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

I am afraid the Taoiseach is in denial. This is not about the collapse in 2008; it is about a policy decision the Taoiseach's Government made in 2011 at which time he said the new policy represents a fundamental reconfiguration of the landscape of housing support in Ireland. The statement went into detail. The Government was to stop building council housing and rely on leasing arrangements with the private sector. That is the root of the problem. It has been a disastrous failure. The plan of the Minister, Deputy Coveney, has not broken from that. It has, in fact, expanded that misguided, disastrously-failing policy, which is resulting in people in HAP tenancies – the centrepiece of the Taoiseach's strategy – now being evicted from the supposedly secure social housing the Taoiseach said the policy would provide for them. There is ridiculous box-ticking with the objective of getting everybody out of hotels by July. Does the Taoiseach know where they go? They go onto the street or into hubs in town that are full of addiction and drug use. The strategy is failing disastrously and the Taoiseach will not admit it.

Will the Taoiseach do what Mr. Edmund Honohan advocated and start a compulsory purchase programme to buy empty properties and buildings to house the people in these circumstances? Will he order NAMA to immediately stop selling off land and property-----

See this speech in context