HOUSING standards adopted by Dublin and Cork City Councils in response to jerry-building in the boom are now being threatened by Environment Minister Alan Kelly.

Those local authorities demand a minimum apartment size of 55sq m. Lower national standards, which the minister is threatening to impose, provide only 45sq m. That brings minimum sizes back to where they were in the mid-noughties.

It was too late then to undo the worst, but planners in Dublin, and then in Cork, benchmarked better standards for the future. Panic-stricken before an election, but unable to move the dial on housing in the short-term, Kelly will make a mark on our cities that will blight them long after he is forgotten.

Natural light; aspect; ceiling height; storage; a balcony, if it’s an apartment; or a back garden, with a house, make a difference. They are basic aspirations for even modest properties. Fat chance it will be the home of your dreams if it is dark, and doesn’t have room to swing a cat or have storage space.

Do you leaf through the property supplements? It’s harmless fantasy. Some bigger place, or maybe a better area, catches your eye? When it comes to property, size does matter. Ever see a picture of a pokey room on a property website? No. They are all light-filled and airy. It’s about living the dream.

Back-to-back housing, where light only shines on one side, and space is cramped, adding to the gloom, is nobody’s dream. Standard in Charles Dickens’ London, this type of housing was adapted in flimsy materials, and divided by endless corridors, for undersized apartments in Irish cities during the boom.

Too often, the dream of a “cosy homestead” translated as “chicken coop”. Ghettos are big business and planning Ireland’s ghettos of the future is in full swing again.

It’s a remarkable reprise of the Easter Rising, largely set in the slums of Dublin’s north inner city, that its centenary will be marked by the State directing a return to poorer quality housing for the poorest people, in the poorest areas. It is not only remarkable, it is an unfolding scandal.

Over the past 20 years, the city centres of Dublin and Cork — and further afield — have been in-filled with inferior homes, for a transitory population of either single people or the poorest families. There were good designs, of course, but substandard quality was common.

That was the ghettoisation of the Celtic Tiger. Enormous profits were made; the cores of our cities were permanently pock-marked by the sites of a culture war on an entire class of people. The culture was crass antipathy to design, and to style. It was based on the premise that those homes — overwhelmingly apartments — were for somebody else, never for us, to live in. So it has proved to be.

Compared with public housing in the 1930s and 1940s, which were usually well-built and sometimes iconic, rough-and-ready kennel-sised “homes”, as slapped up by developers from the 1980s, remain a blight.

They are immovable objects in our streets, scarring communities, hardly more than social engineering with Meccano sets for the permanent underclass. The profits have been squandered, but the costs in terms of people’s lives in poorer communities, where there are fewer opportunities and there is more educational disadvantage, remain. In our multicultural society, ghettoisation has added toxicity for the future.

Beyond Pebbledash, Paul Kearns’ and Motti Ruimy’s book, sets out the consequences clearly. In Dublin’s north inner-city, with a population in 2011 of 20,540 people, 46.5% of homes had one bedroom or less.

That’s a population equivalent to the town of Athlone, housed in undersized accommodation. Think of that town with a government- enforced no-child policy — there would be uproar. Use the planning system to the same effect and there is hardly a whimper.

Few in our inner-cities are owner-occupiers, and fewer aspire to stay longer than they must. For many, it probably feels like they have been there too long already. But with rising rents, hanging on to what you have seems best. The absence of mixed, sustainable communities is highlighted by the fact that just 7.5% of homes in this area have five rooms or more. But, across Dublin City, which has a population of more than half a million people, 47% of all homes have five rooms or more. Housing standards matter. They determine for decades, maybe for hundreds of years, who lives where and how.

Coming from the unemployment and emigration of the 1980s, when even St Stephen’s Green was a gap-toothed landscape with derelict sites, there was a moment when putting up something, anything, seemed like progress.

But it was a wrong call and we know better now. It is astonishing, therefore, that there is a full-on policy move, at the behest of developers, to degrade modest, minimal standards.

The minister has apparently been bamboozled by the industry, and with no evidence. But, desperate to be seen to be doing something — anything — he is enforcing bad standards, which will lead to permanent bad outcomes. Minimum sizes are only one aspect of decent apartments. Ceiling heights are another, and the minister’s national guidelines are a foot lower than what is acceptable in Dublin and Cork now.

Squeeze more apartments into a site and you won’t bring down apartment prices. Prices are determined by demand. What you will do is increase the land value on which apartments are built. If the builder is buying the site, then that higher land value will be built into his cost base before the foundations are dug, and will then be passed on.

It’s a mug’s game.

The minister’s promise of knocking €20,000 off the cost of an apartment, if his lower national guidelines are fast-tracked, is unenforceable. Builders have had him for breakfast.

The notion that they will leave 20 grand on the table, when they have a buyer to squish into a smaller apartment, is unbelievable. As the Institute of Professional Auctioneers & Valuers put it, building costs are an “unknown”, despite claims by the industry that have never been effectively tested independently. That hasn’t stopped Alan Kelly, however.

The damage won’t stop in the private market; it will immediately filter through to social housing.

If the current housing standards in Dublin and Cork, including size, ceiling height and a requirement for dual aspect, are undermined — not the back-to-back type housing of old, recast during the boom — then the same lower standards will immediately apply to social housing in the two cities.

What adds to the harmfulness is the insidious reference to Rolls Royce housing standards, when these standards are in fact only the minimum needed to live decently. Incidentally, no self-respecting developers would dream of living in the apartments with which they again want to blight our cities.