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

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 8, line 11, after "of" to insert "public and affordable".

Essentially, what we have done with these first few amendments is to insert "public and affordable" where the current Bill, as proposed by the Government, only refers to "housing". The reason for this is very simple. There is a notion, which has been peddled for a very long time, that if we just increase the supply of housing, the prices will become affordable. This is an ideological notion, to use a term that Deputy Higgins used earlier on. It is not based on reality whatsoever. The clearest example that increasing supply does not lead to reductions in price or produce affordable housing is the Celtic tiger.

During the Celtic tiger we had housing supply at unprecedented levels, with some 70,000 to 90,000 houses a year being built during that period. Did prices go down? Not at all. They went up because the housing was not being built to provide public, affordable or social housing but to make profit. Those who were looking to make profit completely controlled the housing sector and during that same period when we had unprecedented levels of supply in the general sense, albeit profit-driven supply, we also had pretty much the turning off of the tap of direct build social housing on public land, starting with Fianna Fáil and then carrying on through with Fine Gael Governments. It is not an ideological point. It is a statement of fact that increasing supply, no matter how great that supply is - and we had the greatest supply in the history of the State during the Celtic tiger - did zero to deliver public, social and affordable housing. It did exactly the opposite and then it crashed the entire economy.

The whole point about the utilisation of the public land bank is that developing not-for-profit housing to deliver public and affordable housing is the only way to keep prices down, not only to deliver public and affordable housing on public land but also to dampen the entire market. That is the purpose of these amendments. It is to ensure that we do not repeat the disastrous mistakes that have been made in the private housing sector over recent years on the public land bank and to make sure the public land bank is used for what it should be used for. It should be used to serve the interests of the public, specifically those who are on the housing waiting lists or those who cannot even get on those waiting lists because their incomes are higher than the social housing thresholds but whose incomes would not allow them to buy at the grossly inflated house prices that are available in the private market or rent at the grossly inflated rents that exist out there in the private market. The sole purpose and usage of the public land bank should be to do that.

The other important point to make is that we want affordable housing. Insofar as we have affordable purchase housing, we want it to be affordable in perpetuity so that no part of the public land bank will ever be marketised. Even if people have the right to purchase affordable housing on the public land bank, it should be the case that they would have to sell it back to the local authority and that the profit would not be made from affordable purchase housing that was delivered on public land.