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

Plans are well under way for a national demonstration on 7 April on the housing and homelessness crisis and the shambles of this and the previous Government's policies that created the crisis. Groups such as the Peter McVerry Trust, Focus Ireland, Simon Community, housing and community groups, trade unions and many of the Opposition political parties are mobilising for that protest and demanding a radical change from the failed policies that have been pursued for the past seven years and which have created the housing emergency that now faces the country.

There are many aspects to the failure of the Government's policies, mostly turning on the Government's refusal to return to a local authority-led direct programme of council housing construction to deal with the housing crisis and its continued reliance on the private market instead, which cannot deliver and bodies external to the State and the local authorities. The latest evidence of the shambles of the Government's policy is the decision of the CSO, after consultation with EUROSTAT, to reclassify approved housing bodies as being on-balance sheet, meaning that it will have an impact on the general Government balance and Government debt. The fantasy of having off-balance sheet vehicles to deliver social housing rather than the local authorities doing it directly has now been exposed. The consequence of this, as the Irish Council for Social Housing has said, is that the 15,000 new social houses supposed to be delivered by approved housing bodies are now in jeopardy. The tier three approved housing bodies are now in jeopardy and we do not know what impact it may have on Government debt and the general Government balance because of the madness of the fiscal rules that prevent the State investing directly in building the council and public housing we desperately need.

What does the Tánaiste have to say about this? Is this not further evidence of the bankruptcy and folly of refusing to return to old-style local authority-led council housing provision and to develop an emergency programme in that area? Everything the Government does that is not about that is failing to deliver or, in this case, running into deep trouble which is jeopardising, yet again, the fantastic plans of the Rebuilding Ireland programme.

See this speech in context