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

There is nothing I would like to believe more than that this plan will deliver. Everybody in this House wants to solve the problem, and how could they not, given the scale of hardship and suffering for homeless people in emergency accommodation or those who have been waiting on housing lists for 15 to 18 years with little or no hope of ever being housed? However, when one looks at the detail of this plan I do not think it will deliver. That is so, not just because it does not take on board what people like ourselves have been saying since 2011, but also because of what was confirmed by the chairperson of the Housing Finance Agency, Dr. Michelle Norris, this morning. She summarised what we have been saying for five years and it stands as the most accurate critique of the failure of this plan to get to the kernel of the problem. Dr. Norris said:

We have become too dependent on the private sector to house low-income households. If we are going to deliver houses we need in the short term, in my view, local authorities to be introduced to building at a large scale that will involve them having permission to borrow money.

Therefore, local authorities must directly deliver council housing and be given the money to do so themselves. Dr. Norris has recognised the problem and she is right. The question is whether this plan proposes to do that, and it does not. It is littered with references to incentives, private developers, vulture funds, competitiveness-----

See this speech in context