Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Has the Minister of State any sense of urgency about this problem? I submitted a written question last week. Six families have been helped by the Tánaiste's much publicised initiative with Threshold. Something is wrong somewhere. Obviously, the Government has no interest because it did not fund the initiative properly, not enough people were available to answer telephones, it was not well advertised etc. According to Focus Ireland, one family per day loses a home in Dublin because of rent increases. I estimate that the number must be higher. The Government's feedback does not indicate any urgency in this regard.

The private sector has no interest in engaging in the building of social housing. Landlords have no interest in accommodating social housing tenants, are getting rid of them and will not accept rent allowance. This is why the housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme will fail. Despite this, the Government expects private sector developers, who are not capable of building houses on their own, to begin building them for social and affordable housing purposes. It will not work. It is a law of capitalist economics that the State must intervene when the private sector has no interest, but the Government will not do so. Families will continue to suffer without social or affordable housing because of an ideological aversion imposed by Fine Gael and the troika. The troika's insistence that the Government cannot add to the State's balance sheet makes for depressing news for the hundreds of thousands people who cannot get houses.

While I was a councillor, I asked the council manager to request a loan to build social housing. I was given the same reply, that the Government did not allow it. What happened to fair competition? The Government is excluding councils that would like to build houses from doing so while it looks to the private sector to do the work.

Everything that the Deputies across the way represent is abhorrent. They will allow this problem to fester instead of acting decisively and building houses for people who need them. Government Deputies will look to the same people who crashed the economy in the first place and have not got their acts together since the recession. It will not work. Knowing this, why does the Government continue bowing to the tenets of the troika and claiming that nothing can be added to the balance sheet even when there is a dire social need? This is disappointing for people, but it must be well publicised. The Government is talking the talk about social housing and the Tánaiste has been rabbiting on about it for the past week, but there is no path towards providing that housing for those who need it.

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