Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Drudy for his contribution. He is a breath of fresh air. He should be made housing Minister. It would be interesting to see how that would work. We are all in agreement that the manner in which we supply housing is dysfunctional and has failed. There are a few huge elephants in the room, one of which is land-banking and which successive Governments have refused to tax. Land-banking has played a major role in the cost of housing here. There are, however, many other factors. It costs a person less than half as much to buy a house in a city in Europe as it would in a city in Ireland.

The favoured approach of the Government for many years has been not to regulate and to allow things to ramble on. In other words, the philosophy has been dominated by a tendency to leave things to the markets. Professor Drudy raised the issue of the argument made about not interfering with the markets. I saw the letter Kennedy Wilson wrote to the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and Professor Drudy will be interested to hear that when it was getting permission to build 160 apartments at Clancy Barracks, it also wrote to the planning authority and said the site was not suitable for social housing and - surprise, surprise - none will be built there. When the vulture funds are telling us where we should put social housing and where we should not put it, we have obviously got a serious problem. The planning department probably needs to look at itself too. There is a serious lack of regulation and a lack of political will to do things differently and to challenge the power and influence of vested interests, as this is directly linked to the lack of regulation. We do not regulate because we are under the thumb of serious power and influence in this area. How does the professor think we, as a committee, should challenge that?

On the professor's point about the selling of social housing being a brain dead idea, we do not carry out research of the same nature as they do in Britain. The authorities in Britain have examined what happened to the social housing stock that was sold over the past 30 years and they discovered that over 40% of it has ended up in the hands of big landlords. The latter are then renting it to people who are in receipt of rent supplement from the British state in order that they might live in such accommodation. It has been a completely failed policy, yet we have just introduced it again here. It is as if we did not know we had housing problems for the past five years.

What does Professor Drudy think the committee needs to do to successfully challenge the neoliberal thinking that has been such a cancer in how we provide housing?