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

The time for spoof, big announcements that translate into nothing and chatter about this emergency in this House is over. The main thing I wish to say is that people need to get out on to the streets on 1 December 2015 for a national demonstration to address the housing and homelessness emergency. The demonstration will assemble on Grafton Street at 5 p.m. and will march to the Dáil. That day is the anniversary of the tragic and unnecessary death of Jonathan Corrie, a homeless man who died just metres away from the front of this building. Since his tragic death, the homelessness and housing emergency that the Government has presided over and allowed to worsen has worsened on a daily basis. The time for talk is over and the time to mobilise is now. It is the only language the Government seems to understand and it is the only thing that forces any kind of movement from it. I urge the 130,000 families on the housing list, over 100,000 people in mortgage distress, the thousands of students who cannot find any or suitable accommodation and the Traveller community of this country which has been let down despicably in terms of Traveller accommodation to come out onto the streets, demand action and surround this building until the Government is forced to take meaningful action to address the housing crisis.

I find it nauseating that in order to cover its failure on this issue, the Government now tries to pin the blame on local authorities and suggest that it has given them the resources but they have not got their act together in terms of providing housing. The fact is that in July 2011, months after the Government took office, it sent out a circular to every local authority announcing that there would be no more direct construction of council housing for the foreseeable future. That is why they did not make any plans. It was because the Government told them there would be no more council houses. The Government spelled out in that document how it was going to outsource the provision of social housing to the private sector, which is what it has done. That is what the agenda has been - to privatise the housing market completely. Fianna Fáil did it by 70% to 80% and the Government decided to carry on and complete the job by handing it over. Everything it has done since has compounded this crisis from that first circular in the first few months of its tenure.

That was followed by the Minister for Social Protection cutting rent allowance and claiming ridiculously at the time in the face of protests from this side of the Chamber that it would lead to rents going down. The Government should be sacked for that one piece of incompetence - for claiming that cutting rent allowance would lead to rents going down when it had exactly the opposite effect. It led directly to thousands of people being put into emergency services.

This was compounded by the fact that the Government sold off all of the NAMA properties - tens of thousands of properties - to property vultures. Of course, all of this was directed towards improving the balance sheets of the banks because they were holding the property so the Government could sell it off to these vultures who could monopolise the market, jack up rents and put people who could not pay the inflated rents out on the streets. That is what the whole thing is about. The Taoiseach gave the game away. When we asked for real rent controls rather than Mickey Mouse rent controls, he said that the Government was not going to interfere with the market. That is what he said - we do not want to interfere with the market. That has been the obstacle.

What we need is tens of thousands of council houses, not leasing and not looking to developers. We were building 90,000 houses in this State at the height of the building boom - sadly for profit and not for people. If we could do that then, the Government can certainly build 10,000 or 15,000 council houses in a year. It will not do it because it does not want to interfere with the interests of the developers.

I will finish with the case of Dún Laoghaire. While the Minister is chatting away to the Minister of State, 490 people presented as homeless in October in Dún Laoghaire. This year, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council delivered zero council houses and next year, it will deliver 34 but 1,600 people joined the list in that time. The Minister's plans are a joke.

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