Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am here in place of Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan and I must also attend the Chamber for statements on EU migration and the refugee crisis so I will not repeat points that have already been made here. The discussion has been wide ranging and the Minister has made the point, correctly, that our housing market is a result of political and social choices. That is really, in essence, the project of this committee; to make political and social choices going forward. Having heard what has been said so far, my concern is that repeating the same mistakes will not give a different outcome. From the Minister's comments today, and from much of the documentation I have seen from the Department, it appears that mistakes are being repeated.

The Minister has said that the heart of the matter lies with what the State's role is in housing provision. That is the point. He is correct in saying that the social housing list is not the numbers that are bandied around. There have always been people on the social housing list who, ultimately, may not have wanted a social housing house. They may have been on the list in order to access rent allowance. We all know this, many of us being from a local authority background. However, this is not the issue. Is the social housing crisis worse now than it was a number of years ago when those problems existed? The answer has to be that it is worse. When I was a councillor there were never situations where people got letters telling them their average wait to be accommodated would be ten or 12 years. Does the Minister accept this or does he think we do not have a problem?

The figure of 13,000 given by the Minister - this gets to the heart of the matter - which he says were the number of social housing units provided, is not correct. Some 8,000 of those units were either rent supplement arrangements reclassified as HAP or they were RAS accommodations which were coming on board anyway. These were not new units. If we keep doing that - the Minister said there is no problem with investment - and if one is investing in the private sector to deliver all the time, we will have the same problems. With regard to the pie, I would like to hear the Minister's comments on taking money from other areas. Does he acknowledge that if one accepts the size of the pie, then we are not going to get a solution since the amounts of money needed are quite vast?

I would like the Minister to comment on some direct initiatives because the State has to have a more direct role. For example, a lot of housing stock is underutilised. There are those who want to downsize and so on. Dublin City Council, for example, has a list of approximately 500 people who want to downsize to older people units and single dwellings but they cannot because the unit for older people is not there and because of the one-bed provision and so on. We have stock out there. What of the idea of the State directly encouraging initiatives for people to give up that stock in the way people used to sell their dwellings and give one third to the council in return for being re-accommodated? What of the €100 sites that used to be there? There are a lot of pocket sites held by local authorities. Three or four people could get together and build a house for themselves. This was the old way of doing affordable housing. Unless we tilt the direction back to more State provision, would the Minister not agree that there will not be a way forward on this?

I have two quick questions. The Minister correctly posed the question as to how we make land available. We had the answer to that question in the Kenny report. Has it been looked at really? There was a huge problem in the lifetime of the last Government with the advice of the last Attorney General - I suppose she is still the Attorney General - on constitutional issues. Constitutional issues are only decided by the Legislature and the courts. We need to either test these in the courts or change the Constitution. The Minister and his Government were quite willing to change them on really ridiculous things such as the age of the President. This is more important.