Dáil debates

Thursday, 14 April 2016

6:25 pm

Photo of Clare DalyClare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I had the good fortune or misfortune of attending the Minister’s housing forum in the Custom House a number of weeks ago in place of Deputy Maureen O’Sullivan. Having attended, it struck me quite quickly that the nub of this problem lies at the heart of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, where the ideology seems to be wedded to the failed ideas that led us to this crisis in the first place. The first speaker from the Department who got up repeated the lie - it was repeated again in the Minister's speech - that the Department was responsible for delivering 13,000 extra social housing units last year. This is simply not the case. As Deputy Boyd Barrett said, many of these were just reclassified. They were houses that already existed and the overwhelming bulk of them were based on the private market with the exact lack of security of tenure to which Deputy Catherine Connolly referred. Unless we are truthful about the problem, we will not be able to grapple with a solution. The departmental official went on to say the solution to the crisis was not to build social housing and he went on about stimulating the private sector.

The solution is to build social housing, although not, by any means, exclusively. Unless we reverse the chronic lack-----

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