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

I have been campaigning for social and affordable housing on the Shanganah site since it was closed down as a prison and transferred to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, before I was even elected to the Dáil in 2011. It is a matter of immense frustration to me, to the people on the housing list and the people in the area that a publicly owned site is sitting there, which is ideal for housing and could help alleviate a dire housing crisis. People are waiting 15 years and up to 19 years on the housing list.

It is being held up by the Government's obsession with involving the private sector. This is messing everything up. It is tied up with questions of how to make money out of the site and to what extent the private sector is needed and it is just not working. I do not believe in it in the first place and it means nothing is happening.

Now finally there is a consensus across all parties in Dún Laoghaire that this site should be 100% social and affordable. There is some debate about the balance between those two but we can work that out among ourselves. The key issue is that there has to be direct public funding of it. If we have to depend on the private sector it will take forever. We just need to build the houses. The current scheme, in so far as it has been appraised, and which has been proposed and agreed on an all-party basis cannot work or deliver the affordable housing unless we get subsidies from the Government. It brings into question the wider failure of the Government to come up with an affordable housing scheme. For all the talk about one, it has not come up with a mechanism to fund and deliver it.

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