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

On the housing aspect, we all agree that it is an absolute priority to address the housing crisis. What is the Central Bank's view about our ability to do that? Even pre-Ukraine, we were reaching the point where rents are completely unaffordable for most people, house prices are completely unaffordable, and the cost of construction has reached a point where the market at least is not really capable of doing any better than that. It could not actually bring the prices below or to the level where the majority of people could afford them. Now we are seeing another inflation crisis on top of that, which means that the cost of building materials and so on is going up further. Is it not the case that we are absolutely goosed in our ability to do the most basic thing, the thing that the Central Bank representatives have certainly identified, and on which I and most people would concur, as an absolute priority? We are completely goosed in our ability to deliver on this. Even if we did have significant increases in labour from anywhere in the world, as alluded to by the Chairman, it does not really deal with the bottleneck that we had reached. I have a very definite view of this, which is the unthinkable. We are looking at catastrophic market failure.

It is absolute system failure. The market just cannot deliver any more and we must start thinking about the unthinkable, which means nationalising whole sections and effectively doing war economy stuff in order to be able to deliver the most basic things. Arguably, we are reaching similar points with energy and other key services and goods we need to simply sustain our society at all. What we are facing with inflation and all that is simply a market not being able to deliver and we must consider going beyond the market if we are to meet those basic needs and demands. I do not expect the officials to agree with my ideology but do they think we are at an existential kind of crossroads here, in that all the orthodoxies, rules and economic consensus have come up against a brick wall and we must think of radical measures outside the box if we are going to address these basic things?