Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. When I read this initially I was taken aback in terms of the social policy, but I am mindful that we have not been given the full report and that we have only some of the recommendations. I will hold fire for that reason. When I read that there should be a removal of the maximum rent I thought of the situation in Fingal a few years ago where the manager lifted the cap and many people faced huge rent rises. The witnesses are not advocating the removal of the differential rent scheme, but that situation was something similar. The compulsory deduction of council housing rents from social welfare payments was also mentioned. That does not apply to people in the private rental market. When I read the recommendations I remembered the Taoiseach, speaking during questions on promised legislation, saying that Solidarity stand for people who pay for everything being in one estate. He stopped himself and did not go on to say it, but the obvious implication was that people pay for nothing in the other estate.

The term "social housing" has been stigmatised. When I was growing up the term did not exist; I lived in a council house. Nobody called it social housing. It tags people as social welfare cases. Many of the recommendations listed in the presentation concern making tenants pay more and making them pay for the cost of council housing. The reality is that the Government cannot pay the cost of public housing, in the same way it cannot pay the cost of public transport. Certain things need to be subsidised. However, there has been a dramatic change in the type of person living in council housing. In the 1970s people living in council housing were workers, and then, after the neo-liberal type policy of providing a surrender grant of IR£5,000, council estates were turned into ghettos overnight for lower income people. The rents are lower. As an alternative to the plans of the witnesses, the council suggests that public housing could be built in a way that is also accessible to people on higher incomes who cannot buy houses in the private market, which is most people and most workers in the country. Perhaps the witnesses concur with that approach in the full report. In that way higher rents would accrue to the council. I am not saying that the witnesses are advocating such an approach, but some of the recommendations seemed to be in that vein.

The idea of calling for public investment in maintenance was mentioned. There was a dramatic cut, of some 92% or 94%, in social housing or council housing provision, which means that the council just does not have the money to do the things that have to be done. Council tenants get a really bad rap, and I feel the need to defend them. In the estate I live in - a mixed estate - some council tenants are paying a management fee of €10 a week to a management company. That fee has been reduced recently. I want to counter the notion that people do not pay for things. Rent and mortgage payments should not eat up the entirety of people's and make their lives miserable. The reality is that council housing saved hundreds of thousands of families from dire poverty. It took people out of the tenements, and I shudder to think what would have happened to my family if we did not get a council house. That fact is not widely broadcast anymore, and it should be. I know that the recommendations were perhaps not the entirety of the views of the witnesses, but I baulked at some of them.