Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being absent initially. I sprinted over in record time to be told that the time had elapsed for my question. It was all to no avail. I thank our guests for coming before us. I have read their report, which is interesting reading and focuses on the issues that need to be focused on now. I wish to raise briefly two or three matters.

The points about lifelong learning and education that Social Justice Ireland makes are all well made. We are coming to the point in our economic development at which we expect to be able to do something about these issues, as opposed to the past eight or nine years when we could do nothing. It is against this backdrop that we need to identify the measures to be taken now and how best to do so. I do not have a magic formula for the funding of education costs in the future. I do not know what they will be. As taxation is increased, the balance of the scales is immediately tilted and a cost is placed on jobs, so the equilibrium must be found, whatever it is. Everyone has their own idea about this. We would all like to divest responsibility and pressure from the areas that affect ourselves but, of course, that does not work either.

Lack of housing is a huge contributor to poverty and dependency on a system that is incapable of delivering. Senator Craughwell made reference in the previous debate to people, for instance, living in private rented accommodation and paying the same as people who have mortgages. That is if they are at work - if they can afford to work. If they can afford to remain in work, the costs associated with being in work are virtually three quarters of their income after their cost of living expenses. That does not work. It is economically not possible. This affects the young generation mostly.

The first step is local authority housing. There were several means of securing a local authority house in years gone by. We had a local authority loans system. When local authorities eased their way out of granting loans and handed their responsibility over to banks and lending institutions, they started to think of themselves as banks. They are not banks; they are housing authorities. They have at their disposal two means of providing houses: first, under the capital programme and, second, by providing loans to people on an income-selected basis, which has a reasonable threshold.

In my constituency, during that period, we were delivering roughly 1,000 houses per annum. That was an incredible amount of housing when one considers that no local authority goes anywhere near that at present despite the fact that we have a much bigger population now. We had 1.3 million people employed at the best of times at that time and we now have 2 million people employed. The biggest chasm I see that must be surmounted is to reach a point at which we can deliver to those young families houses they can afford to live in while having enough to live on.

There are two points there, one of which is the cost of the mortgage. We must also recognise that the only other place for them to go is to become unemployed because if they cannot pay the rent, there is no place to go. The voluntary housing agencies - and this is an old hobby horse of mine, as everyone in the Dáil knows by now - did not deliver the goods. They were supposed to replace the local authorities and they did not, but they are very good at dealing with special housing situations. They are experts in that area and do it extremely well, and no one can deny that. However, they were given the whole weight of the housing requirement of the country, which was grossly unfair and wrong.

We are now achieving a continued fall in unemployment figures. That means that more people are being employed, which is good. However, if, for instance, they cannot afford to remain employed for the reason I have just stated, the whole thing becomes counterproductive and we go back to where we were. There is a social welfare system in place which is there for a purpose. It is the safety net for people in that particular pocket, where they are out of employment, do not have prospects in the reasonable future and need help.

The very last point I wish to make is that there is another group of people who may, psychologically, for various reasons, have been out of work for some considerable time. They may have a disability and may have been in work previously - productive work, good work - but may find their confidence dented, have difficulty getting back into the workforce and feel threatened by the present state of the workforce.

I congratulate the witnesses on what they have done, the issues they have identified and the way they have highlighted them.