Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

This crisis has arisen because of the rate of increase in house prices and the low output of social housing. Those are the twin causes so, therefore, it is part of the same problem. The output of public authority houses is now lower than in the mid-1970s. The Minister neutered Part V and, as a result, we now have approximately 4% of achievable affordable houses under that scheme. Under the savage 16 cuts made, the Government rowed back on many of the back-to-work measures to facilitate people entering the workforce. When the Taoiseach talks about the disregard, it is virtually meaningless in the context of a minimum wage which provides a basic subsistence rate per hour.

That €1.6 billion to landlords would have built 6,000 or 7,000 local authority houses. What we have had under Fianna Fáil is landlords benefitting from this pot of gold while the Taoiseach tells people they can live on sites. These 60,000 people cannot live on the sites which have been assembled over the past three or four years. They thought they were getting houses and not sites.

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