Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State, Deputy English, said this is not about ideology, not once, twice or three times but seven or eight times in a ten-minute speech. The Minister of State doth protest far too much and gives the game away. What proposal are Members debating? We are debating whether the right to a home should exist in the Constitution and whether the right to private property - in reality the right to profit from private property - should be limited to ensure the right to a home can be vindicated. It gets to the heart of what the housing crisis is about. It is about the so-called free market and the right to profit versus the right of people to a home. How do Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil answer that question? They answer it without hesitation – they say the right to profit. They say one could not possibly seriously interfere with the private market. That is ideology but hey do not see it as such. The ruling ideology in any society is never recognised as ideology. Rather, it is recognised as common sense.

They may genuinely think that the best way to deal the housing crisis is to incentivise the private sector to build more homes and do some things around the edge. The other mantra is that progress is being made. It is like the debate on jobs, where we were told they were coming around the corner. I came in here in October 2014 and heard that about the housing crisis. I have heard it ever since. The houses and homes have never arrived.

I have no confidence that the Government will deliver the homes because it is not willing to invest seriously in social and affordable housing. It is completely hamstrung both by its ideology and world view and by the rules that codify that world view, namely, fiscal rules which state it cannot use the money that exists in respect of NAMA and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF.

10 o’clock

That refusal to interfere in the private market is the reason we have people dying on our streets, 8,000 people homeless across the State, people sleeping in cars, on couches and in tents, tens of thousands of people facing rents they cannot afford, and people trapped in their parents' homes unable to have their own homes. The housing crisis is not an accident. It is a direct result of putting the greed for profit of developers, landlords and bankers before the right of people to a home. That is what exists in this country and that is why we have this Bill.

Last year, we introduced an anti-evictions Bill. It was a simple Bill to ban landlords from evicting tenants, a huge crisis that would be acknowledged. We were met with opposition from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil who told us that we could not do that because it would be unconstitutional because of the right to private property in the Constitution. At that time, we said that was wrong and that it was a narrow interpretation of the Constitution designed to justify not taking those actions. We still stand over the argument. We are saying that even if the Government is right, we are proposing to change that balance in the Constitution by inserting the right of people to a home. Now they say that they could not possibly do that because, in Fianna Fáil's words, it would be like putting a right to the winning lottery numbers in the Constitution. It is nonsense.

This is all rooted in a class reality, that the interests of big landlords, developers and bankers are counterposed to the interests of people on the streets, people facing unaffordable rent hikes and people facing mortgages they cannot afford. A major problem in the Dáil is that it is the class interests of the first group that are represented - what James Connolly described as the committee of the rich. That is what the Government fundamentally is and it is reflected in the ratio of landlords in this place and even more in the Government - the Ministers, Deputies Michael Creed, Regina Doherty, Simon Coveney, Paul Kehoe and Charles Flanagan, and the Chief Whip, Deputy Joe McHugh. This is 13% of the Cabinet compared to 5% of adults in normal society. Are they against the right to housing because they are landlords? No.

See this speech in context