Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I acknowledge that the agenda today is in some respects a response to a ministerial request to consider this particular aspect of the commission report. Considering the scale of the housing crisis and the excellent work done by the commission in all its collective wisdom, I wonder what the people on the housing list who are homeless would think about this debate. With the greatest of respect to everybody advocating constitutional change, it will not build one house and will not get shelter for someone who is homeless tonight on the streets of Cork or Dublin.

It will not build one house. It will not get shelter tonight for somebody who is homeless on the streets of Cork or Dublin. It is reflective of skewed priorities that we are not considering taxation, zoned land and a myriad of other issues that have an immediate and detrimental impact on the capacity to deliver more housing and that we are here discussing the, to some degree, academic issue and certainly the political issue of constitutional change. My experience over many years on such matters is that we should make haste really slowly on constitutional change. Once bitten twice shy but having been twice bitten and three times bitten including recently, we should be inclined to think. If constitutional change has a contribution to play, it is certainly the cherry on the cake. It is certainly not the cake or the ingredients that would bring about a solution to the housing crisis.

All the political parties represented in the committee membership, Sinn Féin, Social Democrats, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Green Party and whatever, may have significant differences on how we might fix the housing crisis. All of us want the same objective to increase supply and bring supply and demand into some degree of equilibrium. The danger is that the political capital that is there will be extinguished in this debate, which in my view contributes little or nothing to the practical physical challenge that we face. It is in that context that I have a few questions.

I certainly do not hold the Michael Gove view that we are fed up with experts - if people recall the comment he made in the context of the Brexit negotiations in the United Kingdom. When considering constitutional change, we need experts and I certainly would not be one. One of the phrases used in the proposed amendment is the familiar legal phrase, "as far as practicable". It was a line that was used back in the eighth amendment and used in many other legislative and constitutional provisions. How is it possible for someone to vindicate a justiciable right to housing when supply and demand are not in equilibrium? What does that justiciable right look like after going through the courts? I have had much engagement, as all of us have had, with constituents who have housing problems, including homelessness, being on a housing waiting list, etc. What does that vindicated right look like if not vindicated at the expense of somebody else who is waiting for a house?

The State will write a cheque to someone who has access to the courts but not everybody has. It seems to me that this would perpetuate an inequality rather than address a social problem which we all, in different ways, are anxious to resolve. The Constitution should be the last port of call and in some respects it should be at the Minister's and the Department's discretion. I am sure the mandarins in the Custom House are looking in at this believing we have gone down a rabbit hole now and will not be back for quite a while. What we should be doing is bringing in representatives from the Housing Commission. I appreciate that we have some commission members here today and there are others who could not be here. We should be bringing them in to discuss the substantive issue.

I have some questions for Dr. Casey who might be the leading legal expert in the room. What does a justiciable housing action look like? When supply and demand are out of kilter, how would that in any way add to the national good by addressing housing problems generally?