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

The reason we are having this debate is that I pressed for six weeks at the Business Committee to schedule a discussion on the progress or lack of it on Rebuilding Ireland - Action Plan for Housing and Homelessness. That follows six years of Fine Gael Government since 2011, during which time I and others, week in, week out, told five different Ministers that the Government's policies were creating and accelerating a housing and homelessness crisis. Now, the Minister tells us it will take decades to resolve. He is right. With the current policies and Rebuilding Ireland, which is not working, it will take decades. In fact, it will never be solved.

I will speak in simple terms because I do not have much time. The answer to the housing and homelessness crisis is to break from the fantasy that the private market will provide social housing to the extent that it is required. Private developers, property speculators and landlords do not do social housing, full stop. Rebuilding Ireland is dependent on private developers, speculators and landlords for approximately 75% of its targets. It is not working, and cannot and will not work. That fantasy must be abandoned.

The Minister must also abandon the fantasy of HAP. I have a letter with me which I will send to the Minister, as I do not have time to read it. It relates to somebody in my office who is well resourced trying to locate the Dublin Place Finder Service. In a reply to a parliamentary question in 2015 the Minister's office told us it existed in Dún Laoghaire. When the person called the office on the number provided and asked for the Dublin Place Finder Service the person at the other end of the telephone asked what that was. That is what is happening. The Minister must abandon the fantasy of the HAP and the fantasy that the private market will deal with homelessness and social housing.

He must immediately freeze all further sales of National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, property. It has sold €38.1 billion worth of assets in the last five years, assets that could have solved the housing crisis. He must immediately stop the handover through public private partnerships, PPPs, of 800 publicly owned sites to private developers for unaffordable housing. I hate to inform Deputy Jan O'Sullivan that this week in Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party opposed a motion proposing that the Shanganagh site, which is publicly owned, be retained for social and affordable housing. They voted against it because it is one of the sites they wish to hand over to private developers under PPPs. Those developers will not deliver affordable housing. They will deliver unaffordable housing, because they do it for money. The market prices or even slight discounts on them will not be affordable under any circumstances in Dublin, Cork or anywhere else.

The Minister must immediately start the compulsory purchase of vacant land and property as well as some of the property that was bought by vulture funds, REITs and so forth which is empty and which they are sitting on as they wait for its value to rise. Indeed, they are evicting people as we speak. He must immediately start an emergency local authority housing programme with a State housing and construction company to drive it. That is the only way it will happen. He must stop the economic evictions by vulture funds, REITs and profit driven landlords, and introduce rent controls that bring rents to affordable levels. A constitutional amendment must be passed to establish a right to housing and to rebalance the right to housing over the rights to private property, which are being used to make people homeless.

These are positive, serious proposals and the only ones that will solve the crisis, because the market has failed. Two sites in my area could solve the housing crisis in Dún Laoghaire - Cherrywood, which has 800 units, and Shanganagh, with 600 units. Currently, under the Minister's policies 90% of Cherrywood and 50% of Shanganagh will be unaffordable and the crisis will be worse. If the Minister would build public housing on the Shanganagh site and a far higher proportion of public housing on the Cherrywood site, Dún Laoghaire's housing crisis would be solved. That could be replicated across the country.

See this speech in context