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

I did not know this was questions to People Before Profit - I thought it was questions to the Taoiseach. It could not be more telling that, in answer to the most basic and elementary question, the Taoiseach cannot tell the House how many council houses the Government intends to deliver. That confirms that we are just getting a rehashed, slightly upscaled version of the Kelly plan. There are big headline figures but when one scratches beneath the surface, it is all dependent on "incentives" to the private sector in the shape of infrastructural grants and the transfer of public land. Could we cosset them any more than we have already done? Was it not the cosseting and incentivising of these people that led to the last property crash while delivering no social housing? The Taoiseach pursues this mirage but this will be a disastrous failure.

If the Taoiseach cannot answer the question as to how many local authority houses are to be built, which is damning, why did he not accept the recommendations of the Oireachtas Committee on Housing and Homelessness? There is to be no moratorium on repossessions, no request to the EU to break the fiscal rules on investment in social housing and no rent controls. Could it be any more of a mirage than that? The Government did not even listen to its own all-party Oireachtas committee.

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