Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There has been a constant crisis in housing for decades. We in Sinn Féin believe there is a fundamental right to housing. Other parties might not agree but we are marked out tonight in our belief that people have absolute rights that are non-negotiable: the right from the cradle to the grave to a home, education and health. In any civilised society those rights should be fundamental and should be paid for out of a progressive taxation system.

These rights are not dependent on building booms, bank bailouts or so-called public private partnerships.

One of the first pieces of legislation Sinn Féin introduced to the Dáil in 2002 was a Bill seeking to amend the Constitution to guarantee everyone a right to a home. The Bill was defeated by the votes of a government which, in hindsight, we all know had a deeply unhealthy close relationship with the same developers who were laughing all the way to the banks.

Unfortunately, during the age of the so-called Celtic tiger, we were lectured by the great and the good that developers would provide enough homes for everyone. Those of us who promoted social housing were branded as being old fashioned or backward. Now, of course, we realise that it was those same property developers and their allies who were in government fanning the flames of a building boom who brought the economy into recession and brought the State to the edge of bankruptcy.

It is now time to revisit how we provide housing to those who need it. As I stated earlier, there are currently 98,318 households on the waiting lists of local authorities in the State. The building boom failed utterly to provide homes for these.

Now is the time to plan and build local authority housing to meet the needs of these families. It is far more cost effective to build now when building material, labour and land is so much cheaper. Local authority housing is a good investment, with the rent providing an investment return to local authorities.

I merely flag up this practical point with the Minister of State, Deputy Costello, because we will always get the answer that the funding is not there. I have looked at the maintenance budget of a couple of the local authorities and what they collect in rent. From what I can see, the maintenance budget is between 17% and 22% of rent collected annually. Assuming the maintenance is 20%, that allows 80% to be paid off the capital sum of providing the homes. I refer to local authorities that have a fairly good record of house maintenance.

The mistakes of the past should be learnt from and never repeated. We do not want to see sprawling suburbs where residents are denied transport, schools and access to essential services. What we want is well planned housing estates built with purpose. Services and infrastructure must be at the core of any social housing plan, not fast-buck politics or so-called public private partnerships that have dominated the scene since 2004.

It is ironic that there were two major house building programmes during significant recessionary periods in the State. In the 1930s, the Fianna Fáil Government, to its credit, carried out a considerable house-building programme. In the 1950s, the Minister of State, Deputy Costello's party, in power with Fine Gael and Clann na Poblachta, carried out a considerable house-building programme. All the Marian avenues were built in 1954 - one can see them all throughout the State.

Unfortunately, now the major parties tie themselves up in knots in their attempts not to provide social housing. Every trick in the book, such as rent subsidies, rental assistance scheme and social leasing, has been tried but all of them lead back to the same point in the circle. They all lead to a dependency on private landlords and private developers, with the taxpayer carrying the buck. Let us invest in social capital. Let us invest in good local authority housing.

None of those approaches will ever provide enough homes to meet the needs of the 250,000 people who make up those 98,000 households that are on the waiting lists, and now we have the sight of unfinished estates lying dormant, some of them in the hands in NAMA. There are empty houses but there are people who do not have houses.

In my county, there are 1,700 households languishing on the waiting list, yet houses lie unfinished in Portlaoise, Portarlington, Mountrath, Boris-in-Ossory and Graiguecullen. I would propose where the estates remain unfinished and there is no bond, that the local authority complete the infrastructure, as it is doing at present in my neighbouring estate, Woodgrove in Portlaoise. Local authority staff are in there today finishing off that estate. They are completing the works that should have been done by the developer, who is gone.

Where there are empty houses, the ownership of some of these properties could be transferred to the local authority in lieuof payment of the bond that should have been in place to carry out the works in those estates. This is practical. It is just, realistic and fair. This is part of our social dividend. It is part of the burden sharing. This should be part of the solution to the housing crisis.

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