to stop the evictions? These young people are being evicted out of private rental housing, having to go back home. And the Department of Housing is putting out videos going, well, you know, this is how you act.”