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

The reason they are lying on trolleys is the same reason 90% of nurses voted today to go on strike. Nurses are emigrating because they cannot afford to live in this city or in Cork, Galway or Limerick. We have lost 5,500 fully trained nurses in the last few years because they cannot afford to live here and do not want to work in the extremely stressful conditions they are exposed to in this country's hospitals. Hundreds of beds are lying empty and cannot be filled. Patients are on trolleys. Hospitals are understaffed because, as Deputy Shortall said, professional workers cannot afford to live here. Many of them have emigrated or have moved to other parts of this country where they can afford to live if they are lucky. The two Simons need to talk to each other because they are creating another crisis as they try to solve this one. If they do not talk to each other, the dots will not be joined and neither problem will be resolved.

Before the Minister developed this Bill to lessen the planning regulations and take a softly-softly approach to this country's developers and builders, the Government had approximately 60 meetings with vulture funds regarding the sale of NAMA properties. It is no secret that the Government is strongly lobbied by developers. I suggest it needs to be strongly lobbied by the hundreds of thousands of people who lobbied the Government and this House on the question of water charges and forced it into a major compromise and U-turn on that issue. We need to force the Government to do the same on the question of rents, evictions and homelessness.

One of our amendments to this Bill proposes that the Residential Tenancies Board, Members of this House and local authorities should have a say over the proposal to identify rent pressure zones. The criteria for deciding what areas will be deemed to be rent pressure zones should not be confined to the cost of rent. According to our amendment, factors like wage levels, homelessness and affordability should also be taken into consideration when decisions on rent pressure zones are being made.

We need to sort out this crisis. That does not involve passing what the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government is proposing. I do not see why the two parties are not in coalition. They are going on with a kind of drama all the time even though they actually agree with each other and represent the same class of people in this country. This Government is doing the same things that were done before, which led this country into an economic crash, a property crash and a disastrous situation. We bailed out the same developers and builders, including Mr. McNamara, who are now re-emerging as main players on the market. Deputy Shortall argued earlier that "Government policy can only be described as insane". The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and again but expecting a different result. To paraphrase the Marx brothers, we need a sanity clause in this House.

See this speech in context