Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

What the Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, has just said demonstrates how utterly inadequate, to say the least, is the Government's approach to what is by any standards a crisis of unprecedented proportions as far as the number of individuals and families on the housing lists is concerned. The Minister of State should listen to and examine what he said. His first canard was the creation of employment, as he put it, when his Government has been destroying employment for tens of thousands in the public sector. Small businesses and others are adding some extra employment. We welcome the fact that a significant sector of workers has got jobs so that they have not had to join the hundreds of thousands of their peers in Australia and America and everywhere else. On their wages, however, they cannot afford the rents being charged in Dublin and other urban areas, much less go into a bank and get a loan for a home or save for a deposit. What planet are the Ministers of State living on that they come in here and provide as some kind of solution to the housing crisis the creation of precarious jobs, when a large number of people who are desperately waiting on the housing list, being made homeless, being turfed out by rack-renting landlords are in the type of precarious employment they talk about? They provide this as a solution.

The second point made by the Minister of State, Deputy O'Dowd, concerns the repair of boarded-up local authority houses. I welcome that. They should be turned around very quickly and made fit for human habitation. There is no question about that but the scale of what is available there compared with 90,000 units that are desperately needed is Lilliputian. It is totally inadequate. Only a few weeks ago I recited to the Minister of State, Deputy O’Sullivan, what happened in the 1970s with regard to the provision of social housing by local authorities. Notwithstanding the current crisis, society then was at a much lower level of technique and know-how. Against the minuscule few hundred houses this Government plans to put together now and over the next few years, in 1971, some 4,789 homes were built; in 1972 that went up to 5,900; in 1973 it was 6, 072; in 1974, it was 6,746; and in 1975, it was 8,794, and so on of that order. The faces of the Ministers of State should be reddening in embarrassment when they hear these figures recited. The Labour Party, which was in government for part of that time, and I recall it very well, made a huge virtue of its house building programme and used it to excuse many other betrayals of Labour policy in that 1973-77 coalition Government. That brings into sharp relief the utter failure of this Government, which is completely out of touch with the situation.

Some of us who have been around and campaigning for many decades in the interests of ordinary working class people, unemployed people, low income workers, etc., know the suffering is unprecedented. We know the type of stress and pressure on families in, for example, Dublin West, as around the country, who are being faced with rent increases of between €200 and €400 a month. Families are broken up and some members are put into hotels and shifted from one hotel to another. There was a shameful situation around St. Patrick’s Day, when human beings whom we were assisting were being shifted out of hotels because those hotels were able to put up the prices for St. Patrick’s weekend.

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