Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the Housing (Sale of Local Authority Housing) Bill 2016, which in terms of its proposal to introduce a tenant incremental purchase scheme, is not a major priority. It will do nothing to address any of the problems in our broken housing system or to better the housing options for the 130,000 people in need of social housing and the thousands of people in emergency accommodation and homelessness.

There is a need for crucial legislation in relation to the voluntary housing bodies. We were promised by the former Minister with responsibility for housing, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, who is in the Chamber, and by her successor, that legislation on the administration of the voluntary housing bodies would be introduced but that has not happened. Perhaps Fianna Fáil could have taken this opportunity to bring forward such a Bill today.

The outlook continues to be very bleak for people who are urgently seeking social housing. Up to the last week of June, there were 1,078 homeless families, including 2,106 children. Homelessness is primarily a problem in Dublin and the surrounding four counties. The Government has not addressed this issue. Like many of my colleagues, I have had a look at Rebuilding Ireland. While in general terms it is a step forward in that the Minister, Deputy Coveney, has at least begun to look at the problems, it is far too little, far too late. In regard to the output figures provided in the strategy, I made a submission to the Housing and Homelessness Committee on 10 May, which I subsequently sent on to the Minister, in which I sought expenditure of €10 billion.

I thought that was the kind of expenditure we needed to ramp up social housing to address the real problems that I and other colleagues in this city deal with week in, week out. I asked the Minister to declare a housing emergency and to go after the housing issue in a FEMPI- like manner. He has not done that. He has mentioned the word "emergency" in various speeches and interviews but he has not declared an emergency and said "let's go for it".

Yesterday, the Labour Party produced a Bill based on the Kenny report, which should have been implemented. I commend Deputy Jan O'Sullivan on bringing forward the Bill. The Labour Party had five years to bring it forward and do something drastic about the price of building land. All parties in this House recognise that the Kenny report was a solution to a huge part of the housing problem. It has to be said that we always seemed to have a housing crisis. There has always been a housing crisis going back to the 1970s and 1960s. When I began representing people in the 1980s, there was a housing crisis. We never had enough homes in the social housing area. I noticed how closely the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties are working on this issue. Deputy Cowen has said that unless the Minister introduces such and such into "Rebuilding Ireland" in time for the budget, this plan will not come into effect because we will all be out campaigning in a general election. Both sides of the House must be brought along in respect of what is effectively a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil Government.

However, the numbers will not do very much for the people I represent week in, week out. The Minister talks about an output of 12,600 units last year and 14,000 this year. This year has been very disappointing. The target for 2017 is 18,000 and increases to 22,000 and finally in 2020, which will be a great year when everything happens, we will produce the very basic figure of 2,500 units per month. The previous Government signally failed to meet that target.

My fundamental criticism of "Rebuilding Ireland" and even the legislation before us today is that we are relying on the same old systems, the same old failed developers, the same old speculative model of finance and the same old land systems. It is the same old, same old. The Minister may be doing with a bit more brio than his predecessor but he has not come forward with anything really innovative which would solve the problem for those 2,000 children who will be in homeless accommodation tonight, tomorrow evening, the following weeks and through to 2017. The Minister says that hotel accommodation for the homeless will be fairly rare in 2017 but the reality is that we have an emergency. The Minister had the opportunity to come in here like the Minister for Finance and his predecessor, the late Brian Lenihan, did and say that this is a terrible crisis, we must act now and house our homeless and our most vulnerable families, go through X, Y and Z of what needs to be done and do whatever is necessary in terms of changing the Constitution or bringing in the Labour Party Bill introduced yesterday. Those kind of measures include local authorities building again. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil discouraged local authorities from engaging in direct build. When one looks at the figures in the Minister's report, is it not deplorable that we turned out 95,000 units during the Celtic tiger and wondered how we could fill them but only 4,000 or 5,000 of those units were social housing units? Unfortunately, I can only give the Minister a D plus.

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