Dáil debates

Thursday, 14 April 2016

6:15 pm

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

-----of nearly 6,000 households. That 2017 target will not even meet 10% of current housing demand. Does the Minister know how many people will join the list before then? There are approximately 100 new applicants per month. With the Minister's wonderful plans, we will be in a worse situation in 2017 than we are now but even these miserable targets are not being met and figures are being massaged. For example, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council tells us that it has delivered 95 RAS households. In the small print, however, one discovers that 60 of those are renewals. They are not new social housing accommodation. They are just old RAS arrangements that have been renewed by landlords.

This is at the heart of the problem. Some 75,000 houses of the 110,000 that the Government is proposing to deliver will be done through the HAP and RAS with private landlords and yet there is no chance that those landlords will sign up to them, given that they are not signing up now. The proposal will not deliver. If the Government does not break with the failed approach of depending on private landlords to provide a solution, we will face a worse crisis in the years ahead. It must break with failed policies.

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