David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This motion is designed to say to the Government that we need to do an awful lot more in terms of providing affordable housing. Nobody in the Chamber would disagree with that but the problem is that we do not have anything like the action we need.

It galls me to listen to Fianna Fáil Deputies sometimes. Deputy Casey spoke about Fine Gael as the party for the rich and for developers and, while I do not disagree with him, given what has happened recently, Fianna Fáil was previously the party of and for developers. It was the party of the property bubble and the party which lined the pockets of developers, while many Fianna Fáil politicians had their own pockets lined with brown envelopes. We had the Galway tent and when the whole thing went belly up and the economy crashed, we ended up with tens of thousands of families in negative equity, many of whom lost their home. A bit of humility and honesty from Fianna Fáil would not go astray, rather than blaming everybody else for problems they started.

Despite the rhetoric from the Minister, we are putting forward sensible, practical, common-sense, deliverable solutions that can bring about more homes for people and more affordable housing. It requires a move away from market solutions and from putting tens of millions of euro from taxpayers into the pockets of private landlords and speculators, instead putting it into public housing. Until we make the decision to do that, we will be back here, time and again, to have debates and motions on housing. The Government knows where it is going wrong and what needs to be done but the ideological disposition, of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, is not to build public housing, which has been stopped for the past 20 years. Their disposition is to put money into the private sector rather than deliver homes for people. The Minister needs to put his ideology away, stop lining the pockets of private developers and build homes for people who need them.

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