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

We want the housing strategy to be done by the members. That is what the amendment proposes. The housing strategy is critically important and we want to see local authorities take a much more proactive role in delivering housing, especially social and affordable housing and developing a strategy to do so. We want the members and not only the planning authority to be the ones who discuss and develop the strategy.

The reason is obvious to me. It is that our local authorities are not doing enough to deliver the social and affordable housing we need. As an indication of that I will use a current example from my local authority. The targets set out in Housing for All to deliver social and affordable housing - I raised this in the Dáil - which I acknowledge are an improvement on the virtually zero social and affordable housing that was delivered for approximately ten years after the crash and that has left us with this legacy, and while those targets are significant increases from that baseline of virtually nothing, those targets are such that, for the information of the Minister, even if Dún Laoghaire hits all its targets for Housing for All, and I suspect this may be repeated elsewhere, we will still have more people on the housing list at the end of Housing for All than we did when those targets were set. That is pretty damning. The figures for how much affordable housing will be delivered in Dún Laoghaire were published in the past day or two and it is negligible. I think it was about 90 affordable houses in the next two or three years and around 150 cost-rental properties. It is better than nothing but it is a hell of a lot less than is needed when average house prices in the area are now well in excess of €600,000 and houses in Cherrywood, which is the biggest residential development in the country - virtually a new town or small city - are on the market now for €500,000 at the very lowest but people are more likely to be looking at €600,000 or €700,000 for what is being sold there. Bear in mind that at one point all that site was in the hands of NAMA, that is, the State. It was sold, probably at an enormous discount, to Hynes, a wealth asset management company. Mel Reynolds told me at one point that he reckoned that Hynes had already made a profit on the Cherrywood site before a single house had been completed because it was flipping the stuff. Now, we see the consequences of that with houses being sold for €500,000, €600,000 and €700,000 and for modest rents of €2,500 to €3,000. That is on a site that was in public ownership and into which a lot of public money has gone in the form of the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, and so on. By the way, again for the information of the Minister, we still do not know what we are getting in the affordable housing in Cherrywood, including how much it will cost and how much of it we will get.

I remember doing the strategic development zone, SDZ, for Cherrywood. At the time, before there was a publicly acknowledged housing crisis, I said the SDZ should take into account what was needed in social and affordable housing and I was told it was not relevant to an SDZ and was not a planning matter. It is obvious now it is and was a planning matter and councillors should have had a say and should have been allowed to have had input into what went up there. The Cherrywood site on its own could probably have solved most of the housing crisis for south Dublin. Instead, it is probably contributing to making the housing crisis worse because of the extortionate cost of much of the housing there.

These are all the reasons. These are the things elected representatives would know and understand and they should be the ones who put together a strategy for delivering housing that will meet the needs of people in any given area. That is the rationale behind this amendment.

I do not need to speak about the rest of the amendments, do I?