Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Our amendment No. 1 reads as follows:

To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following: "notes that:

- there are more than 1,600 children and up to 780 families in emergency accommodation;

- placing families and children in hotel rooms rather than proper accommodation is totally unacceptable;

- the Government failure to build significant social housing has led to the number of people on the social housing list rising to 130,000;

- 95% of rent supplement tenants cannot afford market rents which have risen every quarter that this Government has been in office; and

- according to the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, only 28 council houses were built in the first nine months of 2015;

agrees that there is a national housing crisis;

notes that the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, has been given responsibility to build 20,000 houses on behalf of the State;

condemns the Government for:

- gutting Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 which allows developers to only provide 10% of units for social housing which includes leasing as an alternative;

- cutting funding for local authority housing construction to just €11.33 million by the third quarter of 2015, representing an 80% cut over the lifetime of the Government; and

- refusing to tackle unaffordable rents and only seeking to delay rent increases for an extra 12 months; and

calls on the Government to:

- utilise the social dividend section of NAMA and to sign an order to direct it to provide 50% of these 20,000 houses as social houses;

- strengthen Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000 to demand 20% social and affordable housing from new developments and remove the opt out clause allowing developers to offer properties for lease;

- introduce rent controls tying rent rates to inflation and empower local authorities in conjunction with the Private Residential Tenancies Board, PRTB, to set local standard rates;

- increase rent supplement rates; and

- increase funding to local authorities for the construction of real social housing."

I am glad to have an opportunity to again raise the issue of housing and homelessness. It is particularly important given that we, as members of political parties and movements, will soon go before the people in an election in which we will propose our different plans for how the next Government should operate and what its priorities should be. There is no doubt that housing is an issue of the utmost importance. Sinn Féin believes this view is shared by members of the public who in recent months voiced great dissatisfaction with the current crisis. More recently, the media have also played a part in raising the issue, although they ignored the crisis as it was developing, preferring instead to take Government spin at face value. Sinn Féin has, thankfully, been to the fore in skewering the spin that has been so carefully crafted by the Government.

The Government is clearly more interested in appearing to be doing something than tackling the issue. We have all heard the Minister repeatedly announce the same money in different press releases and pronouncements. We know these pronouncements are spin because we are on the ground in our communities. We also know that, too often, the houses the Government claims to be delivering are not new homes but new transfers from the rent supplement scheme to the housing assistance payment or rental accommodation schemes. Far too often, they are simply smoke and mirrors or the work of other bodies such as voluntary housing organisations.

For this Government, delivering housing is slang for more subsidisation of the private market without any real increase in the social housing stock.  The Government makes claims that it is spending billions of euro when local authorities now receive 80% less funding for housing construction than they did before Fine Gael and the Labour Party took office. Less social housing has been built in the lifetime of this Government than in a single year under most previous Governments. Between January and September 2015, local authorities built just 28 social housing units, not because they did not want to build but because the Government has starved them of funding for five years. At the same time, it has lumped a property tax onto existing social housing and a site tax on land on which local authorities could build if they were to receive the necessary funding. The reason local authorities did not build social housing was that the Government did not deliver the funding it promised. It even removed the ability of councils to buy housing from developers at cost price. It did so by gutting Part V and allowing developers who have been bailed out by citizens to opt out of their responsibilities and offer properties for lease. Under these lease arrangements, the Government will pay the costs of refurbishing private properties some years from now when the houses revert to the developers who will have made a handsome sum in rent in the intervening period.

Housing and those in need of it are clearly not a priority for the Government. Claims that it will become a priority in one month or one year are utter nonsense. The Government's priority in housing is to line the pockets of developers and protect the precious market from any interference that would require it to function in a way that meets the needs of members of the public.

On budget day last year, the Government announced that the National Asset Management Agency would build 20,000 homes for sale and claimed these homes would be affordable. The Minister later made clear that this announcement was meaningless when he estimated that the homes in question would cost not more than €300,000. These will hardly be affordable homes. Worse again, it is planned that these houses will be starter homes, a term which, in the dictionary of Government spin, means cramped at best. It is little wonder that the Minister set minimum standards for apartment size which would not allow sufficient space to accommodate the rooms required.

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