Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

There are 3,600 people on the social housing waiting list in County Wexford. The Government's five-year plan provides for the provision of 760 units, less than 100 of which - 20 a year - will be built by the local authorities in the next five years. That will not address the problem. Unless the Government changes its policy, we will see further boom and bust cycles and continue to have an affordability problem, homelessness and social exclusion. We sold the best sites through NAMA to investment trusts from abroad. Kennedy Wilson has just received planning permission to build 160 apartments at Clancy Barracks. It asked that no provision be made for social housing and no social housing is included. What will it do with the apartments? It will rent them out. What will that do? It will drive rents up further. There is a cartel of investors, most of them foreign, who control the rental market. Rents have increased from €1,000 a month for a two bedroom apartment in the city centre to €1,500 a month because the Government has sold half the country.

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