Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

That is an unsatisfactory and disingenuous response. We will continue to subsidise private landlords unless the State directly provides council housing. If there are 230,000 empty dwellings, many of them in the hands of NAMA and State-financed banks, they should be transferred directly into council ownership, but that is not what the Government is doing. Instead, it is continuing to pay State money to private landlords, banks or whoever are the private owners of these properties. This is, effectively, privatising the provision of social housing and creating the conditions for a new slum landlord class and tenement housing reminiscent of that at the beginning of the 20th century.

There are people in the Visitors Gallery who are homeless as a direct result of the Government's reduction of the rent cap. Does this not prove that its policy is a failure?

What will the Government do to get those people off the housing list and put them in council houses, either NAMA properties taken into public ownership------

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