Pat Casey (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome tonight's motion on affordable housing, which has been brought forward by my colleague, Deputy O'Brien. Affordable housing is an area of the systemic housing crisis that has been consistently overlooked by the Government, yet it remains an essential keystone in the solution of delivering homes for all our people.

It is an historical fact that there is an embedded and consistent ambition within Irish people to own their own homes. For generations of Irish people, that ambition has been the core aspect of the social contract between the people and the governing system. One of the measures of the success or otherwise of our independent nation has been the capacity of people to own a home, raise families and have substantial ownership in our society.

Since the previous Fine Gael-led Government abolished the affordable homes scheme in 2011, it has regrettably but predictably contributed to the unsustainable growth in house prices. This has arisen due to a lack of supply and a minimalist approach taken by the Government to encouraging - never mind supplying - affordable homes to the thousands of people who need them.

Only recently, Fine Gael attempted to expand the affordable home loan scheme through each local authority. Yet, we need only look at the example of County Wicklow. Government data reveal only two successful applications in Wicklow in the two years since the Government was formed. That is a shambolic result.

The capping of supports for house buyers in Wicklow and the income thresholds involved are forcing many people who were born and bred in Wicklow and who want to own homes in their communities to be priced out of their home county. Wicklow is being gentrified by cash-rich middle-class Dublin. Maybe this is the Fine Gael master plan.

Fianna Fáil has consistently called for the full implementation of the cross-party report on the housing crisis that calls for a housing agency to take full charge of all aspects of our broken housing system. We will insist on independent verifiable data on affordability in each county, thereby informing the public policy response required in each county where prices can be extremely varied. We will also impose targets for each county on the numbers of affordable units to be supplied. Failure will result in immediate support responses from central government.

A crisis demands an emergency response. We will deliver affordable houses for Irish people to purchase in every county in Ireland. We will do so through the State directly building homes, where possible, on State lands, and by accessing off-balance-sheet finance. We will do what the State should be doing, that is to say, governing on behalf of all the people and not only the chosen few.

The political establishment in Ireland has failed the people again in the manner in which our housing crisis is being spun but not analysed, manipulated but not managed, debated but never delivered. We all know where this road ends. It ends with failure. It ends with people losing the limited faith they have in the ability of politics to address the needs of all our people.

It is not too late to put in place an affordable housing system that is vested in our State and that allows us to frequently put housing policies under the microscope of the people. The upcoming budget must deliver on affordable housing. The people demand nothing less.

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