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

NESC has done considerable work on housing in recent years. I can suggest one area where we need to do considerable work. The Government needs to do something on the issue of affordability and NESC could possibly be a vehicle. We still do not have any real plan for affordable housing. We have a market where prices are spiralling out of all control and where much of the funding the Government has put, wrongly, to my mind, into the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund and so on is simply money going to subsidise private developers, but with no guarantees whatsoever over the affordability of the housing that comes back. We need some actual affordability when it comes to delivering affordable housing. Otherwise, as was the case with the Celtic tiger property boom, we will have vast numbers of houses but only on offer at vastly inflated prices that no one can afford or that people are required to take on unsustainable debt if they wish to purchase.

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