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

We should abandon PPPs on public property. It is obvious that this approach takes longer because, rather than a council doing it itself or getting a contractor in to do it, public private partnership involves having to go through a tendering process, etc. That is why we are getting delays. We should stop. Another reason we get messes is because developers want to make money from PPPs. They do not enter into PPPs unless they are going to make money. That slows things down. I am tetchy and I do not appreciate the politicking.

I will explain the record of the Shanganagh site since 2002, when it was given to the local authority. Along with my People before Profit colleagues, I have been agitating since that time for the development of the site, on which 530 council houses could be built. In July of this year, for the umpteenth time we proposed a motion calling for the entire site to be developed for public and affordable housing. Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, the Labour Party and, tragically, Sinn Féin, voted against that motion. They were very embarrassed about that decision over the summer. Lo and behold, all of them, without engaging in any discussion with us, popped up with a plan in September to have 40% of the site developed for social housing, with the other 60% of it being developed for forms of affordable housing which will end up back in the private market. I do not accept that 60% of a public site should end up back on the private market in five or ten years. I will explain why.

I am not just talking about people I know through politics. I am personally acquainted with a woman who is living with her eight children in an hotel. This week, the family is being pushed into its third HAP tenancy. I could tell similar stories about any week. I ask the Minister to imagine what it is like to be moved in and out from an hotel to a hostel with eight kids. This woman, who is crying every day, is being told to go and find a HAP tenancy that does not exist because she will not get a council house for many years. Another friend of mine, who has been in a car for eight weeks, is trying to prove to the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection that he is living in the car. This is what is going on. If I am tetchy about this issue, and if I resent politics being played with it, it is for the reasons I have given.

It is not good enough that we are getting just 40% of a public site. It is not good enough that we are getting just 10% in Cherrywood, or just 1% in the case of the local infrastructure housing activation funding. When homeless people who are now joining the housing list ask me when I think they will get a council house, I have to tell them they are looking at ten or 15 years on the current figures. At the current rate of delivery, that is what we are looking at, even with the ramped-up plans. The construction of 1,000 houses on these sites over the next three or four years will not even keep pace with the current list, which is at 5,700. The person at the end of that list will be waiting 18 years. I am not exaggerating when I say there are people who have been on the list for 18 years. What solution is the Minister proposing? I suggest that there should be more public housing on public land. The Minister needs to get more off the private developers in sites like Cherrywood than the miserable 10%, or 1% in the case of the local infrastructure housing activation fund.