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

We are dealing with the bitter fruit of the Government's abysmal failure to deal with the housing crisis over the past four years. There has been spectacular inaction by the Government as well as misguided policies, most notably the decision in the summer of 2011, months after the Government took office, to instruct local authorities that council housing construction was to cease for the foreseeable future. We are now faced with an emergency due to that policy failure.

Subsequently, a lunatic proposition was made by the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Burton, when she cut rent allowance in 2012. She claimed it would lead to rents going down. I remember laughing, more fearfully than humorously, at her confident claims that reducing rent allowance would see rents fall. That is what she said. It was the most extraordinary misjudgment imaginable when one considers the consequences of rents subsequently going through the roof. It led directly to a homelessness emergency. It is not something the Minister for Finance simply inherited. He certainly inherited a mess, but he compounded that mess at every hand's turn with the policy decisions he made.

Faced with this catastrophe, the answer is tax breaks for landlords. It is quite extraordinary.

Faced with this suggestion, we are in the invidious position of knowing that in the absence of a major council house construction programme, which the Minister is not promising and which, despite all the trumpeting of announcements here, there and everywhere, is not actually happening, the total capital budget for social housing as against money going on leasing arrangements, rent allowance, housing assistance payments and so on is small. The capital budget for physical council house construction is €360 million, approximately the same as it was in 2006 when we already had a major problem. At approximately €100,000 per house, the figure corresponds to 3,600 houses. We were speaking to the relevant Minister today and he admitted that the number will be far less than that. It will probably be in the region of 2,000 at best. That is what will derive from a capital budget of €360 million.

This is against a background in which we do not have figures on how many people have joined the council list this year. It is extraordinary. We have seen the worst housing emergency in the history of the State but we do not know how many people joined the housing list this year. The Minister acknowledged this was something of a lacuna, to put it mildly, and that we should have that information. Again, that is on the long list of promises.

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