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

The Minister has not really explained his resistance to what I am trying to do in my amendment No. 47, which is to ensure that affordable housing funded through the LDA and through direct State investment would stay permanently affordable. Why on earth would the Minister not want to support that? I accept Deputy Ó Broin's addition. My amendment proposes that, if sold, it could only be sold back to the local authority. I accept we could amend that if the principle was established that it could be traded with other people, but as affordable housing. There would then be a stock of housing that remains permanently affordable. The Minister has not given an answer as to why he has a difficulty with that.

If he does not do that, then after the first generation of purchasers of affordable housing, the housing on public land will have been turned into unaffordable housing. As soon as market prices kick in after the first purchase, those houses will revert in my area to €450,00 or €500,000, having been built at the affordable level. There is no way to describe the consequence of not accepting this amendment other than marketising public land. Ultimately, we are fuelling the conditions that have given rise to this crisis.

The Minister keeps making references to the Affordable Housing Bill but, as we will discuss in the following grouping, the Bill is littered with references to the market being taken into account and being the reference point for the setting of affordability, rather than being based on people's income.

Neither did the Minister come back on the point I made and Deputy Duncan Smith echoed. Why has the Government not raised the income threshold for more than a decade? Most of the responsibility for that lies with Fine Gael but the Minister is conspicuous in his refusal to answer that question. I think the secret answer that the Minister will not give is that, slowly but surely, the agenda driven by somebody - I am not sure who but I suspect elements in the permanent government - is to turn social housing into housing that will effectively only be available to people on social welfare. That is why we have not moved the thresholds upwards so, year on year, working people who used to be able to apply for social housing for no longer able to do so. Slowly but surely, working people are being excluded from eligibility for social housing. One has to be on the lowest of incomes, barely above social welfare rates currently, to qualify.

If the Minister wants to do something about avoiding segregation in housing, he should address that problem. The way to segregate housing is to make only people on the lowest incomes eligible. Here is a radical idea: why could anybody at all not be allowed to apply for social housing?