Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

A number of people were suggested for this session on financing a house, in particular. More property interests have testified before the committee than independent witnesses we had suggested. I acknowledge Dr. Lyons works for daft.ieand he made that clear. It would have been good to have had balance in the contributions. Representatives of landlords, chartered surveyors and the CIF have appeared but other groups we suggested such as Construction Workers Alliance Ireland and Dublin Tenants Association have not been invited.

Dr. Lyons has proposed getting rid of Part V and the rent supplement and replacing them with a single housing subsidy. One third of the population who need assistance to afford a home would get this subsidy. I will go into the repercussions of that later but would it not be cheaper to build council houses? It is extremely expensive to provide a subsidy on this scale. Dr. Lyons mentioned a figure of €600. The State has paid billions of euro to private landlords over the past number of years in rent supplement. The advantage of the subsidy is people would acquire a permanent asset rather than having the State subsidise private landlords. This would also give security of tenure to families.

I have a case of a family in homeless accommodation who have been allocated a house in Swords but their children go to school in Ongar. They have to consider switching the children to another school or driving between Swords and Ongar each day. Dr. Lyons will be aware how important school is in the life of a child. His proposal means there will not be permanent security for people in a house in a community. They will just get this subsidy.

If one compares paying differential rent to a council with Dr. Lyons's proposal, his proposal will be cheaper for people. I am all for reducing costs.

Dr. Lyons mentioned that ghettoes are being created by public and council housing. It is something that features in the minds of a lot of people and it has become evident there is a lot of stigma attached to social housing. Social housing is probably not a good term because it suggests that people have serious social problems. It is something that will have to be addressed because there is opposition to council housing now because of these things. Another option, which existed in the past, is that there would be a more diverse range of incomes in public and local authority housing. This could be achieved by raising the qualifying income for eligibility for council or social housing and having more diversity of incomes in the council estates by having more affordable mortgages or differential rents to the council, which was the case for many decades. Dr. Lyons seems to be arguing that the other advantage of the income-based subsidy is that it would not matter whether the house was publicly or privately built. From all the evidence we have heard, the private rented sector is where the problem is located. People are experiencing insecurity and the trauma of trying to pay rents. People are becoming homeless right now because there is so little security for people to protect them from eviction. I have not heard anything put forward by Dr. Lyons that would get rid of those problems. His solution seems to be more private housing because he is arguing that the subsidy would go to approved housing bodies-----