Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I would like to bring the Taoiseach's attention back to our other national crisis, the housing crisis. Homelessness is at record levels, the price of a house has risen by 50% since 2013 and rents continue to sky-rocket despite the Government's ineffectual rent pressure zones. This Government and its predecessor have treated the housing crisis like some strange, mysterious phenomenon for which we must go on a quest to find solutions but it is actually quite simple. Public house building has ground to a halt; it was slashed to bail out billionaires ten years ago and it has never been restarted. Local authorities own more than 1,200 ha of land with the potential for 38,000 houses but less than 1% of the social housing that is needed has been built on that land. Housing analyst Mr. Mel Reynolds said that it is a policy decision not to build on local authority land and that the State is actually the biggest land hoarder in this country. To hoard land during a housing crisis is akin to hoarding food in a famine. A total of 13 councils did not bother to build a solitary thing in the last two years. Fingal County Council, with which the Taoiseach will be familiar, completed ten homes. Ten homes equates to 0.01% of the number needed for the 8,046 people on its housing list. The Fingal area has 22% of Dublin's population but 35% of its homeless population, mostly in the Taoiseach's own constituency and mine, Dublin West.

It is a microcosm of the national housing crisis.

Solidarity has put forward a proposal to council management to build on its own land. In Blanchardstown the council has 75 acres of zoned land that it has never developed at Damastown. Solidarity has taken drone footage, got architects drawings, made a video, produced a booklet and costed a proposal to provide over 1,100 homes on that land which will be launched tomorrow night by Fr. Peter McVerry in Dublin 15. We seek the support of all councillors for it. Some 50% of those homes will be for workers under an affordable mortgage scheme and 50% for people on the list. Damastown village, if properly planned, with the additional transport infrastructure that Dublin west needs and with dedicated youth facilities and parklands, could transform the lives of thousands of people. Only 15% can get a mortgage. What about the other 85%? Why do we hear on Sean O'Rourke's show today that workers in Ballymun can get a mortgage for €170,000 in the Ó Cualann project but the Taoiseach thinks it is affordable for workers in Blanchardstown to pay €315,000? This could resolve that issue for many workers. Will the Taoiseach back the funding of this project and similar projects nationally, given Dublin west is just a microcosm of the national homeless crisis?

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