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

With all due respect, I will acquaint the Minister of State with reality. There are 96,000 families who are waiting up to 15 years on housing lists because they cannot afford the prices in the market, either for rental or purchase. There are 8,000 people, including 3,000 children, in emergency accommodation. There are 70,000 people in mortgage arrears, many of whom face the possible repossession of their homes. There are tens of thousands of people who are being evicted or face potential eviction because of rent increases by the private sector which wants to make more profit from the current crisis.

Against that background, the Minister of State is talking about an agency which is going to hand over, partially or fully, public land to private developers who in turn, supposedly, are going to give us social and affordable housing when there is no evidence whatsoever they will do that. In Cherrywood, as I pointed out, a new town of 8,000 houses is being built. While the State has put a lot of money into that, and although it was on NAMA land that it sold to a private developer for a song, it appears we will only get 2% affordable housing for the money we put in. That is not going to deal with the crisis. There is no point in them building houses for €400,000 and €500,000 if the vast majority of people who work in this country or who are dependent on social welfare cannot afford them. In fact, that is what led to the last crisis, given we had houses being built in their tens of thousands that nobody could afford. What we need to do is build public and affordable housing on the public land we have and use the resources and cash of NAMA to build public and affordable housing that is not built for profit. Instead, what the Government is proposing is more privatisation.

I will give an example. Apollo House was sold to private developers and there is no residential or affordable housing there. What is going to happen to Hawkins House, the Department of Health building, which is another site that could be used for public housing? What about the motor taxation office? Properties are being sold off to private developers and the public are getting nothing back.

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