Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have been listening to all of the presentations in my office. I was at the conference yesterday and found it very interesting. It is clear that, by and large, the supply of social and affordable housing is the big issue and that the private market is not going to deliver it. I am disappointed that nobody has argued that the State should be operating a company and doing what we did back in the 1960s and 1970s when the State was running a company and making it available to the different bodies to build social and affordable housing. There could be an element of building privately also. I cannot see us getting out of this circle unless we get into a recession and things collapse. We are not going to be able to get rid of our major problems with homelessness and housing provision. That was the general sense that was coming across at the conference.

We are spending between €700 million and €800 million between the HAP scheme, the RAS and the rent supplement scheme. The local authorities are sending letters telling people that they have to move onto the HAP from rent supplement. That is increasing the number of homeless people because nobody can get the HAP or their landlords to agree to accept it. I am finding that it has now nearly come to a standstill. We have transferred as many as we can from rent supplement. We are facing a very serious problem which we need to watch. Several people have been to my office in the past few weeks for this reason. We are told that the figure is going to be over €1 billion by 2020. It is scandalous that this money is being spent in this way when we are not investing in social and affordable housing.

I was born in Finglas and came from a council estate. I have always been upset by the general opinion that we have to have social, affordable and private housing and that if we do not, there is something wrong. There are constant remarks about social housing as though people who are looking for it come from a different background from everyone else. I was always very upset by that line and have never bought it and never will. Even at the conference it was quite clear that we were very successful in building social housing. We have models dating back many years. What is wrong with looking back at those models and utilising them? Our biggest problem in building many of the estates, whether in Finglas, Ballymun, Tallaght or wherever else, was that we did not put in place the infrastructure needed such as crèches, shopping malls and transport. In most cases it all came afterwards. I am a great admirer of Brendan Kenny, but I disagree with him in that he is adamant that we will not be putting in place large-scale developments containing a lot of social housing. We have not got many left in Dublin City Council, but in Fingal there are large tracts of land on which we could build a massive amount of social and affordable housing. The biggest amount of such land in the country is probably available in Fingal.

I am a great admirer of Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance, but I think there is doubt in the mind of Dublin City Council that it can deliver on a large scale. I have had this argument with it. There are 38 units coming up in Ballymun and the quality of the housing Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance has delivered is outstanding. However, Mr. Brennan said something that surprised me. He suggested Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance was being confined to Ballymun. I got that impression from what he said and would be very disappointed if that was the case. I know that it is moving into Cork and elsewhere. There are plenty of places across Dublin that could be utilised. Is it down to the shortage of workers and skilled people? I keep hearing that we need to entice people back from Australia and other places because of the shortage of workers. We lost so many in recent years. Is it one of the biggest stumbling blocks? That is really what is coming across to me. Recently, Dublin City Council spent €35 million in buying 90 units with between one and four bedrooms. The four-bedroom units cost €500,000 each. The builder is laughing. Ó Cualann Cohousing Alliance can build houses at less than half that price. Surely we can do better; that is not value for money. I know that we are in a crisis, but it is mind-boggling that we have spent so much in this way.