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

Who is advising the Economic Management Council on the economics of housing? Whoever they are should be sacked. We are facing the worst housing and homelessness crisis in the modern history of the State. No matter how much the Government talks about it and makes announcements, it gets worse on a daily basis. Under the Taoiseach's stewardship, the housing lists have gone from 96,000 to 130,000. That is a disastrous failure by any definition. The number of children and families living in homelessness increased exponentially. Waiting lists have gone from approximately eight or nine years, which was bad, to 18 years. The wait is 18 years in Dún Laoghaire if one joins the housing list now.

This is an index of disastrous failure, which is now not just affecting people who would traditionally have had difficulty affording a home, but is reaching up into every sector of society. Nobody who is not very rich can afford to put a roof over his or her head. That is where we are at. Anybody who finds themselves, for whatever reason, without a roof over their head and looking for one, is, by definition, in trouble, unless they are earning €70,000 or €80,000 a year, which most people are not. We now have the phenomenon of the working homeless, people who are going out to work and are sleeping in different hostels on different nights, trying to do a full day's work while not knowing where they will be sleeping that night. That is what is going on. It is beyond belief.

I am asking what advice the Economic Management Council is getting on this. The Taoiseach made a very telling statement on budget day: when asked about rent controls, he said that while he was looking at the matter - we keep looking at these matters but doing nothing about them - he would not be doing anything that would interfere with the market. In other words, it was an economic decision that was informing his refusal to introduce rent controls. As he well knows, one of the major contributory factors to the homelessness and housing crisis is spiralling rents that are unaffordable and consequent evictions, or the inability of people to access affordable housing, because we are essentially dependent on the private sector. Is this not the problem? Whatever advice or economic doctrine the Taoiseach is working on is telling him we must not interfere with the market, and that is the fundamental problem; in fact, we absolutely must interfere with the market. He needs some advice from somebody who will tell him that we desperately need to interfere with the market and that we must not allow the market to dictate this issue or imagine that the market is going to solve it, when he has pursued this policy of hoping the market will sort the problem out for the entire duration of this Government and the market has self-evidently not sorted the problem out. Does the Taoiseach accept that? Does he accept that the advice is wrong, the policy has been wrong and the problem is continuously getting worse? If we do not get that admission, we are on a hiding to nothing in terms of a chronic situation.

Finally, on the economics of housing, the Taoiseach keeps saying that we need to increase supply. First of all, it has not happened. He keeps referring to the fact that we built 90,000 houses during the boom and now building has dropped to abysmal levels, so what we need to do is get supply up. Would he acknowledge the basic economic point, and does the EMC even discuss this point - that even when we were building 90,000 houses per year, mostly private, during the boom, the housing crisis was still getting worse? The numbers on the housing list were increasing even then. The idea that supply equals demand - this economic notion - is just nonsense. Is the Taoiseach getting any contrarian advice, to use the Nyberg phrase, in the aftermath of the analysis of economic crash? Is he getting any contrarian advice that is challenging the orthodoxy-----

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