Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I welcome the fact that the Dáil is at long last having a formal debate on the important issue of housing. Since the publication in April 2004 of the report of the all-party committee on building land, and more particularly since the publication a year ago of the National Economic and Social Council report, Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy, I have, on behalf of the Labour Party, sought a debate in the House on the unmet housing needs of tens of thousands of people. It is a measure of the Government's disinterest in housing and its indifference to people in poor circumstances who cannot afford today's high house prices that this debate has been delayed for so long.

In November 2004 the NESC published a major report, Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy. It urged the Government, the social partners and others involved in housing to take action along three inter-related lines of policy: the provision of social and affordable housing, the need for integrated sustainable neighbourhoods, and active land use management. The NESC described what needed to be done as, "a major national challenge which bears comparison with other great challenges that Ireland has faced and met in the past half century". In other words, the NESC put today's related housing, planning and neighbourhood problems on a par with the economic crisis which faced Ireland at the end of the 1950s, and it suggested that the priority for policy and the level of effort required to resolve these problems are on the same level as the efforts which eventually and successfully addressed the country's past economic, employment and emigration difficulties.

This paints an entirely different picture of the housing challenge facing this country than the complacent, self-congratulatory tone of the Minister's speech.

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