Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We must at least start redirecting Government policy in that direction, however. I thank the Minister of State very much for her insistence in the Department that we return to the principle of building. For a long time, the principle was knocked by the Department as something it did not want to do. We wanted to subsidise landlords. We wanted to rent properties and have local authorities foot the bill while long-term value was added. At least now we have funding, some of which will come to Galway to start building houses. It is the right approach. We need much more of it. We need social housing to help those people whose lives are in many ways on hold. It is not until people get roofs over their heads that they settle and build connections and integrate with their children in their neighbourhoods. That is when we see community cohesiveness, not when people try to set up lives in temporary accommodation. While there is perhaps an element of exaggeration in it, someone once told me that staying in rented accommodation for such a long time made them feel almost like being homeless. It was to stay in someone else's home and not to have a home of one's own. It is something we see in the private-rented market among people who cannot buy and in the social housing system among those who have been waiting for a house for so long.

Many of the families who come to see me have been waiting 12 years for social housing in Galway. It is not the exception, it is the rule. When people come to my constituency office and tell me they have been on the housing list for four, five and six years, all I can tell them is that it is a list system, that housing is provided on a first-come, first-served basis and that there are those who have been waiting for six years longer. We must start working on those issues now. There are things we could do straight away if the political will was there. While I understand that the Minister of State cannot force every political party in the Dáil to agree a policy position, we must begin investigating and arriving at proposals for the short term on rent controls. It would be one way to alleviate the pressure on those who are living in private rented accommodation. It would stop the pressure coming on those in receipt of rent supplement from landlords who can act on a whim when someone comes to the door with an extra €100 or €200 a month for a house.

We must decide once and for all as a country what the place of housing and the home is in Government policy. Is it a commodity to be left purely to the market? That was the position previously and it damaged us greatly. Should we have complete State control whereby all housing is social housing? There is no appetite for that on any side of the House. If we do not have that, we must decide what people should have to pay for a home over the course of their lives. If they cannot afford it, we must look at the State's options. When we decide that, we can build a policy. I worry sometimes that in a knee-jerk reaction to get building going again, we will simply reignite what happened before rather than put in place something different. Rather than to have a "buy, buy, buy" model, we should have a model which acknowledges that some want to buy, some want to rent in the long term and some want to rent for the short term. We need a different housing policy from the one we had before. The previous model has left us with a legacy of misery. We must do something to alleviate the problem right now and in the long term replace it with something completely different.

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