Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the motion tabled by People Before Profit, acknowledging that it highlights a specific aspect of the empty homes and sites and seeks strategically to place teams in each local authority as a national approach to bringing these empty homes into local authority housing schemes. Fundamentals must be dealt with in this housing crisis and emergency. The Government needs to provide adequate, well-built, secure and well-supported estates with amenities and services. If this Government continues to rely on developers to deliver the crumbs off their profitable tables the crisis will continue.

The UN rapporteur on adequate housing, Leilani Farha, who was hosted here on Monday by Threshold and Simon, said the housing crisis is a global phenomenon primarily because of unregulated real estate speculation and commodification making housing unaffordable even for the middle classes. She said that in developed and developing countries, people are being displaced from their communities. She gives three reasons for this: national governments have receded from the arena of social housing and social protection; the unprecedented amount of wealth being parked in real estate and the global financial crisis that allowed the predatory buying up of bad debt and hedging, waiting for that bad debt to become lucrative. She said we must step back and ask how we view housing, as a commodity, something traded and sold on stock markets or as a human right. She said it should not be viewed as something to be traded on the stock market like gold, steel or wheat but as a human right. It is enshrined in international human rights law. Ireland has ratified and signed that law and committed to this human right.

Even if the Government uses private developers to build some social housing, they should be regulated to comply with human rights legislation but they are not. It is an ideological issue for the Government not to use public lands for public housing. St. Michael's Estate offers a great opportunity for a pilot scheme. I again suggest the Government needs to look in that direction, support that initiative and provide the capital funding in the budget for 2019 to support the scheme with a view to developing it.

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