Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support the motion, as an affordable housing scheme is urgently needed, and I thank Sinn Féin for moving it. However, it is only a small part of what is required to deal with the national housing emergency. That is what it is, an emergency, and it is important to name it. Without recognising and naming the problem, it is not possible to do what is required, namely, produce an overall comprehensive housing policy within which the provision of homes for our people is seen as a fundamental human right, a prerequisite to a functioning democracy and an essential element of any country that describes itself as a republic.

What we have had to date, however, are policies that have tinkered with the system in a piecemeal manner, from rent pressure zones that, from my experience in Galway, have not worked, a help-to-buy scheme that has actively promoted the market, an allocation of money for affordable homes that, while welcome, is so minute as to make no difference, and a vacant site levy that has been delayed in its implementation.

All of these tinkering, piecemeal initiatives are fundamentally premised on the belief of this and the previous Government, including the Labour Party, that the private market will provide what are described as "accommodation units". Not only is there an utter failure to recognise that such housing policies are a major cause of the ongoing emergency, but, even worse, the Government is, in the guise of misnaming social housing, actively promoting the private market. The past and current Governments have promoted the housing assistance payment. Following its introduction, we in Galway city were told throughout my 17 years as a councillor and up to the present day that HAP was the only game in town.

The emergency has arisen not by accident or overnight but, as with the health service, as a deliberate consequence of this and the previous Government's belief that the market would provide. It is a scandal that, 70 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - interestingly, that was the same year that Dr. Noël Browne tried to introduce his mother and baby comprehensive scheme - set out in Article 25.1 that everyone had "the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself [or herself] ... including food, clothing, housing and medical care", the most basic fundamental right to shelter and a home is still lacking. Not only is that bad, but the use of language and statistics to hide it is frightening.

I live in a city where I know for a fact that approximately 5,000 households are on the waiting list. One that I am familiar with has been waiting since 2002. In those 16 years, that household has never been offered a house. In the Department's document, however, I have suddenly found out that, although the Galway city housing crisis has not been solved, it has been magically reduced. The city has gone from 3,322 households on the waiting list to 2,219. That 33% reduction in nine months is the largest percentage drop in the whole of the country. Nine months is a pregnancy time, but how did anyone manage to reduce that number when we have not had a single directly built house in Galway city since 2009? One must ask what is going on in my city of Galway where there is no overall plan for our land. We have no shortage of land or public space in the docks and Ceannt Station. Two thirds of the land that we bought at high prices for a road that is going nowhere have been sterilised. Someone is erecting office blocks for 2,700 workers without accommodation, but that issue has been got around by erecting accommodation for overseas students who will pay a fortune.

We are back to the developer-led business as usual in Galway city despite all of these documents, including Rebuilding Ireland. While the Government actually is rebuilding Ireland, it is once again doing so in the developer's name while depriving our people of homes. That is unacceptable. Without a home and security of tenure, people cannot participate in a democracy. Clearly, that is what the Government wants.

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