Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Housing policy is one of the key areas where the Government has a direct impact on the lives of the people. The opportunity to live in a family home, where one has protections and rights, has been a fundamental right in our society for generations. A Government that does not honour this fundamental right will ultimately fail its people. By any yardstick, the past two Fine Gael-led Governments have failed the people in terms of the provision of a working housing policy. Families are suffering as a result.

The Minister has a responsibility to create a number of housing options but he has failed to do so. He has a responsibility to create a social housing policy that can be implemented by local authorities whereby low-income families can get a house appropriate to their needs at a rent appropriate to their income. This has not happened. Our local housing authorities, the county councils, have been turned into a giant administrative bureaucracy to distribute money from the Government to the private rental sector. Couples whose incomes are not high enough to allow them to engage with the retail banks have been offered Rebuilding Ireland, which is so badly funded and full of so much red tape it will never address the housing needs of the specific demographic for which it was intended. Worse still, it is sending those young couples to a lifetime of housing uncertainty in the private rental sector. Couples whose incomes allow them to source a mortgage with the high street banks are at the mercy of an inflated market, due to the lack of housing supply. The Government must accept full responsibility for that.

The final failure of this Government's housing policy is the manner in which it has allowed the banks to ride roughshod over families in mortgage arrears. The banks have no plan other than repossession or to sell distressed mortgages at a knock-down price to the vulture funds. The same banks trousered billions of euro from the bailout provided to them by Irish taxpayers a few short years ago.

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