Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am sure there are others but the Minister of State must accept the point. Half of the so-called "council builds" were actually purchased. That is instead of having two streams to bring homes onto the market, one involving houses built by local authorities as they used to do when we had housing departments buying land years in advance, servicing it and building according to need, and a separate stream of houses coming from developers to service the private market. The problem is that we do not have anything like enough of the old-fashioned local authority houses. We are sitting on hundreds of acres of land. We have all identified it. Notionally, we have allocated the resources. When moneys became available, my very first act was to allocate the first few bob we got to social housing. There were problems, however. Let us be honest again. In the early part of the 2000s, there was a policy to hollow out the capacity of local authorities to build houses and to rely instead on the private sector to build and lease back properties. It was the wrong policy and it had a doubly negative effect.

Not only did it incentivise the private sector to build houses and create a boom, it also hollowed out the capacity of local authorities. In 2014, when we had our first few bob, I allocated it to housing as our very first measure because it was the number one social priority. That was four years ago. I was told quickly that the local authorities did not have the capacity to build the houses and I had to immediately allocate additional staffing. I had to alter the restriction on employment to housing departments because they had not got housing officers in the same way as they had for decades previously, and we are only getting to that stage now. There was a lag because of the policies that were developed over time.

Now let us recognise, as I thought we did across this House, that the biggest social challenge we face - there will be Brexit and other issues - as a community and as a nation is housing. There are too many people with no certainty about the roof they have over their heads and too many young people almost abandoning the notion that they will ever be able to afford to own their own house. Let us do something about it collectively. For God's sake, let Deputies top scoring points off one another, with them running in here for five minutes, making a few mumbled charges and running out again solves no problems for anybody. Let us try to collectively allocate the resources - it is our constitutional role to Vote money - agree on the plan and, in the interim, when we need to solve the big issue which is the supply-side issue, utilise the landbanks we have, utilise the money we have available and the capacity within the local authorities and other State agencies and agree to quickly embrace proposals like those put forward by Deputy Jan O'Sullivan to ease the burden now on those in the rented sector so that they do not face rent hikes above the CPI.

Members come in here stating we should halve rents.

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