Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We can come up with all sorts of reasons why house prices are so high in this country but I do not see any real attempt to drive them down. This is an island off the west coast of Europe and there is a need to bring in materials and all the rest so, in terms of a comparison, I will look at average house prices on the island. In Dublin, the average house price is €436,000. Nationally, it is €330,000. Why is it €260,000 in Belfast, €202,000 in Derry and €200,000 in Northern Ireland as a whole? It is very difficult to figure out why it is so much more expensive in one part of the island compared with another part of it. Those are up-to-date figures.

The Minister referred to affordability. One cannot say it is affordable if it is more than 35% of the gross income of a household because that is the determinant factor in terms of what is sustainable. People want to buy, mainly because it gives them security of tenure, but there is certainly nothing like the ambition that is needed in respect of affordable rental.

I am the Social Democrats spokesperson on justice. We have been reading reports on adverse childhood experiences and the associated impact on education and health outcomes, but also on things like anti-social behaviour, for example. Very often, such behaviour is underpinned by trauma. Homelessness is one such adverse childhood experience. Anyone who thinks that if a child is homeless for six months or a year, that will be the cost is not reading the academic documents on what is going to happen. The Taoiseach made the point on numerous occasions that it is not the same families who are homeless all the time but, rather, it keeps rotating. In fact, that makes it worse because there are even more children who will have that experience. We need to make children the number one priority in the context of homelessness. I never thought we would be in this House talking about homeless children. We always understood there was an issue, very often to do with addiction and a whole lot of things like that, and that was the reason people ended up in homelessness. People are now becoming homeless because they cannot pay the rent. They do not have security of tenure and there is no eviction ban even when people pay their rent. Ireland is abnormal in that regard.

A very big price will be paid by those children and by this society by virtue of the fact we are not dealing with this. It has a longer-term consequence.

On the Land Development Agency, we actually proposed a land development agency back in 2016. The remit of that agency was not the one we see now. It would have been about project management, master planning, economies of scale to drive down prices, and de-risk for smaller builders as they are the ones who very often cannot raise the funds to build. We put that proposal forward because even at that point in 2016 we were considering the cost of housing. When we consider how much house prices have gone up since then, if we had had that policy implemented at that stage I wonder what difference it would have made. I am convinced it would have made a substantial difference because we would have had those economies of scale.

A person contacted me today. He is part of a couple where both are working. They have two children. He is tearing his hair out because the family is facing eviction as the landlord wants to sell. I looked on the digital media platforms to see what is available: a three-bedroom house is €2,200; a three-bedroom house in another area is €2,500; and a two-bedroom apartment is €1,700. This family does not qualify to go on the housing list but they are just a bit above the cut-off point. They really have no hope. There is very little the Minister can give to those people in solutions.

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