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

Between 70% and 80% of working people cannot afford the average house price on their incomes. That is a damning indictment of the Government's failure to solve society's most basic need, namely, to provide an affordable roof over someone's head, particularly for those who would expect that the fact they work hard and earn a living would give them an income sufficient to buy a home. The vast majority are not in a position to do so because successive Governments have messed up the housing sector badly. Since 2011, Governments have compounded that problem significantly. There are many elements to the outrageous scandal, which will go down in the history books as the greatest mistake any Irish Government ever made, of selling off all of NAMA's properties to developers who are now building shockingly overpriced housing, including at excessive rents, speculating and hoarding land to drive up prices.

Given the abysmal failure to do the most basic thing, there are two ways to address this historic mistake and the crisis it has produced. The Government can try to find ways to give more public money to people to pay unaffordable and extortionate house prices, which is what this scheme does, benefiting only the people who are profiting from the dysfunctional housing sector. Alternatively, it can try to drive down the price of housing to affordable levels. The measure in the Bill is moving in the opposite direction from what is self-evidently what we must do, namely, driving down the cost of housing.

I am convinced that this and the previous Governments have failed to deliver a clear definition of "affordable housing" and messed around with land development agencies and so on because of a fear that the State delivering affordable housing - in other words, housing that is not based on market prices but simply on making it affordable - would mess up the private developers. That is essentially why we have not developed affordable housing in places like Shanganagh and why there is a reluctance to define affordability or roll out affordable housing on scale. If the State built housing at cost and set prices at levels that were affordable for the average worker, it would effectively mean that private developers could not make a profit out of housing anymore because there would be housing at below the market price at which they could make a profit.

In this sense, the Government continues to dance to the tune of the private developers, who are telling us straight that they cannot deliver housing at a price that is affordable. In order for them to be able to deliver housing at all, they have to charge high prices to give themselves their profit margins and cover site costs, marketing and so on. All of this has been well broken down by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland and so on. Developers cannot deliver housing at anything like affordable levels. The State can and should, given that it can build on its own land on a not-for-profit basis. However, the State is reluctant to do so because it would mess up the private developers.

Given that situation, we end up coming up with hare-brained schemes like this which do nothing to deal with the fundamental problem that we face. I refer to a massive shortage of affordable housing and a market which is dysfunctional and incapable of delivering to the vast majority of working people in this country. It is a retrograde scheme, it has done nothing to address the fundamentals of the housing crisis and it should be abandoned in favour of measures that are about actually delivering affordable housing.