Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

We have a chronic crisis in every virtually aspect of housing in the State. There is a catastrophic failure by the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, building on the failure of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party before them, to resolve the desperate need for homes. Incredibly, 90,000 families or individuals are on local authority waiting queues nationally. It springs from the crazed property bubble which inflated over ten years to 2008 when developers, big bankers and bondholders were given free rein to profiteer mercilessly at the expense of young working people in the housing market. The price of a home accelerated in a ten-year period to 2006 by the equivalent each year of the average industrial wage. Inevitably, it has left an entire generation in negative equity and shackled in dreadful situations involving unsustainable mortgages, distress and suffering.

Following on from the previous Government, the response of the Government has been that the instigators of the crisis - the profiteers and speculators - have been bailed out and our people left homeless or struggling hard to try and keep their homes. The root of the crisis was the building of homes for profiteering by major construction companies, bankers and speculators.

A home, the basic right to shelter, is a human right. It is reprehensible that people in need of a home should be at the mercy of the capitalist profiteers in the same way as it is reprehensible that people who are sick should be subject to the profiteers in the health industry. The political establishment and the media, with all that was going on in the property bubble, legislated for it and cheer led the developers and the speculators. They were lionised by the political establishment and the media which pretends to be scandalised about what happened. What happened then and now is that the capitalist cycle and boom and bust is allowed to dictate and the neoliberal agenda, which has intensified for the past 10 to 20 years, means that the thinking is all about privatisation. The so-called private market is supposed to fulfil our housing needs with the consequence is appalling suffering by individuals and families. Every public representative knows and experiences that. In my own area we have had horrific cases. Gwen Connell, a very brave single mother with three children, was faced with homelessness when her rent was increased by €400 per month. Gerard Tier with his partner and two young children were forced to go from hotel to hotel under the so-called homeless programme and, bravely, had to go public to try to get some measure of justice and urgent action from the Government.

Emergency action is needed. Rent controls to stop the increasing rents is essential. It is incredible that the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, who made her career on the backs of the working class people and the poor of Mulhuddard and Dublin West at a certain occasion, should stand over a situation where single mothers with children are told to go to their landlord and negotiate the rent downwards, in a market where the rents are shooting up because of the lack of homes. That is shameful.

We need an urgent programme of social homes. There is a shameful dereliction of duty by the Government in that it is building virtually no social homes. The Library and Research Service has furnished us with the statistics which show that 363 social houses were built in 2012, 486 in 2011, in addition to some co-operative and other housing. Let me contrast those statistics with past periods. The Minister of State's ears should burn with shame and embarrassment when she hears the following. In 1970 we built 3,767 local authority homes. Let me labour the point. In 1971, we built 4,789; in 1972, 5,902; in 1973, 6,072; in 1974, 6,746 social homes; in 1975, 8,794; and in 1976, 7,263. In that seven year period more than 43,000 social homes were built and that was not a time of capitalist boom. There was the oil crisis and other problems of the always weak Irish capitalism but it was prior to the neoliberal drive when Thatcher and Reagan, and then their imitators all over the world, including in the Irish Government, had yet to come on stream. That is a shameful remonstration with this Government.

Any homes in the possession of NAMA, receivers, and developers in unsold estates should be taken immediately into public ownership and made available but an emergency programme of house construction is needed. The construction industry is not investing because it is not profitable for it to do so. The major construction companies, with the banks and the financiers, should be nationalised and a programme of major home construction to meet the needs of the people should be put in place. Tens of thousands of construction workers, those who are devastated as a result of the crisis, languishing in unemployment, would have their skills utilised and would be back at work and contributing to the economy. This would help economic recovery. That is the type of radical action that is needed. Ministers come in and moan about the situation and expect the capitalist market to resolve the issue-----

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