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

Since I was first elected to the House in 2011, I have been warning the Government that the failure to build council housing and the policy of selling off land and assets by NAMA, which could have been used for public and affordable housing, would generate a disastrous housing crisis. For the first few years, the Government completely dismissed that warning. Now that we have a housing crisis, which has become an emergency, the Government has finally acknowledged it but if the announcement yesterday in the newspapers is anything to go by, far from the learning the lessons of its failed policies which have produced this crisis, the Government continues to persist with its addiction to privatisation and a dependence on private developers to provide the social and affordable housing we need when they patently will not do that because they are driven by profit. We have been calling for a new State agency that will deliver housing for six years. We said specifically that NAMA's assets and resources should be used to deliver social and affordable housing. Yesterday, the Taoiseach said that could be tricky because of state aid rules. Let us be clear for the public what they are. They are ideological, market driven rules of the EU which say the state cannot distort the market by building public housing or public infrastructure without private sector involvement. The Taoiseach says we cannot do that but we can have an agency, which will, according to the reports, assemble the hundreds of sites that are currently owned by the public and for the purpose of delivering housing, these land banks will then be sold to private developers to construct private social and affordable homes as well are as for commercial use. What on earth is the Government doing setting up a new public private partnership handing over public land which should be used now to provide public and affordable housing?

3 o’clock

I heard the Taoiseach say we do not just need council houses, we need affordable housing. I agree, but where is the evidence that private developers or the private sector are going to deliver either of those things? Private developers are in it for profit. Average house prices in south Dublin are now €560,000. What on earth makes the Government think private developers are going to make those prices affordable?

With regard to the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF, funding the Government promised would deliver some affordable housing, we discover in the case of Cherrywood that it may deliver as little as 2% of the overall development as affordable, and even that will not be affordable because it will be in the region of €300,000. What on earth is the Government doing? It is planning to hand over 800 public sites to this new agency which, if it has to comply with state aid rules, will be majority privately owned by private developers in public private partnerships. We look at what happened with Carillion during the week, where public private partnerships collapsed, resulting in schools in this country and across Britain being put in serious trouble because they were dependent on the private sector.

I would like clarity on this plan. I put it to the Minister of State that this is not the way forward. What we need is public housing built on public land by a public construction company and local authorities.

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