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

I am part of the National Homeless & Housing Coalition which is involved in organising the protest next Wednesday which I hope will see a large turnout of people who are fed up with this housing crisis and the way it is affecting them. I was involved in the set-up of that coalition about three years ago. It arose from absolute frustration at the way in which the crisis was continuing to get worse and how nothing the Government did seemed to do anything except make it even worse. It has continued to get worse since that point. I do not wish to speak too much about the past because we have to speak about the future and solve this problem but it does not give me a lot of confidence when the Minister makes statements such as nobody could have predicted in 2011 that this was going to happen. That frustrates the hell out of me and it suggests to me that the Minister and this Government have learned nothing because we did predict it and we said it very openly in the Dáil in 2011 when the Department produced a document explicitly saying that there would no longer be big capital public housing projects. Anybody who doubts that should Google the Department of Local Government and the Environment June 2011 housing policy and they will find it. I remember holding a briefing in Buswells Hotel where I had to try to explain to journalists who did not know anything about this stuff at that stage what the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, was - we did not have HAP then but we had RAS. I tried to explain to them that this statement meant that the Government was formally abandoning the direct construction of council housing in favour of outsourcing it to the private sector through RAS or a new similar scheme.

I will send the Minister the press statement I sent out that week, where we warned that this policy would cause a housing crisis. One did not have to be a prophet to work this out, because even then there were 96,000 families on the housing list. It was obvious that if the local authorities did not build council houses, there would be more demand. Another point made by Members in the Dáil the following year was that the decision to allow NAMA to unload vast amounts of property to vulture funds was going to be a disaster. I really think the Minister should withdraw that statement and recognise that it was a mistake to make a formal decision to stop building council housing. Would he agree in retrospect, even if he did not see it at the time, although some Members warned about it, that it was a mistake for NAMA to flog off all those lands and assets, given that we now see a very significant portion of the people who bought those lands and property assets from NAMA, sitting on land, speculating and flipping land and ratcheting up rents and property prices through their activities? The reason it is important to make this point is that while the Minister now states that we are now going to ramp up the level of direct construction of council housing and so on, the proportion of social housing solutions in the Rebuilding Ireland plan that are dependent on the private sector still remains the overwhelming majority of those targets. Approximately 90,000 out of 137,000 houses in the Rebuilding Ireland plan will be RAS, HAP or houses for leasing. In what sense has the Government broken from the policy that was started in 2011, if that is what its plan is?

Does the Minister have anything to say about the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, IGEES, report from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that is warning that not only will that not deliver secure social housing for people but will deliver very precarious housing from which people can be evicted and will cost the State an absolute fortune as the bill for housing under RAS and HAP to private landlords who we can see are jacking up rents month after month, gets bigger and bigger and becomes a massive hole in the public finances?