Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome to the Dáil residents of the greater Dublin area who have been campaigning for housing accommodation for themselves and people generally who are in urgent need of a home. This includes some who are actually facing the horror of eviction in the next week. This history of the Irish State has been characterised by an economically weak capitalist class that was utterly incapable of developing a modern economy to meet the needs of the State's population hence the tragedy of mass emigration in every decade. This failure forced various Governments, albeit those composed of right-wing political parties, to mobilise State resources in public investment to construct significant enterprises such as the Electricity Supply Board, peat production and sugar beet industries creating thousands of jobs and services and publicly funded home building on a wide scale.

In the modern era, we have had a catastrophic implosion of Irish capitalism - first splurging on an orgy of antisocial and parasitic speculation and profiteering in a property bubble and then inevitably crashing ignominiously into chaos. What do the present-day political directors of the State do? Fianna Fáil, the Green Party, Fine Gael and Labour wade in to bail out the perpetrators of the crisis at the cost of immense suffering and a disaster for the innocent victims of the crash, none more so than homeless families and individuals and over 100,000 families on local authority housing waiting lists. Incredibly, the Labour Party Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, in view of the catastrophe wrought by private speculators, developers and the banks and the catastrophic failure of the same class over the seven years of austerity since the crash they caused to make any contribution to resolving the housing crisis, came into Dáil Éireann last night and said:

While policies have been brought forward through recent legislation and again more recently through the Government's decisions on housing supply, it is now the market that must respond to meet the demand and deliver double the current output of 12,000 houses per year. This is a significant challenge for the construction industry, given all that has happened in the past decade.

It defies belief that the Minister again comes in and wants to involve the market that has palpably failed. It is the market whose profiteering caused the crisis in the first instance that must respond. A huge majority of the 110,000 houses promised in the Social Housing Strategy 2020 are in the form of private rented accommodation sending those in need of a home into the arms of private landlords.

It was the logic of the market that led this Government most shamefully to allow NAMA, a State agency, give in to the clutches of capitalist vulture funds, thousands and thousands of units of accommodation that should have been taken into public ownership. Vulture funds are carpet baggers roaming the globe to pick over the carcasses of the economic victims created by the greed of the system they epitomise. That is who the Irish Government is looking to in this crisis.

The market will not supply the homes that are desperately needed by our people. The Government should declare a national housing emergency forthwith; mobilise the local authorities with State funding to build tens of thousands of homes to provide for the people on the lists; mobilise the banking system in public ownership and publicly owned major construction companies to build tens of thousands of affordable homes to be sold to middle and low income workers. These and other measures, which we have outlined in our motion, are crucial and the only way to resolve the crisis. On 1 December people should mobilise in Dublin with the organisations fighting the homelessness crisis and mobilise to kick out the political parties of austerity responsible for this crisis in the forthcoming general election and put in place an alternative policy to the disaster it has caused.

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