Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the Thirty-fifth Amendment of the Constitution (Right to Housing) Bill 2017 and commend People Before Profit and Solidarity on putting it forward, as indeed I will support the removal of the eighth amendment from the Constitution and the referendum on the amendment to the Constitution water in public ownership Bill. The Constitution is not fit for purpose and needs replacement. It was written by a Catholic priest in the 1930s and reflects the ethos and values of a society dominated by the Catholic Church and conservative thinking of the time. It does not correspond to the needs of the Ireland that we live in today, in the 21st century. We need a constitution which prioritises the rights of citizens as opposed to those of private property, the State, and the Catholic Church.

Having a right and being able to exercise it are, however, two different things. What stands in the way of people being able to access decent and affordable accommodation are the links between developers and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael which means the right to make profit comes before the right to housing. In the past week we have been treated to a storm in a teacup between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over the tax cuts in the budget with an implied threat by Fianna Fáil to bring down the Government. This squabble will no doubt be resolved in the next two to three weeks. Where is the storm and the threat to collapse the Government over its outrageous lack of urgency in tackling the housing and homelessness crisis? The Nevin Economic Research Institute, NERI, partly funded by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, has put forward a very sensible, workable, costed proposal to establish an Irish housing company to initiate a programme of public housing using the European cost recovery model which could provide 20,000 affordable housing units per year, using existing State-owned, re-zoned land. The Government has apparently been considering this proposal as I know because I have tabled several questions on it to the Minister. Instead, we now have talk of some half-baked scheme to use the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA, in conjunction with private developers to somehow or other play a role in the provision of affordable housing. One of the definitions of stupidity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different outcomes. We are in the mess we are in today because of pandering to developers and the suspension of house building by local authorities. This needs to be reversed with a public housing programme at the centre of an emergency response to the humanitarian crisis we face today.

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