Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will read something to the Minister of State and see if he recognises it. It was echoed in the Minister's plan yesterday and it states:

Off-balance mechanisms will be used to maximise financial opportunities and leverage other assets available to the State, including land. Under the strategy's governance structure, a dedicated work stream will be established from within the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, the Department Public Expenditure and Reform, the Department of Finance and the Housing Finance Agency to progress specific off-balance sheet mechanisms: expansion of the NAMA special purpose vehicle, a large-scale public-private partnership and a new financial vehicle.

If it sounds familiar, it should, as it was put before the Dáil by the last Government by a former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly. It has just been copied and pasted into the current plan.

I am not as optimistic as many people. I would love to be optimistic in this House but I am not. I am certainly not optimistic when I look at the housing policy. The main reason I am not optimistic is because the prevailing idea is that the only way we will get housing is by going through the private market, which seems to reign supreme as God almighty; therefore we must look to it. I took some notes from a book today documenting the history of social housing. In the years between 2000 and 2007, there were 46,000 or 47,000 units of social housing stock from the entire supply; private housing numbered nearly 500,000 units. Probably a tenth of all houses are social houses. This document is non-committal about the delivery of social houses, meaning the more than 130,000 families on the social housing list will have to do one of two things, and it looks like they will only have the first option.

That option is to get into a housing assistance payment, HAP, scheme. Having been a councillor for the past seven years, I am familiar with the scheme. It is very difficult to get a landlord interested in the scheme, as they have the pick of the crop now and they can go to students, information technology workers and other professionals around the city and take them. That is instead of entering an arrangement with the local authority that would tie them in for a number of years. There is a commitment to get something like 550 families into the HAP scheme by the end of the year but by the time we come back there will be four months until the end of the year and the Government would work magic to get 550 families housed under the scheme by then. We will see and the proof will be in the pudding. I will put a few bob on it and say it will not be done and cannot be done.

The reason is that this Government relies entirely on the private market, as social housing is absent from this document. It is absent not by accident, but for a reason, which is ideological and political. It is about feeding the developers, bankers and the same old crooks, gangsters and financiers who put us in this current position. The Minister of State, and the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, are quite genuine about this to a degree but they will not achieve much. This Government will build more houses than the former Minister, Deputy Alan Kelly, not because of the plan, but because it would be impossible to build any fewer than he did. We were promised 5,500 social houses under the former Minister by 2015 but we got approximately 400 by 2016, so we can work out the maths and see how much can be delivered.

The problem with the housing market is that it is a market and it gives us many problems. It does little to deal with homelessness. I will comment briefly on modular housing, as I have some in my back yard in Cherry Orchard. There was a recent protest to stop the building going ahead but people did not object to the housing. The people in Cherry Orchard have one shop and school, with no post office, dentist or doctor, and a lousy bus service. They objected to the housing scheme going ahead because the builders did not know what they were doing. They were cutting through an estate, taking away culs-de-sac, while they put main roads through another estate. When the council was called to check what was going on, nobody had any maps or drawings. Even at that most basic and fundamental level, we are making a hames of this. We are paying somebody - I do not know who it is - €250,000 for each of these modular houses. I am not saying they will be nasty or horrible but we know from builders and people like Deputy Mick Wallace that one could build a decent home on public land for approximately €150,000. Why are we not doing that? It is because the market reigns supreme and the Government cannot get that out of its head. It should move away from the market and take responsibility for providing decent public housing.

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