Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Government's amendment starts with the phrase "recognises the high priority which the Government has afforded to increasing housing supply, through its Construction 2020 strategy and its Social Housing Strategy 2020". The situation has got consistently worse over five years. How poorly the Government has dealt with the housing crisis beggars belief. At the core of the crisis is the lack of local authority built social housing. I checked the position in Wexford today. The council has permission to build 19 units over the next couple of years. There are 3,800 people on the waiting list in Wexford. The number has increased every year in the last five years, and it will get bigger. The notion that the Government would allow NAMA to build nine times more private housing than social housing in the scheme for 20,000 units just does not make sense.

The lack of local authority built social housing is at the core of the problem. I do not understand why the Government cannot admit it. I accept that Fine Gael does not believe that local authorities should build housing, because it does not suit the neoliberal agenda.

However, the problem will not be solved until that is done. The problems in the private sector and the development sector are linked to the fact that we have yet to start to build local authority social housing. We need to stop describing as social housing the provision of rented units through the rent supplement scheme. It is disingenuous. Social housing is housing built through the local authority scheme which allows people who cannot afford to buy to get a house that is owned by the State. NAMA states €300,000 will be the average price of the houses it will build. How many of the 100,000 people plus on the waiting lists today will be able to afford those houses? They are the people who need the housing most but very few of them could afford it. The same is true for Wexford.

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