Joanna Tuffy (Dublin Mid West, Labour)

I wish to focus on the general issues related to the Government's housing policy during the past ten years. We debated this issue a number of times in this House and it was the subject of a number of debates when I was a Member of the Seanad. The Minister at the time, Deputy Noel Ahern, used to come in and give statistics such as the fact that there were 50,000 completions this year and 60,000 the following year and so on. He was giving the figures for private housing in reply to motions on the need for more social and affordable housing. The Government has emphasised meeting people's housing needs through the private market and that has led to this unsustainable situation. The price rises and unaffordability of houses could not go on forever. There has been a nod by the Government to a policy of providing a certain amount of affordable housing. The Government brought in that policy but never implemented it. A minimal amount of affordable housing was delivered over the years. For all that time the core should have been a sustained delivery of council housing every year but that never happened. When I was on a council we used to complain that it was not committing itself to enough social housing, but it never delivered even what it promised. That is not all the council's fault because there was a pattern of the Government's committing so much but not giving the councils the capacity to deliver the number of council houses for which it promised money.

Today I got a printout of the Central Statistics Office's figures for new dwellings completed since 1992. For the bulk of that time, until 1998, approximately 10% of housing delivered was social housing. In 2006, which is the latest year for which figures are available on the CSO's website, 5% of housing was social housing. I read an article by Fr. Peter McVerry that reported that at one stage 30% of our housing stock was social housing.

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