Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government's political strategy with regard to the housing crisis consists of two things that I believe are not true, the first of which is that we have got this under control and things are getting better. By any metric, that is not true. House prices are increasing. They are beyond the reach of the vast majority of people who, as far as they are concerned, are doing everything they can and doing everything right. They are bettering themselves and getting training and an education to get jobs, but a mortgage is just out of reach for them. The rental crisis gets worse and worse and as Deputy Ó Broin has pointed out, the scandal regarding homelessness and particularly children in homelessness has grown out of all proportion. Sometimes this House has actually lost sight of how bad the situation is.

The last two housing cases I dealt with today involved a young father sleeping in his car most nights and a man in his 60s who is facing eviction. These form the daily basis of what we are dealing with at the minute. House prices are increasing and homelessness is increasing and all the targets are being met. However, the other thing the Government tries to insist upon that I believe is not true is to suggest that the Opposition has no substance. That disregards the mountains of proposals that have been produced by Deputy Ó Broin. I would make the point that many of the proposals the Government has belatedly adopted started life on this side of the House, such as an eviction ban, a tax credit for renters albeit that the half-baked version the Minister produced is not adequate, cost rental and cost-purchase housing and tenantsin situschemes. These are all proposals that Sinn Féin and Deputy Ó Broin came up with a long time before the Government proposed them. If the Government had spent less time resisting the proposals and saying they were not possible or workable when they came from this side of the House, we might be an awful lot further on. An awful lot of those things were introduced two or three years, half-baked and half-paced, after they should have been brought in. I call on the Government to listen now to the proposals that are coming forward, which are workable proposals that can finally resolve the housing crisis, rather than continue along the failing path that the Minister and the Government are pursuing.

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