Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am very glad to be able to join the debate on this critical issue for our country and our people of how to get affordable housing. I listened to the Tánaiste, Deputy Simon Coveney, replying on Leaders' Questions to questions on housing. At several points in his answers, he said the Government was open to new initiatives and ideas. I was screaming in my office as I watched on the monitor because we have brought forward an initiative. The Dáil voted on it three weeks ago when it approved the cost-rental motion we presented to the House. The Minister was not able to contribute on the debate and we did not get the written version of his speech during our own Private Members' time. However, I am glad to see in his speech today a recognition that cost-rental social public housing is strategically important in addressing the issue of affordable housing. I welcome that. However, I want to tease out what that might mean and what scale we should go at because I have real concerns about what is in the Minister's speech in that regard.

The Minister said the aim was to deliver approximately 3,000 new affordable homes to buy and rent. That is not the scale we should be considering. If one takes out the homes which would be for sale, one is talking about only a couple of thousand, if that, in terms of affordable rental options. We need ten times that scale of ambition as we move to cost-rental as well as social housing and an increase in supply in the private market sector.

The case for that is so clear. In this homeless crisis we face, these dramatic figures are the tip of the iceberg of the our difficulty, particularly in the private rental sector. The Minister would agree that our real problem in housing is the high rental prices in the rental sector. That is the crisis that is driving the homeless figures so high. Families who historically would not have been put out of the private rental sector are being forced out of it because of increases in the private rental sector and it is the rental sector where the real crunch is and where the attention has to be. Within that, there is a recognition that our real supply shortage is in apartments close to the centre of cities and towns. That is why the scale of ambition of 3,000, of which I presume rental will be half at most, is not commensurate with the pinch point of the crisis.

Dr. Ronan Lyons wrote last week in support of these cost rental proposals. He stated that if we want to guarantee a right to a home for all, then cost rental is a critical key ingredient in our response and that we cannot keep pursuing a policy which is to try and address this issue by increasing rents and what we need to do is focus on lowering costs. The reason I say we have been engaged in a policy of increasing rents is that the alternative to a cost rental model, the one that the Government has been pursuing, is merely to pump more money into HAP. The Government keeps saying it is spending ever increasing amounts of money but most of the money we are spending is in subsidised supports to the private rental sector that are doing nothing to bring the rents down. They are actually feeding this continuing bubble in rental prices. We have to shift and the way to do so is towards cost rental and the way to do that is to use State lands because as Dr. Lyons states we must concentrate on bringing the cost down to make it affordable.

I still stand by my party's Bill. I do not believe we will see a better solution than going to Broadstone or, indeed, Cathal Brugha Barracks, and taking State action with State land and going not for 1,000 or 2,000 units but, on those two sites, for 3,000 units and then going beyond to other sites to get another 3,000 and another 3,000. That is the scale of response we need in this cost rental sector. I asked the Minister of State at the Department of Defence, Deputy Kehoe, the other day about this and he did not have a reason not to do it. He stated there were security reasons but he could not divulge them: he would have to kill me and it would put the State at risk. It is not good enough that lack of ambition.

There is rightly concern on this side of the House that the problem with Fine Gael is it is sticking with the status quo. It is not willing to reform. It is not willing to break away from the old developer-led model that it inherited from Fianna Fáil. I refer to this belief - it is riddled through the speech, much as I welcome the agreement to move towards a cost rental model - that things are going well and volumes are increasing. Construction activity is increasing but it is bringing us back to that old model that got us into trouble in the first place. We are not reforming and that is the key critical reason Fine Gael is getting hammered. That is why Fr. Peter McVerry, Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy and all the others are coming out stating that they have lost confidence. Fine Gael is seven years in government, but it is two or three years, I suppose, since this crisis became absolutely clear in its scale and urgency and none of us has seen Fine Gael being willing to reform. They have just been applying an old Fianna Fáil model.

If I can give an example of how it is not working, in the constituency the Minister and I represent where the crisis is at its worst reliance on the Government building all the numbers and construction activity increasing is undermined by the reality. I am told there are 1,000 new apartments being built in the docklands. One could well say, if one was merely doing a numbers game and not reforming, that we have got it back again, we have the numbers up and everything is working, as the other comments in the Minister's speech would make one think until one looks on the reality of the details. Of those 1,000, I understand 600 or 700 are already contracted into the technology sector, which has an urgent crisis on its hands in terms of housing its employees, and those are not effectively going on the market unless one is an employee of one of those companies. The danger is we end up in a divided city where one does not have a diverse population, particularly in our constituency which is most at risk from an affordability point of view.

The remaining 10% might go into the Part V social or affordable housing provision. However, we know that in those very expensive housing areas the local authorities face a very difficult choice of whether it should spend a huge percentage of its budget buying them or if it should do a deal where the private sector takes them away and the local authority gets commensurate cheaper units elsewhere. That way lies madness: a divided society, a less successful city and a deeply unjust and insecure, gated-type city. We do not want to go that way. Playing the numbers game, saying that construction activity is increasing and development is taking place, is not its answer on its own. It is time to reform, including in the social rental sector. There must be a move away from the divided, completely diverged systems towards what the National Economic and Social Council says, namely a more unitary housing system. That is where cost rental comes in.

I am glad that the Minister supports this. It was already in the programme for Government but the Government had said nothing about it. The Minister must come at the matter at a large enough scale. It is not good enough, as the Minister has set out, that he will approach it with a European Investment Bank-funded single project in Dublin. I know the European Investment Bank. It deals in hundreds of millions of euro rather than tens of millions. We should not go to the European Investment Bank with a vision of 500 or 2,000 homes, or whatever the figure is, to be delivered by that mechanism. We should be looking for several hundred million euro initially and several billion euro in the short to medium term to put into that response as part of the delivery of affordable housing solutions.

I welcome the change of tack in the Minister's speech. I do not see why Fine Gael could not, based on its own policy, support our motion. I want the Minister to tell me why he would not try to develop Broadstone or Cathal Brugha barracks on that basis. Can he indicate what sites he is thinking of? If not those sites, which are the biggest, best, most effective sites that I can see, where does he suggest? Will we take south Dublin port back? That is one option that I would favour. I do not believe that storing boxes at a port within two miles of the city centre is an effective use of that land and it would be another location where we could consider availing of public land.

If the use of public land is only at the periphery and, as the national planning framework sets out, the Government is going towards 50% of new housing to be outside existing urban areas the result might be affordable but it will not be accessible. It will not create the type of cities that we want. The Minister has to start to be specific. Where is he going to apply this cost rental model? Why is he limiting it at 3,000 units including rented and house purchase? Will he proceed with that strain which almost every expert I have listen to and read agrees is one of the key strategic elements? It should be something that is not an afterthought, or something to test now and see if we continue it later, but be the centrepiece of the Government response.

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