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

These unfortunate people were shunted somewhere else. This is the Ireland of 2014 over which the Government presides but it does not get the scale of the suffering. Other Deputies have related many examples.

It is important to ask what happened and find the root of the crisis. What happened between the 1970s and now was neoliberalism, the privatisation of the provision of homes, the property bubble, when developers and bankers in pursuit of massive profits were allowed to speculate outrageously, and when the three key parties of the establishment, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, over a 20 year period not only allowed, but fomented, the privatisation, and continued with it so that the human need for a home was put out to the profiteers, as increasingly health services are now. The result is the huge scale of suffering that we have at present. To rely on the private sector now to resolve the problem with a new house building programme is futile.

We need a massive programme of public home building, social and affordable. Major construction companies should be taken into public ownership and diverted in that direction and local authorities must directly build homes, as they did in the past. The rental crisis is of huge proportions. We need immediate rent controls. We also need to stop the rack-renting landlords and the crisis they are creating; the immediate outlawing of the veto on human beings on rent supplement looking for a home, which is rampant; and taxation on the super wealthy and major corporations, which would very quickly provide the finance for the type of major reconstruction necessary.

In terms of raw materials, there are tens of thousands of willing construction workers languishing on the dole who are desperate to build homes. There is no shortage of them but with this policy the suffering will continue. That is why we need a huge uprising against this by all working people, the homeless and those who are suffering.

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