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

I will refer in that case to a well-known private developer, one of the people who helped with the Celtic tiger crash, who is now gaining control of a significant portion of the Cherrywood development in exchange for an office building that will generate revenue for the council when what we need is housing. It is unbelievable that the Minister would allow this to happen. This is a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil council. We opposed the setting up of that corporate subsidiary as we believed the democratically elected representatives of the council should make decisions about these matters. However, this corporate subsidiary, which is dominated by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, has been allowed to hand over what is known as TC3 to a private property developer. This shocking decision will not deliver any of the desperately needed affordable housing.

The Minister stated that the standards and quality of social housing that is being delivered must be maintained. Allow me to give him a newsflash on what is actually happening because it drives a coach and horses through his claims about social mix and the integration of people from different income streams. Cualanor-Honeypark, one of the biggest developments, was in the hands of the National Asset Management Agency but is now back in the hands of private developers. We have just discovered, on foot of representations from residents, that all of the houses built for social housing under Part V were built to lower specifications than the private equivalent in the same development. That is housing apartheid. The residents are now suffering the consequences with noise pollution and so on between units. At every level, the social houses were built to a lower specification. The attitude taken was that these were council tenants who could, therefore, be given lower quality housing.

How does that tally with the Minister's claimed aspiration for a social mix and placing people from different income brackets in together?

Those people who cannot even get on a housing list because their incomes are just above the threshold are completely in no man's land, in particular in areas like mine. I have repeatedly asked the Minister when he is going to raise the income thresholds for people who have been waiting ten or 12 years and are being whacked off the list because they get a job or a pay rise. They are trying to do well. They are not dependent on social welfare as some people might have to be. They are working and they then lose their ten or 15 years on the housing list. This is happening every week. I have asked the Minister again and again to do something about this but we are told it is being looked at and that there is a review. We are told there is this, that and the other. A whole generation of people who are working are in no man's land. There is nothing for them. There is no affordable housing and they cannot get on the council housing lists. Nothing is happening. What is the Minister going to do about it?