Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Housing affects everyone in the country because everyone has to stay somewhere at night and they will have grown up somewhere. Housing impacts on every family, every individual and every couple in the country. When talking about housing and affordability, one cannot just pick out one element and say that is the part that matters because the whole market is completely interlinked between homeowners, prospective buyers, those in the private rental market, those in social housing and those who provide the houses - the construction companies and developers of land banks - in which people live. The final element is comprised of the banks and the credit they provide to people to allow them to put the purchase price together. Each one of those plays a vital part in the housing market and a problem with one of them creates a problem with all of them.

I refer to what happened when the economy collapsed and the recession kicked in and almost 250,000 people lost their jobs. Every single one of those elements was impacted. People living in their homes were finding it difficult to pay their mortgages; prospective buyers could no longer get any kind of credit; because of the economic circumstance, production of houses and development of houses stopped. People lost their jobs and as a result, the number of people needing rent supplement and social assistance increased. Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with our housing market, went wrong in 2008 because it was based on a false premise of a free market provision where 90,000 houses were being provided yet the costs kept escalating.

People were terrified of not buying a house because if they did not buy at that stage it would have been €10,000 more expensive three months later and a year later it would have been €50,000 more expensive. They were terrified of being left behind and taken out of the property market altogether. This led to an obscene situation whereby it was socially acceptable for a recently married young couple to mortgage themselves to the hilt for 35 years, so they would be under incredible financial pressure for the rest of their lives, to own a three-bed semi-detached house where they could start a family and raise their children. This is the obscenity from which we came. This is what happened when we said it had nothing to do with us, and that it should be left to the market with the Government having no say. This was the extremely dangerous thing we did, because we handed over the market to a group of speculators, developers and bankers who used it for their own gain. Many millionaires were made on the backs of families and people who are still paying those mortgages to this day.

In Galway city approximately 4,000 households are on the city council housing waiting list. In the past two years, rents in the private rental sector have gone from approximately €800 for a semi-detached house to €1,100 or €1,200. The price of buying a semi-detached house has gone from between approximately €175,000 and €180,000 to €240,000, which is a €50,000 increase. We are making the same mistakes. We are leaving it to the market to provide.

Where we are finally starting to get some action now, which is very important, is an increase in the supply of social housing, which will have an impact because it will take pressure off the private rented sector and give people alternative options. As a society we need once and for all to come to the decision that it is affordability which matters and not the market. We should ask how much do we anticipate or think a family, which gets up every day, goes to work and brings their children to school, should pay for a house and should they be priced out of it. Unless we make this decision we will be in a difficult position and we will never get it right. Once we have done this, we can tell those who cannot afford to do so because of their circumstances, means or ability differences that we will step in and help them with social housing.

Our Constitution does many things, but perversely it protects the right to private property over the ability of the State to regulate land prices and rent controls. This is not what our Constitution should do. A debate is taking place throughout the country on economic, social and cultural rights and their place in our legal system. If we were to amend our Constitution to include the right to housing we could balance out the right to private property, which would make a big difference and have a big impact on our housing market.

See this speech in context