Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

The cards are in the Minister's hands. It is a fact that there are more holiday homes being built than social and affordable homes. It is a fact that in times of poverty, the State, through its local authorities, built thousands of homes for people on lower incomes. It is a fact that there is no control on rental levels in the private sector. It is a fact that half the landlords in this State are not registered, despite the trumpeting that the recent legislation would tidy up that sector and get rid of the cowboys. It is a fact that a report the size of a telephone directory was delivered by the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution which dealt with property rights. The Minister has failed to implement any aspects of that report in a meaningful way. It is gathering dust. It is a fact that tens of millions of euro are being spent on rent supplement that would be much better spent on providing homes. It is a fact that the shared ownership scheme is not working in urban areas such as Dún Laoghaire. It is also a fact that the quality of new homes is lagging behind the rest of Europe at this stage. We are not meeting the thermal performance standards. We are failing to update our building regulations to meet the kind of standards that have been in place since last year in the UK, where condensing boilers are mandatory. One would be hard pushed to find such a boiler in Ireland.

In essence, the Minister is not addressing the fundamental problems of housing, other than welcoming the developers into the tent. There are gated communities for the rich, while there are unscrupulous landlords for the poor. It adds up to a waiting time of decades for people on the housing list. We can go in a clear direction on housing and the NESC report indicated many aspects of that. If the Green Party was in Government, we would recoup a fair share that is added to urban and rural land which is zoned for development. We would ensure that this value is returned to the community. We would ring-fence this revenue for the development of sustainable settlements. We would begin to shift the tax burden from labour to smart taxes on the site value of land, including residential investment property and second homes. We would commit to ensuring that the State provided tens of thousands of social housing units per year. We would meet the targets in the national development plan.

There is a great amount to be done in the area of housing. In the richest of times, we are failing to honour our obligations to the poorest in society.

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