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

It is not that we lack optimism about the future when we ask these questions, rather it is that some of us and members of the public are fed up to the back teeth of warning against certain behaviour and activity by developers, and the bankers and Governments who facilitate them, and never being listened to. Regardless of how many times these warnings are issued, be it by political representatives or ordinary people, they are ignored, the Government permits this activity to continue and nobody is ever held accountable. I will give an example. When the Priory Hall issue arose and I heard the name Tom McFeely I knew I had heard it before. I then recalled that approximately ten years ago when a developer was trying to evict an 84 year old woman and three other residents from a block of flats in Charlemont Street so that he could build an apartment block, myself and a few others gathered with the residents and Charlemont Street community and mounted a 24-hour six week long protest to prevent those evictions and calling on Dublin City Council to, rather than permit this developer to evict people so that he could build an apartment block, take control of that site and construct social housing thereon. The developer involved was Tom McFeely. We succeeded and stopped him. Despite all the bullying and threatening, and his having a court order to evict an 84 year old woman from her home, we forced Tom McFeely to abandon the site and the council to take ownership of it. We said at that time that we would in the long run save public money. We should not be facilitating these gangsters. If we had not succeeded the result would have been another Priory Hall. What we should be doing is building affordable social housing so that the new market is not dominated by developers like Tom McFeely but we are never listened to. Even now, we are not being listened to.

The Government's policy on social housing is to outsource it to the same people, although not Tom McFeely this time but other people like him. The Government has abandoned the direct provision of social housing and has handed over, as the Taoiseach calls it, the most important market of a roof over the heads of human beings, which is the precondition for civilised existence, to the bankers and developers who got us into the mess we are in. The Government has also given the bankers the power to veto sustainable mortgage solutions. After all of the revelations of the past few weeks and given the attitude of the banks, did the Cabinet sub-committee not realise when it met on 30 September that a radical change of policy is necessary?

There has been much talk about sustainable solutions. We have discovered that the banks are trying to bully as much money as possible out of distressed mortgage holders. That is their strategy and we all know it. The Taoiseach knows it and I know it. We know from the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Finance Public Expenditure and Reform that their strategy is to squeeze every penny out of people. Even those who are forced to give up their homes by handing back their keys are being chased for outstanding money. There is no willingness on the part of the banks to accept that they must take some hit. There is also no willingness on the part of Government to enforce that hit on them. When will we see change? Are we going to continue to allow the McFeelys and bankers of this world dictate the pace of everything at the expense of ordinary residents? That is what makes people depressed. People are depressed that this is allowed to continue.

I recently discovered there may be a Priory Hall type issue with properties at the Pavilion site in Dún Laoghaire. I have heard that apartment owners living on the ground floor of the Pavilion apartment development, which some of us opposed and were denounced for doing so, have had to move out because damp rising from below has made them uninhabitable. There was no regulation. Despite public opposition, this development was backed by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil councillors. How many more tragedies like Priory Hall must there be before we finally wake up and stop these gangsters, opportunists and greed driven people controlling the provision of housing, the roof over the heads of families? That is what we want to know?

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