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

I want to ring the alarm bells for the Taoiseach. People cannot even get into hotels now.

12 o’clock

Families cannot get a family hub or emergency accommodation. They cannot even get a hotel now because when they ring the hotels they are told the hotels already have a full complement of Dublin City Council-approved homeless families. Not only has the Government not got them out of hotels - some of them would love a hotel because they have nowhere else to go - they cannot even get a hotel. I just wanted to tell the Taoiseach that this is where we have come to.

As we had already heard about the 3,800 units, there was nothing new in the budget in this regard. Not a single extra social housing unit. This is against a situation where the last line of defence on homelessness has collapsed. It is not going to cut it. As for home building finance Ireland, HBFI, along with the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, it involves more handouts, extraordinarily, for private developers. As the banks we bailed out will not lend to the private developers, we are now going to give cheap money to private developers to build on public land and who will then sell the properties back to the State at inflated prices. What sort of madness is that? The LIHAF is a failure and the Government has allocated more money to it. Private developers are now looking for well in excess of the €300,000 cap, which the Government has lifted. They are going to sell us back at exorbitant prices the land we sold them at a discount. What madness is that?

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