Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Increasingly, the public across all age cohorts has come to the conclusion that this Government is utterly failing to deliver affordable homes. I do not think the Minister could point to anything he has done during his term of office that has contributed to actually driving down the cost of housing. In fact, most of the initiatives he has taken are contributing to the high cost of housing. He has concentrated on subsidies, which do nothing to tackle the underlying reasons house prices are allowed to remain high and continue to grow.

First-time buyers now need a median income of more than €90,000 to purchase a home. In Dublin, it is more than €103,000. Let us look at the other side of that. The median disposable household income is just under €47,000, meaning home ownership is now completely out of reach for increasing numbers of workers. This Government's market-driven policies, along with its close ties with those interests who are making a packet out of housing, whether that is developers, land speculators or the property industry in general, have condemned an entire generation to unaffordable rents and unaffordable house prices. We are still dealing with the consequences of Fianna Fáil's last term in government, when it crashed the economy, and then after that Fine Gael rolled out the red carpet for vulture funds and real estate investment trusts, REITs. Unfortunately, this was followed by further poor policy decisions such as the housing assistance payment, HAP, and the scaling up of long-term leasing. In 2021 alone, a staggering €1.2 billion was spent on rent subsidies and leasing arrangements. For example, since 2014 HAP spending has gone from €0.4 million to €515 million last year, while €300 million has been spent on long-term leases since their introduction in 2008. Neither of these policies is a solution to the housing crisis. All they have done is turned social housing into an investment opportunity. Yet this Government's latest solution to the housing crisis is just more subsidies. The only people lining up in favour of them are the developers who lobbied for them, and in many ways wrote Government policy. Policies like Croí Cónaithe and the shared equity scheme prop up extortionate house prices; they do not reduce them. Public money would be much better spent increasing the delivery of affordable and genuinely cost-rental homes. An unambitious target of 5,500 affordable and cost-rental homes simply is not good enough. We need an acceleration of delivery. However, according to the Central Bank the 2023 target of 29,000 homes will be missed and it is also predicting that the targets for 2024 and 2025 are likely to be missed as well. This is extremely concerning, not least as the targets are already too low. This was again highlighted in the EU Commission's 2023 country report, which found that Ireland's housing targets needed to be substantially increased.

Another housing policy area in which the Government is found wanting is vacancy and dereliction. According to GeoDirectory, as of July, there were almost 82,000 vacant homes and more than 21,000 derelict properties. In my view, the Minister's vacant homes tax, at a rate of 0.3%, will not help to bring any of those homes back into use.

With this tax rate, the Minister is just pretending to do something of consequence but he is fooling no one. He could not honestly believe that a 0.3% tax rate would change anyone's behaviour. The most devastating consequence of this Government's inaction on housing is the homelessness crisis. There are 12,847 people living in homelessness, including 3,829 children and 181 pensioners, as my colleague said. That is probably the most shameful element of the Minister's tenure in government but he has failed across the board.

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