Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We are told that the traditional way of building housing for those who needed it was through local authorities down through the years. After the biggest housing crisis, and the last one we had was in the 1970s, that was how it was done. That will be minimised under this new off balance sheet way because the Minister will have to finance his housing development. It is not because everybody thinks of mixed tenure and we must have diversity. It is actually to justify the funding of this new housing model. Apparently, if one has somebody with a mortgage living next door, that civilises the neighbour in some way. I was brought up in a local authority estate where everyone had a job. The problem is what we have is mono-incomes in local authority estates. We need to have everyone working and we also need to create affordable mortgage schemes in order that we have a range of different people in public housing. All we hear is that we cannot have another Ballymun, Knocknaheeny or whatever. If that is the attitude - I said this to the Minister in the Committee on Housing and Homelessness - and if we can only have 30 houses here and 40 there, then we must build 4,000 estates to clear the housing list, and it just cannot be done. If one can only have 10% social housing in an estate, then we will need to build 1 million houses to house those 100,000 on the list.

I expect this neoliberal creed from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party-----

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