Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The Permanent TSB-ESRI house price index makes chilling reading for tens of thousands of young working people in need of homes. In March 1996, the average price of a home in Dublin was €82,000. This year, ten years later, it is €384,000, an increase of €300,000. That represents a shocking €30,000 increase per year, the equivalent of the current average industrial wage each year for ten years. Prices outside Dublin have increased pro rata. Is there any appreciation by the Government of the dire situation facing young people who earn the average industrial wage and need a home or any recognition of the hardship of young parents who are saddled with 30 and 40 year mortgages? Are members of the Government so cosseted by their massive salaries that they are oblivious to the suffering, hardship and desperation?

This happened on the Taoiseach's watch. He failed cataclysmically to stop the unbridled speculation by developers and house builders. Of course, that was deliberate. The matter goes all the way back to the devil's pact made between Fianna Fáil and house builders and speculators in the 1960s. They bought the party's councillors, who in turn corrupted planning in Dublin and, perhaps, other areas and created the nightmare we now have. They got everything they wanted. They bought the party's former leader, who the Taoiseach eulogised unstintingly last Friday. The VIP pen in the Donnycarney church was like a major house builders' convention. Oddly enough, the politicians were probably the poorest people there, with the exception of some of the Taoiseach's colleagues who are publicans, landlords or dabblers in hair dressing salons in Moscow for the Russian nouveau riche.

This is a serious situation, with a serious downside. Speculators are buying houses in working class communities left, right and centre. A frightening percentage of homes in hitherto stable communities are now rented. Stable communities are being replaced by transient communities, by people who are forced into the laps of landlords, such as migrant workers and those on rent supplement. That means, for a Government which is completely unprepared, massive pressures on services. The Taoiseach is recreating in 2006 the alienated and neglected communities of the 1970s and 1980s in what were extensive council housing estates, yet the Government is oblivious to this.

What will the Taoiseach do during the time available to him to rectify this situation, to make homes affordable and to stabilise communities so that ordinary working people can live stable lives?

See this speech in context