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

My thanks to the Minister for acknowledging the point about undue segregation. There should be no segregation whatsoever. My point is not simply about the wording, although I acknowledge the Minister is willing to look at that. The issue is also that we have de factosegregation by virtue of the fact that the income thresholds for social housing have not increased for more than ten years. Bit by bit, the people who qualify for social housing are people on ever lower incomes. These are working people - the bus driver, the nurse, the bank clerk and so on - whose incomes used to qualify them for social housing but no longer do. They will continue to be moved into a different category unless we significantly increase the income thresholds.

I do not know how many times I raised this with Eoghan Murphy in the last Government. We were told of a mythical review of the income thresholds. Every few months we would be told it was coming but it never came. To me that was a deliberate policy to cull numbers on the social housing lists. People were literally thrown off the lists. Whenever a person got the slightest pay increase, he or she was thrown off the list. This was a source of great distress for people who had been on those lists often for ten or 15 years. All that time waiting was simply gone. They have been in limbo since then because there was no affordable scheme in reality and no cost rental scheme in reality.

My point is we are now saying that we need a different category for that group of people. We end up with de factosegregation. I believe that is why the drafters of the Bill referred to the word "undue". They knew in fact there will be segregation in the way we are doing things. We are going to have different categories of affordable or social housing delivered to different people based on certain thresholds. I believe we should be looking for ways to genuinely get rid of that segregation by saying that social housing and affordable housing should be available for everyone.

I wish to make one last point. We see this in reality and it is not unfair to call it housing apartheid. I know of developments in my area where the 10% social housing is all segregated into one block of a development. Even different finishings and different quality building materials are used for the social housing parts, which is disgraceful. In the same development a building that may look externally the same has different finishings internally and different features because it is social housing. It is as if they are doing it on the cheap. In most cases such dwellings are segregated from the private ones. It makes something of a lie of the notion of the somewhat patronising term "social mix". If that is what we actually want, if we want a mix of people with different incomes and backgrounds, then it really should be a mix. It should not be segregated into one block.