By Donal O’keeffe EchoLive.ie
THE Tánaiste’s office is not as big or as impressive as the Taoiseach’s, which is upstairs, but it’s still swanky, up the red-carpeted steps in Government Buildings, famous from the pandemic briefings, and left along a long, echoing corridor.
The office feels less ceremonial than the Taoiseach’s, but it also has fewer personal touches than Micheál Martin’s. Despite that, pride of place behind Mr Harris’s desk is given to a lovely photograph of his two children, Saoirse, 6, and Cillian, 3.
Personable and understated, Simon Harris is tall, and, at 38, still slim, but the unruly mop of jet-black hair he sported on his first day in the Dáil, in 2011, is neatly styled and grey.
Mr Harris saw the clip recently on Reeling in the Years. “Every time I look at it, I go: ‘How the hell did anyone let me out of the house like that?’,” he says.
He was 24 then, the youngest TD in the House, and his maiden speech proposed Enda Kenny as taoiseach, something he recalls as “pretty nerve-racking”. And, for 30 minutes or so, it was also the only time — so far — he has ever sat on the opposition benches.
Elected unopposed to the Fine Gael leadership in April 2024, after Leo Varadkar’s surprise resignation, Mr Harris became the youngest taoiseach in the history of the State.
It might be unkind to note that he is also, at 297 days, the shortest-serving taoiseach, but Mr Harris is adamant that he will resume the role in November 2027, when Micheál Martin is due to stand down and the office will revert to Fine Gael.
On the day of our interview, Cork singer Martin Leahy was on Kildare St, singing his song, Everyone Should Have a Home, outside Leinster House for the 162nd Thursday in a row.
Joining Mr Leahy that day were housing activists Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry, who, in 2020, began compiling a list of more than 700 derelict properties within a kilometre of Cork city centre. Five years later, they claim that more than 70% of those properties remain vacant.
Responding to that statistic, the Tánaiste said the sight of derelict properties in the midst of a housing crisis made people “rightly very angry”.
“At a time when we have to do so much more to put a roof over people’s heads, the idea that there’s any sort of properties lying idle is a cause of great frustration,” Mr Harris said.
“Now, I can point to things we’ve done to try and improve the situation somewhat; we’ve obviously brought in levies and penalties in relation to derelict sites, and there’s a derelict register, as well.
“And, yes, obviously, Cork City Council has a responsibility, but I think we have a partnership responsibility on this. I’d like to see greater sanctions, in terms of actually enforcing action on derelict properties.
“I wonder are the local authorities best placed to enforce those sanctions, or should we consider assistance from national government, from the Revenue Commissioners?”
He said he wondered whether “more teeth” were needed for financial sanctioning of owners of derelict properties, and he added that he would be pushing for the activation of a Cork city centre taskforce, as promised in the programme for government, as a matter of urgency.
“We’re having this conversation in the week where we’ve just launched the Dublin City Centre Taskforce roadmap,” Mr Harris said.
“One of the things in the Dublin City Centre Taskforce is a focus on dereliction, where it’s specifically outlined as an agenda item. So a plan for Cork city, underpinned by the work of a taskforce, I think, would be really good.”
He added that he was appointing Colm Burke as Fine Gael frontbench spokesperson on Cork.
Mr Burke might have his work cut out, it was suggested to Mr Harris, in a city which is, perhaps, beginning to suspect that this Government is long on announcements and short on concrete commitments and deadlines, with every promise of a northern distributor road, a northern ring road, an N/M20, and a Cork Luas haunted by the ghost of events centres yet to come.
The Tánaiste said he was aware of “the deep frustration in Cork” around the events centre, adding that “Micheál and I took the right decision in the last government in doubling down on the commitment to the project”, despite the “multitude of reasons” behind its ongoing delay.
He noted that he had campaigned in the election on the proposal to establish a department of infrastructure, but “you don’t always get your way in politics”. Despite that, he said, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform now has a new infrastructure division, headed by a deputy secretary general.
Mr Harris said the scale of capital investment needed to address infrastructural pinch points would require much quicker delivery.
“Thankfully, we live in a country where we’re going to be able to very significantly increase our capital spending, and we’ll have our review of the National Development Plan concluded next month.”
He said he believed that the bigger test for government would be efficient delivery of projects.
“I always think you’re actually better to really turbocharge your pipeline and capital projects, because there will always be a project that will get delayed in a planning process, but you have to be able to move ahead with another project. I think we should be quite ambitious here in the scale of our National Development Plan.”
Last year, the State missed its target of 40,000 new homes by perhaps as many as 10,000.
Asked whether the Government would even hit 30,000 of its 41,000 target this year, Mr Harris said he believed it would.
“Actually, what I signed up to do on the programme for government is deliver 300,000 homes over the next five years, and I think that’s the North Star, that’s where we need to get to,” he said.
“Annual targets can fluctuate, and some years, by the way, we’ve significantly overshot our target. Last year, we undershot it. There’s no doubt about that.
“But, actually, what success looks like, I think, over five years of government, the cumulative number needs to be about 300,000 and that’s what we’ve committed to in the programme for government.”
Mr Harris added that, for more homes to be built, Uisce Éireann would require significant increased funding, an investment to which he was committed, but he suggested that allowing for an increase in developer-led infrastructure would assist in the delivery of housing.
“If I’m a developer, and I want to build 12 houses, rather than wait for Irish Water, I should be able to put in the infrastructure myself, with Irish Water oversight. If you’ve all the towns and villages in Ireland delivering relatively small numbers individually, it can add up to quite a lot,” he said.
“So, I think better money for Irish Water, absolutely, but also developer-led or developer-installed infrastructure, subject to Irish Water oversight.”
To end on perhaps a personal note, exactly a week before last November’s general election, disaster struck for Fine Gael when a tired and apparently impatient Mr Harris met Charlotte Fallon in Cork, a disability worker who accused the Government of ignoring the disability sector.
The then-taoiseach denied the accusation, before walking away from Ms Fallon, despite the fact that she was emotional. The clip went viral, and the next morning Mr Harris contacted Ms Fallon to apologise.
Mr Harris said that he has not spoken with Ms Fallon since the election, but he said he was hoping he could meet her again, in a private capacity.
“I’m wanting to listen and learn, and I’ve spoken a lot about that night and the mistakes I made, but I’m also pleased to say that the main issue that was raised with me that evening was the issue of pay in the sector, and how we pay people who work in the disability sector, and the need to pay them properly.”
He said he was “genuinely pleased” that this Government has made significant progress on pay.
“There was a pay agreement for that sector that was overwhelmingly voted in favour of by those working at the sector, so I think that’s an important piece of progress.”
Asked whether he felt some good had come of that night in Kanturk, he said: “Yeah, it did.
“I quite rightly am a person who tends to be self-aware and self-critical, and when you make a mistake, you put your hands up, you own it —that’s how I was reared — and you learn from it.”