Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I thank all our contributors. The main thing I am looking for is hope. I accept that the targets, figures and finances are important and that one has to go through all this detail to deliver social and affordable housing. I have been around a while now and note that nothing has changed about the human reality or the misery of people coming through my door week in, week out, owing to housing crises. In the past few months, it has been getting worse. The cohort I am encountering includes people who are working and who in some cases have been on a social housing list for ten or 15 years and are now getting taken off it. All their time is gone and their earnings are only marginally over the thresholds. The ten or 15 years in which they believed they would eventually get housed are gone but their earnings are such that they have not got a prayer of ever buying in my area, where the average house price is €560,000.

I would like the guests' comments on affordable housing. I do not see how it will deliver anything in my area given the house prices. Even with a shared equity arrangement, with the local authority having 30%, I just do not see how people on the incomes in question will be able to afford it. I encountered a council worker who had been knocked off the list after ten years. When I heard about Enniskerry Road, I rang him up very excitedly and told him to get on to those concerned because there were new cost-rental units there. He rang me back half an hour later and said I must have been joking because the rent was €1,200 per month, which he could not afford on his wage. Another council worker, who was on to me this week, lives in his car. Yet another, who has a family and is working in a Dublin hospital on the front line, is just about to be evicted. He believes he will be living in his car with his family. He has an ill wife and kids. They are told to go to Dublin Place Finder Service. This service cannot find anywhere either within the HAP limits. There is just hopelessness and despair. I am looking for a bit of hope from the delegates present.

In one way, I cannot judge these things. I would like to see the figures on them. We can have projections on the number of units to be delivered in a given year but they do not tell how many people are getting knocked off the list nationally every year. I submitted a question to the Minister recently and was told the Department does not have the answer because it cannot find the information. Could the CCMA delegates provide that answer because the Minister cannot or will not? The figure would be helpful. I would like to know, given the projections for delivery, how many are going to be added to the lists. Do we have a rough estimate of how many people will be added to the lists over the period of the plan? Again, figures do not mean a lot if we cannot judge them against how many more people will be added to the lists.

I would like to ask about income thresholds if anybody, such as a representative of the approved housing bodies, is willing to answer. There is much talk to the effect that we have to move away from segregation and stigma associated with social housing, but to me we are going in the exact opposite direction. Do the delegates agree? While income thresholds have remained at the levels they have been at for the past ten years, the incomes of those who become eligible for social housing are becoming increasingly lower. People who traditionally could get social housing, such as workers in councils or those in construction, banking, postal services and healthcare, are increasingly becoming ineligible. Actually, we are narrowing down the cohort of people who are eligible for social housing and telling them that there will somehow be something else, such as cost rental housing or affordable housing; however, I cannot envisage the scale matching the demand. Maybe the delegates can give me hope on this but I just cannot see it. Maybe they could respond and refer to the cohort for whom, increasingly, there are no avenues. I just do not see where the avenues are.