Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the organisations who have attended. I have some specific questions about some of the issues raised, but I want to start with the generality of what is common to many of the presentations.

Nothing enrages me more than the issues that have been raised. I am sick of the situation, because it is a most inexcusable and inexplicable crisis. Whatever else a government of this country could say, the one thing we could do is put roofs over people's heads. We have properties and we have the workers who could build properties where needed. It is time we started to scream loudly about this. I do not believe the media has fully grasped how central this issue is to everything. Housing is at the heart of the global crisis. The wrong approach to housing was taken, with sub-prime markets and property developers building houses for profit rather than for people, crashing the Irish and the global economy, with devastating economic, social and human consequences. After all of that, the Government still has not got the message that if we do not put roofs over people's heads and do not protect children, we can forget about everything else. This would be so achievable. As I said to Mr. Mike Allen of Focus Ireland yesterday, there are many finer details to this. However, the bottom line is that the Government almost fully privatised housing in the past ten to 15 years, which has been a disaster. We must reverse this completely.

Rents are high and are out of people's control so that they cannot manage to source private rented accommodation, but a large stock of social housing would work towards keeping rents down. Such a stock would also prevent a property bubble. Unemployed building workers, one of the hardest hit groups in society and whose families are suffering the consequences, could be put back to work building social housing. We could also save the State revenue by building social housing, so that we do not spend €500 million a year subsidising private landlords, many of whom are increasingly slum landlords. The ones who can get higher rents do not want to be part of the rent allowance schemes and what is left available for those who need to rent is the rubbish. People are being forced to rent the rubbish and the situation is getting worse.

It is extraordinary that in response to all of this, the Government's plan is, essentially, to make the rent allowance scheme permanent through its long-term leasing schemes. Not only will such schemes not provide decent social housing and mean more subsidies for private developers, NAMA and the banks, they will not work because the banks and the landlords do not want to be part of those schemes. Two or three years ago, some of them thought they wanted to go into them, but now that rents are increasing in Dublin, they want to get out of them. Half of the people who come to my clinic are people whose landlords are manufacturing reasons to evict them, either by increasing the rent or some other means. The rent cap reductions have made the situation worse. The current position is a time-bomb or social volcano.

My question for the panel is, should we not get back to the housing action campaigns of the 1960s and early 1970s and start screaming about this situation? We should mobilise the 100,000 people on the housing list, the homeless and so on to put this issue in the Government's face, so to speak, in a way that it cannot ignore it. What Deputy Ó Ríordáin said is true. This will be an issue for a day, if the media bothers covering this discussion, but in the next few days it will be off the agenda. It will be lost with the discussion on fiscal advisory councils, macroeconomic projections, IBEC, industrialists and so on. However, if we solved this issue, we would go 70% or 80% of the way towards solving the problem.

Investment programmes were mentioned. Should we not be more specific and ambitious? Should we not say the Government should spend between €500 million and €1 billion a year for the next five years to build 40,000 or 50,000 social housing units? If it did that, it would get its money back. We could easily work out a model to repay the money, based on how much is going out in rent supplement and various leasing arrangements every year, a model even the European Investment Bank could understand. Should we not group together and present a model that would create jobs, put people in houses and save the State money?